Maidexpl
Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast
Numerootno
A story that's too fascinating to pass by...
Ariella Broughton
It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.
Scott LeBrun
Horror icon Boris Karloff heads this picture, the last in a six picture contract with the bargain basement company Monogram. He plays one of those standard-issue well-intentioned mad scientist parts that he often played during this period. Bernard Adrian is absolutely hellbent on helping the lovely young Frances Clifford (the appealing Maris Wrixon) to walk again; for ten years she's been confined to a wheelchair. His experimental process involves healthy doses of human spinal fluid. Since there's only one way for him to get it, he goes out and does it, using the aspect of an escaped circus ape as his cover.There are some well defined characters in this routine, preposterous tale, from our bent antagonist who believes that the ends will justify his means, to Frances' jealous boyfriend Danny (Gene O'Donnell), to local rotter Henry Mason (Philo McCullough), to a weary sheriff (Henry Hall) who has just enough brains to connect the dots in the puzzle lying before him. Mason in particular is just loathsome, saying to his pathetic wife (Mary Field) that "there's always the river" when she asks him where else she could possibly go. Ray Corrigan plays the ape; I. Stanford Jolley plays his despicable trainer. The acting in this sort of low, low budget genre fare may never win awards, but it's serviceable enough. Karloff, as could be expected, stands tall above everybody else, giving an A+ plus performance in a B movie.As for overall presentation, the movie runs through its paces adequately, complete with okay direction by William Nigh and a respectable amount of humour as citizens needle each other. To a modern audience, it wouldn't be scary at all, and in fact would be pretty damn laughable, but it entertains capably. A fair amount of the credit would have to go to adapter / co-scripter Curt Siodmak, who hit pay dirt the following year with the legendary "The Wolf Man".Six out of 10.
utgard14
Boris Karloff once again plays a scientist. Whether this one is mad or not I'll leave for you to decide. A circus ape has recently escape and attacked a man. Karloff treats the man and uses his spinal fluid on a young crippled woman. When she reacts positively to the treatment, Karloff realizes he must have more spinal fluid. So he dresses as the killer ape and seeks victims for his experiments. Cheap Monogram effort with Karloff effortlessly playing the role of the kindly scientist doing the wrong things for the right reasons. What's there to say, really? It's a guy-in-an-ape-suit movie. There's a pretty low ceiling on how good it could be. Karloff fans will like it most.
zetes
Boris Karloff stars as a doctor attempting to cure paralysis. To continue his research, he needs to collect spinal fluid, but there just aren't enough corpses from which to harvest it. Thankfully, he has just killed an escaped circus gorilla, so he hollows out its corpse, puts on its skin and goes out at night to murder townspeople for their precious, precious spine juice. This movie is pretty retarded. Why exactly does Karloff need an ape costume to kill his victims? I mean, he knows that the sheriff has organized hunting parties that go out every night looking for the ape. It seems that an ape costume is probably the least safe thing to be wearing. And it's not like wearing a gorilla costume is going to give him super-strength or anything. It's more likely to make it much more difficult to murder your victims, as it's got to be hot as Hell in there and your maneuverability and vision have to be severely diminished. The film is also painfully slow, and the characters are as dumb as the plot. Not Karloff's finest hour, but at least it provided some good laughs.
dwpollar
1st watched 5/1/2009 - 5 out of 10 (Dir- William Nigh): Interesting movie that just missed the mark for me due to a strange quick ending that I don't believe was prepped well, in my opinion. The movie is about a misunderstood doctor, played by horror great Boris Karloff, who is trying to cure the local town of a crippling disease but is using animals in his experiments and the townfolk don't like his methods. The Ape comes into the story after it escapes from a local circus, causes a fire and then is hiding somewhere in the town. While the authorities are hunting for him it is noticed that he spends a lot of time around the doctor's place but no-one knows why. When the doctor first encounters the creature he stabs it, but it's not apparent that he killed the beast. The ape still continues showing up killing others, but escaping from the authorities. A subplot revolves around a crippled woman that the doctor is slowly healing thru spinal fluid from victims of the ape and wherever else he gets it. It appears to be working but he needs more fluid. This is where the filmmakers lost me because they don't link these two pieces together very well. You can probably figure out what's going on, but I'll let you watch the movie and see if you felt the same way I did about the quick ending. The movie wasn't bad it just felt like the makers didn't have enough movie to really do what they wanted to do and tell the story better. So, this one just missed the mark for me despite the fact that I was glad that I saw it.
