Great Film overall

best movie i've ever seen.

Absolutely brilliant

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

During the brief 1937-1938 lull in horror film product, Boris Karloff worked for the cheap Monogram Studios, making a series of rather lackluster Mr. Wong detective pictures. When scary movies became in vogue again after the smash hit of SON OF FRANKENSTEIN in 1939, Monogram decided to make Karloff's last contracted movie a horror one.In THE APE, Boris falls into his comfortable niche of portraying a well-meaning and kindly old doctor. As Dr. Adrian, he is devoting all his time and effort into curing a beautiful wheelchair bound girl of her inability to walk. He has had some success with spinal fluid injections taken from recently deceased people, but finds he requires more and more of the serum to perfect a more permanent cure to end the girl's paralysis. At the same time, a savage gorilla has escaped from a local circus and is wreaking havoc right near the dedicated scientist's laboratory.Without revealing more details, the plot that is hatched from here on is potentially absurd and unbelievable. Yet, owing largely to Karloff's professional attitude and straight-forward performance, he helps the story rise above its silly premise. Boris is just perfect in his part, neither overacting nor just phoning it in. And this is what makes all the difference.**1/2 out of ****

This short feature is probably best known as Boris Karloff's only foray into the realm of chap Monogram horror films so often inhabited by Bela Lugosi and George Zucco. That may be technically correct, but it was filmed after he had made a series of Mr Wong films for the same studio, which technically fell into the category of mystery.Here, disguised by round eyeglasses and a large mustache rather than yellow-face, he gives a very different performance. And though the film was made quickly (I read that it was shot in a week) and cheaply, he puts a lot into the performance. He's a murder who is nonetheless quite a sympathetic figure, trying to film a cure that will allow his handicapped daughter-figure to walk.The short running time doesn't help in that I wish there had been more time to build character. What exactly is that nature of Dr Adrian's relationship with Frances that he is so dedicated to her case? The film makes the point quite strongly that the townspeople hate him, but doesn't really explain why.The central premise of extracting (possibly an ape's) spinal fluid to cure human paralysis is delightfully daft. Though I suspect it would have seemed less so in 1940, only fifteen or twenty years after the fad of men using "monkey glands" to cure a loss of virility.The dialogue is actually quite good at some points, and the writing has a good pedigree. It's an adapted version of a successful play (which I can't evaluate, having never seen a copy) by Kurt Siodmak, a respectable novelist. The end may seem hackneyed to some, but I actually didn't quite guess that it was Adrian in a monkey suit. To me it was just the right level of telegraphed that I felt as though I should have guessed it even though I didn't. And it made much more forgivable the fact that the ape looked like a person in an ape costume.I like that Frances was finally able to walk and give Adrian a happy death despite the murderous means he used to find the cure. Melodramatic but fitting. The theme overall touches on the fear of science (in the "some things man was not meant to know" vein) that many of these films had, but repudiates by curing polio despite the murders of the scientist.All in all, a nice little science fiction mystery of the era that manages to be a entertaining and even a bit thoughtful despite its flaws, low budget, and rushed, brief nature.

Boris Karloff has promised his niece he will cure her paralysis at all costs, despite his research making him a bit of a pariah in his home town (doesn't help that he experiments on dogs that he kidnaps). When an Ape escapes from a local circus and mauls its keeper, who had it coming, Boris extracts spinal fluid from the guy and creates a formula that seems to work. Problem is – he needs more spinal fluid. Solution is – the Ape is going around killing people and Boris has just murdered the Ape in his kitchen (in a hilarious scene), so now Boris can disguise himself as the Ape and get more spinal fluid. It's simple as well as completely daft.Dressing up as an Ape and wandering about while there's an armed posse looking for a gorilla is as crazy as dressing up as Hitler and walking down a street in Stalingrad during World War 2, but that's what Boris does. He's determined to help his niece walk and nothing's going to stop him, dammit! Mad scientists are ten a penny, but Karloff's mad scientist has a heart, and even though his method is slightly off, he's trying to help folks, so you end up rooting for him to finish his research before the posse riddle him with bullets. Besides, his victims are all sort of hick bad guys, so you can't feel too sorry for them when Boris leaps on them with his Ape suit. The film itself isn't too eventful, but the bittersweet edge to it was more than welcome.

With a title this blunt, one would expect that the actual narrative of The Ape follows suit. It actually does try to switch things up with some last second bet-you-didn't-see-that-comin' idiocy, but this is a movie about an escaped circus gorilla terrorizing a rural community. Oh, and then there's the outcast scientist who's illegally experimenting on a paralyzed young woman named Frances.Yeah—it's every bit as random as it sounds. How the escape of the ape in question correlates with this doctor's ethical quandary is hazy to say the least, and the behavior of the townspeople is just as weird. Apparently, they're all scared of this doctor because he practices medicine in an "unorthodox manner" (that's about as much details as we're given). In fact, even the kids around town hate him; so much so that he catches them pelting his house with rocks. In any case, the good doctor is forced to treat a circus trainer who was attacked by the beast in question. The doctor draws some spinal fluid from the dying man, injects it in his paralyzed patient, and marvels at her ability to begin twitching her hitherto unresponsive feet. Meanwhile, the escaped animal breaks into the doctor's house; during the chaos, the aging practitioner throws some sort of liquid in the ape's face and then stabs it with a knife (and, we assume, kills it). What's really weird is that he informs his mute assistant that no one in town should know the gorilla is dead. This seems to have a sinister motivation at first, but we later discover that the doctor begins dressing as the ape (I think? Or maybe he skinned it and then made a suit?) in an effort to motivate Frances to finally stand on her own two feet—*cough, cough*—and prove that his research had scientific credence all along.Uh-huh.In short, this is a movie that uses the presence of a lumbering ape to try and add an element of horror to an otherwise straightforward—and boring—story about a renegade scientist who's misunderstood. It's the classic "he's-got-good-intentions-and-we-should-all-feel-like-jackasses- for-doubting-him" tale.There are plenty of chances for the film to be inventive, but it suffers from a particularly bad case of "convenient circumstances"; you know, the sort of thing that happens at just the right time to allow the narrative to move forward in an absolutely unbelievable way.Case in point: an official from the institute that trained the doctor shows up to investigate strange occurrences in the town. The man accuses the doctor of breaking all sorts of ethical codes. How does the scientist respond? He suggests that the official see the result of his research, and takes the man to visit Frances. The official requests that Frances prove she's recovering from her Polio by wiggling a foot. She can't do it. Based on all of this you would assume the mad scientist is in deep doo doo, right?Wrong. Instead, right when it seems that our anti-hero is about to be taken into custody, the official says, "Well, she didn't move her foot. But I definitely noticed a muscular reflex. Congratulations, doctor!" Umm… what?These sorts of occurrences plague The Ape, making it one of the most eye-rolling attempts at scary film making to have ever come down the pike. But, like a lot of the "B" offerings from this era, it does have its moments of unintentional humor. Because of that, I'll award it half a star.