Meet Lucy Ossorio (Norma Lazareno), female wrestler and her boyfriend Arturo (Armando Silvestre), manly cop. Lucy is having quite a bad day. During her last fight, she hurt her adversary and friend Elena (Noelia Noel) so bad, Elena has fallen into a coma from which she will most probably never awake. That is at least what Dr. Krallman (Jose Elias Moreno) says.
Krallman has troubles of his own, and while Lucy is fighting the mental block that prevents her from fighting with her full ability, the kindly doctor and his private assistant Goyo (Carlos Lopez Moctezuma) use the doctor's secret basement lab/operation room to find a cure for his terminally ill son Julio.
Julio needs a new heart and fast, so what is a father to do? Break into the next zoo, look at footage of an orangutan, shoot a man in an undefinable ape costume, call it a gorilla and kidnap it from the zoo of course. Then it's just a question of a little effort, some real world heart transplantation footage and the help of Goyo, who calls Krallman master and works as his trusty servant since the old man somehow saved his life, until Julio has a brand-new gorilla heart.
Julio is saved and all would be well if not for a small complication in the form of Julio's newly won tendency to turn into something I suppose is meant to be an apeman, escape his father's house and kill, mutilate and probably rape people.
Dr. Krallman seems not too surprised about this turn of events. He recaptures his wayward son and of course soon has a new plan - replace the gorilla heart with a healthy human heart and all should be well again. Elena is obviously the perfect donor, having no family and lying in a coma. So, faster than you can say "morally dubious", Elena is kidnapped, heartless and incinerated.
But Krallman's treatment is not as effective as he has hoped.
Night of the Bloody Apes (you know, I always thought "apes" means "more than one ape") would be a much better film if it wouldn't promise some things it isn't then willing to deliver. Wouldn't you think that a movie that spends a remarkable amount of time introducing us to a wrestler, showing us her fights and entertaining us with her traumata would then let the character do something plot relevant, like fighting the monster, perhaps? Think again. NotBA only uses her as filler material, nothing in the movie would have to change if she was a soap saleswoman. Nobody involved in the production understood how disappointing a decision that is and how badly it damages a movie that taken without the lucha angle could be a fine trashy monster movie.
Alas most of the film found me grumbling about its lack of monster wrestling action, barely able to appreciate the unnecessary and badly executed gore effects (produced for the American version of the film, believe it or not), the even more unnecessary authentic heart operation scenes, the weird dubbing or the total lack of sense the whole thing makes.
But one scene pierced the shroud of my indignation beautifully. When Elena disappears from her hospital room, a room full of doctors discusses, as if it was the most normal and obvious thing in the world, how best not to inform the authorities of their missing patient. The personnel is obviously easily dealt with, it's enough to tell them the coma patient was sleepwalking (as we all know sleepwalkers are wont to do).
The version I watched was the dubbed American version as found on the "Horror from South of the Border Volume 2" set, full framed and not to shabby looking with some really eye-popping reds in the color mix.
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