The Ape

Man, the highest kind of animal...

Just watched the old Boris Karloff film The Ape on my Mill Creek Horror Classics set.  Here's the synopsis from the booklet:

SPOILER ALERT!

The Ape
Starring Boris Karloff, Maris Wrixon, Gene O'Donnell
(1940) B&W Unrated
Doctor Adrian (Boris Karloff) is a researcher looking for a cure to polio that would benefit his young friend Frances Clifford (Maris Wrixon), who suffers from the disease.  His research centers upon the use of spinal fluid in a serum that could return mobility to sufferers of polio.  The escape of a circus ape and the injury of its trainer provide an opportunity to test his procedure on Frances and it provides positive but limited results.  Hoping to prove his research and cure his friend, Doctor Adrian sets out to use the ape as a means to provide the necessary spinal fluid for completing his research.

I had never seen this creaky old flick before but enjoyed it, though the print on the DVD was in pretty rough shape with lots of missing frames throughout.  There were a few nice scenes of the circus, with a memorable shot of a fire eater in an old fashioned Mephistopheles theatrical costume, and I thought the ape suit was actually a pretty damn good one for the time--maybe it was just the way the actor bowed his legs when he walked or the fact that the skin around his eyes was blacked out to blend seamlessly into the mask but it looked good enough for me to suspend my disbelief so that I could almost think I was watching a real ape and not merely a man in a monkey suit, which made the climax a bit more shocking for me when the ape is finally gunned down and is revealed to be Karloff's Doctor Adrian dressed as an ape in order to secure additional supplies of spinal fluid for his research collected from the corpses of the unfortunate victims of ape attack.  At first I thought the mad doctor was wearing an actual ape costume but then realized to my horror he did not have access to a quality costume shop in the small town where he practiced and was actually garbed in the foetid carcass of the recently deceased simian.  Talk about dedication to your work!

Best line is when a put-upon wife confronts her philandering husband about his obvious affairs:
Wife: I've got no place to go...
Husband: You've got the river.

Ouch!  That's harsh--what a dick!  Though I think he gets done in at the end by the titular ape...or was it Boris?

Anyway, here's a clip for your viewing pleasure: