Unrated, 1 hr. 2 min. Directed By:
William Nigh. Release Date:
Sep 30, 1940.
I was a little excited to see that
not one, but two Boris Karloff movies made the list of films suggested by
readers. I know that Karloff is kind of
an icon for early B-movie horror, but I couldn’t have spotted him in a line up,
and I’ve never seen one of his movies before today.
I’m not sure what I was expecting,
but this wasn’t quite it. The first
problem was that at no particular time was The
Ape scary. Not even a bit. I’m not even sure it would have been scary if
I’d been a teenager in the 1940s.
Probably not. But, I found this
movie eerily entertaining, and I say eerily because there’s no way the modern
equivalent of this movie would have been.
In fact, I probably would have made raspberry noises and turned it off
about halfway through had this movie been made in the modern day.
There’s no logic in my
reaction. Initially, the old circus
elements reminded me of one of my favorite episodes of Scooby Doo. For those of you
who are curious, I’m talking about the Ghost Clown episode, not the Ape Man episode…
although clearly the Ape Man episode would have more in common. I also have this thing about the circus, so I
loved watching the old class three-ring circus at work. The Ape
also reminded me a little of those reruns of The Andy Griffith Show, although that could have been because it was recently a
topic of discussion at work. The tone of
the movie made me feel as if this small town could have been Mayberry, well,
Mayberry under siege by a mutant ape that’s running around terrorizing the
population by occasionally killing someone.
I found the dichotomy of horroresque
subject matter and light, airy tone of storytelling to be a bit odd. I also thought that with the sole exception
of Boris Karloff, that the casting was poor and direction appeared to be
minimal. From a technical standpoint,
this may be one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a while… but I understand why
it put a smile on my face. It was
terribly endearing, but I can’t put a finger on why . It’s an intriguing mental exercise, and I’m
hoping that more exposure I get to Karloff movies, the closer I’ll come to that
understanding.
