I saw this trailer for gross-out Mexploitation cinematic “classic” Night of the Bloody Apes at a drive-in movie in the 1970s with my parents and younger sister. I must have been all of 6 or 7 years old. We were watching a Hercules/Hercules Unchained double bill featuring Steve Reeves when between films this incredibly lurid trailer came on…

What an impression it left! Scared the crap out of me and I had vivid nightmares about “bloody apes” for some time afterward. Looking at it now, it just doesn’t seem quite as scary, but it sure is a lot funnier than I remember it being.
 

 
Bare breasts, internal organs, GUTS and, natch, female wrestling, this one has it all. You really have to wonder how many future serial killers this gory freakout inspired?!?!

Night of the Bloody Apes was a film directed by famous Mexican director René Cardona in 1968 (it’s a color remake of his pioneering blending of the lucha libre and horror genres.The Wrestling Women vs. the Murderous Doctor AKA Doctor of Doom from 1962) that was recut in the early 70s with extra nudity and insanely over the top gratuitous gore added (in the form of several minutes of footage shot during an actual open heart surgery). Etcetera, etcetera.

The English version of the film sports the most monotone, wooden, voice-over actors the world has ever known and the dialogue is a very literal and direct Spanish to English translation:

“I’ll say that’s absurd, the proofs are circumstantial, it’s more probable that of late more and more you’ve been watching on your television many of those pictures of terror,”

James Joyce himself could not have written that sentence! (And even if he could have, he didn’t.) The editing here is, unavoidably, so bad and amateurishly inept that it borders on the hallucinogenic, but that’s part of the charm and what makes Night of the Bloody Apes feel like it occupies its own sub-genre within a sub-genre within a sub-genre.

I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying there it is…