Following a plague of murders committed by the titular beast, a rich man (Lionel Atwill) receives a note that fingers him as the monkey’s next victim, to be killed at midnight. He calls his niece, her fiancée and three bumbling detectives (The Ritz Brothers) to his mansion, which turns out to house a ton of secret passages, which the gorilla uses to terrify the houseguests (which include butler Bela Lugosi).
But director Allan Dwan’s The Gorilla is no horror film — rather, it’s Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders at the Rue Morgue” mystery rejiggered as a screwball comedy. And the comedy is perfectly stupid, which helps make the movie perfectly enjoyable.
The Ritz Brothers are like a combination of The Marx Brothers, Abbott & Costello and … oh, I dunno, Sammy Petrillo and Duke Mitchell, just to even things out a bit. (Typical exchange: “How do you spell ‘gorilla’? Two Rs or two Ls?” “Gorilla. G-O … Gee! Oh! Gorilla!”)
Every old, dirt-cheap, 66-minute movie should have a killer monkey on the loose running through a hidden maze of corridors, bonking guys on the head. Yeah, I kinda loved it. —Rod Lott