In The Ape, Boris Karloff is a doctor who’s alienated the townspeople by conducting secret experiments with animals. Using their spinal fluid, he’s been trying to find a cure for paralysis, particularly for Frances, a cute wheelchair-bound young woman whose legs haven’t moved in 10 years.

Doc catches a lucky break when a gorilla escapes from the local circus and breaks into his home. Karloff kills it, skins it and uses its hide to disguise himself as the real deal, so he can go prancing around town at night (in obvious day-for-night shots) and extract spinal fluid from humans. The trick works and progress is made, so he keeps going ape to get more fluid so Frances may walk again.

Written by The Wolf Man’s Curt Siodmak, this has to be the most bizarre concept for an early horror film. Think about it: Karloff is walking around in the skin of a gorilla he slaughtered. How did he clean it? How does he not reek of monkey entrails? How lucky was he to murder an ape just his size? The mind boggles; the movie entertains. —Rod Lott

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Throughout most of its 99 minutes, the Italian-made Werewolf Woman is rhapsodically, wonderfully terrible in that way only a sleazy exploitation movie made by pretentious foreigners can be. While some unfortunate stretches of eyeball-glazing, poorly dubbed exposition exist, the sheer insanity of the rest of the picture more than makes up for them.

Busty French Sondra Locke look-alike Annik Borel plays Daniella, a severely disturbed rape victim whose fears of sex and men are exacerbated by her obsession with her resemblance to an ancestor who was burned at the stake for being a werewolf (which we see and which is hilarious), causing her to devolve into a lethal, wolf-like state the night her strong sexual feelings toward her sister’s husband correspond with a full moon.

Sent to a mental hospital, she escapes after killing a crazed nymphomaniac who attempts to rape her. More folks are killed along the way, including another wannabe rapist who actually shouts, “I’m gonna rape you!” while he’s attacking her. She briefly finds happiness and salvation in the arms of a gentle, loving stuntman, but reverts back to her old ways when her beauty attracts the attention of a trio of thugs, who rape her (sense a theme here?) and then kill her lover. Her trail of bodies finally ends when the detective on her case is inspired by a cohort’s dream to come to the forest she has made her home.

Part horror, part psychological thriller, part softcore porn and part revenger, the film also known as The Legend of the Wolf Woman is a whole lot of crazy in a frequently fascinating package. It’s never for one moment genuinely good, but in the end, that’s what makes it so great. —Allan Mott

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I defy you to name one other film that offers as much breakdancing, animated monsters, spandex, gushing blood, naked breasts and Bull from Night Court as the diabolically incompetent and massively entertaining Night Train to Terror. Destination? Hilarity!

It’s a horror anthology film, built out of one unfinished flick and two existing films severely edited to the point that they play like extended trailers. The wraparound segment has God and Mr. Satan — played, according to the credits, by Himself and Lu Sifer, respectively — sitting on a moving train, debating for the souls of each story’s characters, while a musical group with way too many guys wearing headbands and aerobic outfits sings the same damn song over and over and over in the next car.

The first case they pore over – the incomplete Scream Your Head Off – stars Barbarella’s John Philip Law as a salesman who ends up in a mental ward and is coerced by the hot middle-aged nurse to go out and drug young women so that they can be strapped to tables naked and have their internal organs harvested to the highest bidder. Oh, and Richard Moll is in it.

Next comes the heavily abbreviated version of 1983’s Death Wish Club, in which Gretta, a skank with bad teeth, makes porno movies until she meets frat boy Glen. Gretta takes her new beau to a strange suicide club, at which one member is dispatched each time via some bizarre method, whether that be a giant winged beetle with a sting of death, electric-chair Russian roulette or lying in sleeping bags until your head is crushed by a wrecking ball.

Last is a chunk of 1980’s Cataclysm, in which a Nazi war criminal with a cloven hoof continues to live — and murder — in the present day without having aged. Cameron Mitchell investigates, and finds stop-motion monsters and open-heart surgery footage. Oh, and Richard Moll is in it.

Between each vignette, That Damned Band “sings” that “song,” engages in semi-Laugh-In bits and breakdances in slow motion. At the very end, a model train car crashes, presumably killing all aboard, which is a good thing. In its own fucked-up way of utter incompetence, Night Train to Terror is genius. —Rod Lott

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I am unconvinced that Wes Craven is a great horror director. I’m not honestly sure he’s even a good one. His filmography is at best spotty; some watchable films, many outright stinkers, one great grindhouse flick (The Hills Have Eyes), and nothing remotely approaching the artistry of his peers John Carpenter and David Cronenberg. And the film that cemented his reputation, A Nightmare on Elm Street, ain’t the classic many people want it to be.

I’ve really tried to enjoy it. Freddy Krueger’s a good villain, but he’s better served in some of the sequels, especially Craven’s return to the series, New Nightmare. There are some good scares here and there, great bloodletting and weirdly effective dream sequences to compliment an intriguing, if half-baked scenario.

Craven’s choice of heroine, however, ruins everything for me. Or rather, her portrayer. Heather Langenkamp delivers one of the most utterly wretched performances I have ever sat through. Not one line reading approaches believability, and it only makes it worse that she is obviously trying her best. It’s like watching a high school play: She’s pretending, not acting. Considering Craven had a fairly talented ’80s staple nearby in Amanda Wyss (as Tina), his casting of Langenkamp is all the more puzzling.

Beyond Nancy (and her equally atrocious mother, Ronee Blakley), Elm Street is only passable horror entertainment, one of the few movies improved upon in some of its sequels (parts 3 and 7). I must admit a fondness for the ending, but only for its utter ridiculousness; watching Nancy somehow morph into MacGyver as she sets up her entire house with sophisticated traps in a few minutes somehow makes a demon pedophile who kills in dreams seem plausible. —Corey Redekop

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Judging from the opening credits of this juicy helping of Italian sleaze, you’d think this would be called When Animals Attack the Shit Out of One Another, as the film introduces us to the laws of the jungle via real-life, mondo-style footage of how the food chain works. These bits are sprinkled throughout the film at random moments as well, allowing you the full-color spectacle of, say, a snake swallowing a monkey whole.

But there’s a story here, too, albeit a sketchy one. The Mountain of the Cannibal God stars Ursula Andress as Susan, a woman in search of her husband, unheard of for months after his jungle expedition. She and her brother hire Prof. Foster (Stacy Keach, who looks coked out of his mind) to take them into said jungle to locate him, although few doubt her spouse remains alive.

The group encounters poisonous spiders, venomous snakes, arm-hungry crocodiles and spike-laden booby traps. Eventually, they come across natives wearing freaky masks, prompting an admission from Foster that he has been partaken of their unusual rituals before: “You never forget the taste of human flesh!” he screams.

Eventually, Susan does find her husband … dead and partially liquified, with a Geiger counter sticking out of his tum-tum. The cannibals strip her naked, paint her orange and tie her up. One cannibal tries to rape her, so the lead cannibal cuts off the eager man’s penis. In more deviant footage, female cannibals masturbate and a man fucks a pig. I leave it to you to determine whether that’s a recommendation or a warning. —Rod Lott

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