Night of the Bloody Apes earns its reputation as a classic of Mexploitation cinema — and then some. Director René Cardona plundered his own film, 1963’s Doctor of Doom, to build a better monster, adding el grande tres: color, guts, nudity.

Dr. Krallman (José Elías Moreno, who played the title role in Cardona’s Santa Claus) has a problem: His son’s leukemia has progressed to where the young man’s days are numbered. Dr. Krallman also has a two-pronged solution: First, kidnap a gorilla from the zoo. Then, transplant the gorilla’s heart into his son, Julio (Agustín Martínez Solares, Santo & Blue Demon vs. Dracula & the Wolfman). For this second step, Cardona splices in lunch-losing footage of an actual open-heart surgery.

It works! And yet it also doesn’t, because Julio’s head transforms into that of an ape. He doesn’t look simian so much as his face has been dipped in chocolate pudding, which since has dried. Primate Julio runs around town, wanting to rape women, but he cannot figure out how to remove his infernal, high-waisted pajama pants.

So the doc performs another organ swap, this time giving Julio the ticker of a woman who suffered a skull fracture. It works! And yet it also doesn’t, because Julio continues ripping clothes off the ladies and, to their boyfriends, squeezing out marshmallow-like eyeballs, tearing off flesh and other acts that earn the title its penultimate word.

It says a lot about the movie that I haven’t even mentioned the good-guy cop (Armando Silvestre, The Scalphunters) and his girlfriend (Norma Lazareno, Cardona’s Survive!), who wrestles professionally in a red-leather catwoman mask. Cardona’s story is so weird on its own, it doesn’t even need them, yet the two are major players.

Cardona works in a palette of unbelievably bright colors for a story so willfully embroiled in the sleazy side of things; the juxtaposition works to Night of the Bloody Apes‘ advantage, lending a downright quaint and wholesome vibe to its gleeful presentation of gore and gazongas. Plus, it’s easy to love a film rife with such absurd dialogue played straight-faced: “It’s too early to declare a victory. We have to wait and trust in God. Come, help me drag the cadaver of the gorilla over to the incinerator.” —Rod Lott

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Part two of the Philippines-lensed Blood Island franchise begins with a gimmicky prologue exhorting audience members to take the oath to join the Order of the Green Blood. William Castle would be mighty proud of this tacked-on bit, but he would detest the reliance on bare breasts that follows. That’s okay; Mad Doctor of Blood Island was made for us, not for him, and we find it delightful in its good-time depravity.

Government pathologist Bill Foster (John Ashley, Beach Blanket Bingo) heads for the titular site via boat, which also carries the buxom Sheila (Angelique Pettyjohn, Takin’ It Off), who hasn’t seen her isle-bound father since she was 12, and Carlos (veteran Filipino actor Ronaldo Valdez), who’s come to remove his mother from “this wretched island.” What makes the slice o’ paradise so wretched? Dr. Lorca (Ronald Remy, Blood Is the Color of Night), the limping scientist whose experiments toward eternal youth yield green-skinned men with crusty faces, like a progenitor to Swamp Thing.

Whenever director Eddie Romero (The Twilight People) aims his camera at these homicidal freaks of nature, the lens quickly zooms and in and out — not for a few seconds, but for the entire scene, in such a frenzy as to literally induce nausea. Gore is present via butcher-shop scraps placed atop cast members’ torsos. The entire affair is full of screaming mimis and hula dancers and sacrificed goats.

Oh, and bad acting, particularly with its ostensible hero. As wooden as Pettyjohn is pillowy, Ashley puts as much as pizzazz into a dramatic line like, “And these people you’ve caged and mutilated?” as he does a throwaway one such as, “I think your father could use some soup, Sheila.” The only time he seems to be fully charged and in the present moment is in his long-awaited fireside love scene, in which he goes Method to slowly grab a big, honking handful of leading lady. —Rod Lott

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Ever since she was a 10-year-old blonde, the brunette Cathy has seen visions throughout New York City. In the day, it could be a granola-looking woman wrapped in thrift-store duds or a little girl who looks like she came in fourth place in the Heather O’Rourke look-alike contest. In the night, however, Cathy sees Lurkers: superimposed faces and bodies of “horrible old people” surrounding her bed.

Nonetheless, Cathy (Christine Moore, Prime Evil) survives such hauntings — not to mention abuse from and nearly getting stabbed by her shrew of a mother — and becomes a professional cello player who enjoys sexual congress with her fiancé, Bob (Gary Warner, also from Prime Evil), a photographer who looks like Lou Reed. Although she thinks he’s the bee’s knees because he “protects” her while she sleeps, Bob is really a cad who’ll stain the sheets of anything with fallopian tubes. And you think the elderly are horrible, Cathy?

As becomes increasingly obvious to everyone but our big-haired heroine, Bob is involved in some deeply sordid dealings. Such acts come to light approximately at the point of Lurkers when, out of nowhere, a beefy man with a sledgehammer (Tom Billett, Bad Girls Dormitory) appears and flattens the melon of a random screaming woman in the streets. Cathy witnesses this, then immediately attends a party where no one believes her likely story.

That’s when director Roberta Findlay (of, yep, Prime Evil) seems to have tired of the course her film heretofore has taken for a good hour or so and switches gears. This could be because across her decades of work, Findlay is not known for having much use for story, which Lurkers actually possesses — okay, so it’s in piecemeal, but a start is a start. Her touch is all over this one: rough setups, questionable angles and unbalanced performances.

For what it is, Lurkers looks pretty good, benefitting from the decade’s love of bright colors; therefore, I suspect it’s visually sturdier than Findlay’s porn work, although one can sense this movie could become an X-rated pomp at any moment. After all, on display are pink sheets, overgrown ferns, crucified homosexuals in bondage gear and, above all else, lingerie models talking junk bonds and index futures while undressing. —Rod Lott

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Transparent in its efforts to be a Halloween viewing staple, The Penny Dreadful Picture Show pays homage to the horror anthology while attempting to revive it. Bearing a titular hostess who looks Raggedy Ann in rehab, the scrappy, all-hands-on-deck project exhibits a spirit as impressive as its production values.

In an old-fashioned movie theater — palatial and abandoned — the squeaky Penny Dreadful (Transmorphers’ Eliza Swenson, one of this Show’s writers, directors and producers, not to mention providing the Danny Elfman-esque score) invites a succession of Internet dates over to screen horror films (i.e. the three stories). Also in the sparse audience are Penny’s doll collection and her two co-hosts: a zombie named Ned (Collin Galyean, House of Bones) and a wolf boy named Wolfboy (Dillon Geyselaers).

Up first is “Slash in the Box,” woefully short, yet dead-on in recapturing that Tales from the Crypt feel. “The Morning After” finds Alice (Samantha Soule) unable to recall the previous night’s events, but certain that she’s not quite herself. Its Mad Men-retro look provides an interesting backdrop to a well-worn theme.

The final “feature” is “The Slaughter House,” which puts a twist on the ol’ plot of car trouble amid a cannibal family (albeit one addicted to Pepsi products). Lending star power are Sid Haig, in a character not too far removed from his in House of 1000 Corpses, and Re-Animator‘s Jeffrey Combs, at first unrecognizable in a party hat, cape and wheelchair. While hardly politically correct, his performance is an absolute riot.

A segment about Boy Scouts on a camping trip from hell was cut — and rightly so, as perusers of the DVD’s extras will find, because while its sense of humor is equal, its sense of pacing is not. Violent without being vile, The Penny Dreadful Picture Show ends before you want it to, but seems eager and open to sequelize itself, which I encourage. —Rod Lott

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Had Wes Craven cast Lyle Alzado as Freddy Krueger instead of Robert Englund, the result might look a lot like Destroyer, a slasher movie that gave the former NFL defensive lineman/shriveled-testicled steroid user his first leading role following such big-and-dumb turns in the comedies Tapeheads and Ernest Goes to Camp. I’m not sure whether anyone involved with the production had the heart to tell their star this wasn’t a comedy, because Alzado laughs his way through it.

In a premise that predates both The Horror Show and Craven’s own Shocker, Alzado’s Ivan Moser is a death-row inmate who spends his last minutes alive sweating buckets, squeezing a doll’s head like a stress ball and getting angry over a Wheel of Fortune-esque game show because, dammit, no contestant will pick the letter B! Anyway, Moser is electrocuted to a charred crisp, only to return to haunt the place several months later when its cells are used to shoot the women-in-prison pic Death House Dolls. That fictitious flick’s shoot-’em-and-move-’em director (Psycho-tic Anthony Perkins, quite amusing) would do Roger Corman proud.

On-set stuntwoman Susan (Valley Girl Deborah Foreman, adorable as always) is dating the screenwriter (Clayton Rohner, reteaming with Foreman after April Fool’s Day); the two become our heroes as Moser continues his murderous ways, from torching the cowboy-wannabe warden to jackhammering a cop. (Speaking of, Alzado rather phallically brandishing this “tool” became Destroyer‘s key art.)

You know the electric chair will come back into play, but I won’t spoil whose butt is introduced to its 3,000-volt jolt. However, I can reveal without guilt that when Moser corners Susan, he delights in cutting off her hair and then eating it. That gastronomic quirk very well could be the highlight of this serial-killer swiller — inane, but enjoyable in all its overt ’80s-ness, from lingo-laden lines of exposition (“The tungsten element must’ve been bogus!”) to Foreman’s close-cropped hairdo, seemingly modeled after Woody Woodpecker. —Rod Lott

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