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
When it comes to Stephen King adaptations, some are good and some are bad. 
His idyllic surroundings turn icy when a mysterious, hat-wearing hick named Shooter (John Turturro) shows up on his porch leveling charges of plagiarism. Depp doesn’t take him too seriously at first, so Shooter puts a screwdriver through his dog’s head; ergo, Depp pays closer attention.
While fooling around loading a top-secret experimental rocketship, Abbott and Costello accidentally launch into the air, veer through the Lincoln Tunnel and land in New Orleans, which — because it’s during Mardi Gras — they amusingly, but far-fetchingly (even for them) mistake for the planet Mars.
