The Ape Man (William Beaudine, 1943)

Agatha Brewster (Minerva Urecal) comes to America to find her brother James (Bela Lugosi), a scientist who has disappeared. James' colleague Dr. George Randall (Henry Hall) takes her to his mansion, where she learns that his experiments have transformed him into a half-man, half-ape. Investigating Dr. Brewster's disappearance are reporters Jeff Carter (Freaks' Wallace Ford) and Billie Mason (Adventures of Captain Marvel's Louise Currie). James' condition can be staved off with injections of spinal fluid, but this would require killing the donors, and Randall is understandably reluctant to do so. Therefore, James and his savage lab gorilla take matters into their own appendages...

The Ape Man is the third film I've seen directed by William Beaudine and starring Bela Lugosi, the other two being the fairly decent Voodoo Man and the execrable Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, which I covered here a while back. Thankfully, our current subject is more akin to the former than the latter in terms of watchability. The absence of Sammy Petrillo helps considerably in that regard. Besides Bela, Louise Currie and Henry Hall were also in Voodoo Man. Both films also have surprisingly meta endings, in The Ape Man's case involving a oddball character who turns up at the most opportune times throughout the film, and whose identity is only revealed in the last scene. Bela as usual puts 110% into his performance. His ape makeup is cool, and way more convincing than the gorilla suit Emil Van Horn has to wear. Dr. Brewster's sister Agatha is supposedly a ghost-hunter, a la William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki, but other than a scene where Agatha attempts to convince Jeff and Billie the ooking they've heard coming from the mansion came from a spirit called "the Galloping Ghost," this never becomes relevant to the plot. Too bad, because an ape man and ghosts in the same movie would've been awesome, in my movie. Jeff is pretty much a sexist ass to Billie throughout, even though they're on friendly terms, stating in the aforementioned last scene he should take her over his knee for going off on her own to find Brewster. Then again, his character of Phroso in Freaks was kind of a jerk with a heart of gold, so there's precedent for such a character in his resume. Henry Hall is better here than he was in Voodoo Man, where he was saddled with lines like "Gosh all fish hooks!" and "What I'm really interested in is young girls," which taken out of context sounds really troublesome. Bela fans should definitely give this one a look-see.