Brand new factory sealed double feature is Out Of Print and no longer being manufactured.
This transfer puts to shame all other previous releases of this title with pop-art vibrant colors. NIGHT of the BLOODY APES (full screen): Director Rene Cardona's attempt to update with gore and skin the genre he had invented, a crossbreed of Mexican sports/superhero thrills with 40s B/serial mad science.
It opens with female wrestler Lucy, fetching in a scarlet catsuit with eared mask, winning a bout but traumatised when opponent Elena is left in a coma after being tossed out of the ring. Lucy whines a lot and her cop boyfriend Arthur, is smugly gratified when she decides to quit the ring after her final contracted free-for-all on Monday night.
Meanwhile, the distinguished Professor Krellman (Jose Elias Moreno) is agonised because his much-loved son Julio is dying. The Professor, whose limping sidekick Goyo with prominent scar, abducts a gorilla from the local zoo and transplants its heart into Julio. The effects budget is here pruned by using real bloody operation table footage. Because the heart of a gorilla "is much too potent for any human," Julio's cerebrum is affected and his face becomes a grey semi-simian.
The monster escapes from the labratory and rapes and bloodies a woman in a nearby apartment before he is recaptured. Krellman resolves to use the vegetative Elena as a heart donor in an attempt to fix up the problem. After more medical footage, Julio momentarily becomes himself--though the stubborn beast flesh comes creeping back, and this time the beast has a set of fangs.
Another gory rampage includes a throat-ripping in the park and a rape from which the victim emerges and alerts bystanders to the monster. Arthur is on the case, Lucy is still preoccupied with winding up her grappling career and Krellman still tries to help his beloved but uncontrollable son live. The plot becomes repetitive (more transformations, escapes) and there are more horrors from eye-gouging, cop-scalping, Goya's decapitation, etc. and the finale is a rooftop child-imperilling.
Julio does the Hyde-to-Jekyll transformation when shot dead and professor Krellman sadly concludes that he "acted against the dictates of God" and is led away, a broken man. "The desire to save his son from death was the cause of so many people suffering," says Arthur, whereupon Lucy mildly agrees "it's unfortunate... really sad." One of the few genuine pleasures of badfilm, endlessly rewatchable for its outrageous mix of real and fake splatter and the non-stop surrealism of that dubbed lost-in-translation chatter.
FEAST of FLESH (widescreen, B&W): Set in a beachside resort complex, it follows the molestation murders of promiscuous, provacitive young women by a character who wears a monster mask, wig and gloves that look vaguely like Christopher Lee's 'Curse of Frankenstein' creature. The fiend's usual m.o. involves huge syringes of heroin and serenading his victims with a favorite tune on the organ or record player.
Playboy inspector Ernest Loring is rather noncommital on the case, in one scene, he lurkes in the bushes and watches the killer give a girl a deadly hot shot before attempting to intervene and then promptly gets bonked on the head with a rock and knocked out. We get a lot of footage of beach and nightclub frolics, intended simultaneously to exploit and condemn the "immoral" behaviour of carefree youth.
The cop tells heroine "Bebe" that her nickname is apt "because your both a baby and a flirting femme fatale," and seems to think that the victims more or less deserve what they get. Is the killer the doctor obsessed with his unfaithful dead wife? The piano player in the club lounge? The mannish lesbian? The bespectacled guy who tries to rape the teasing Bebe? A real monster?
The culprit is unmasked after death and the director gives us a few moments as cop and heroine gasp at the revelation before panning to reveal who it was and replaying a dialogue snatch that explains the killer's motivations. Shot in a Film Noir style the atmosphere is heavy and the excellant transfer is near-pristine.
The disc also comes with a ton of special features too numerous to mention amounting to bits and pieces of girls and gorillas, schlock trailers, ghastly comic book art gallery, outtakes, and more that add up to over an hour.