AFED #76: La Horripilante bestia humana [aka Night of the Bloody Apes] (Mexico, 1969); Dir. René Cardona
Horror movies tend to treat all science as quackery, it just so happens that all quackery is valid. Transplant surgery, in one form or another, has been the subject of the wildest fantasies ever since Frankenstein ; from the many adaptations of the Shelley story, to The Hands of Orlac , to aberrations like the previously mentioned The Man Without a Body ( AFED #61 ). So even when Christiaan Barnard conducted the first successful human heart transplant in 1967 it was never likely to dampen the zeal for the original Body Horror. Sure enough Night of the Bloody Apes, made not long after, presents a grim reminder of what could go tragically wrong... if only science was a bit less rational. It's your typical mad scientist yarn, albeit with a distinctly Mexican spin. Dr Krellman (José Elías Moreno) decides to conduct the world's ape-to-human heart transplant, in a desperate bid to save the life of his son Julio, who's dying of leukemia. After kidnapping an ape from ...