The Ape Man (1943)

Vintage poverty row Bela Lugosi madness. In this one, Bela’s got the ape man blues. He’s a mad scientist whose experiment went all wrong and turned him into a half-monkey. Bela spends the whole movie in a ridiculous wig and facial hair prosthetic and doing his best hunched-over simian walk. There’s only one cure for his condition: an injection of human spinal fluid, enough to kill the person from whom it’s taken. So, off Bela goes into the night for victims, leaving behind a trail of corpses. And maybe banana peels. It’s horror done the Monogram way, shot in “wham bam, thank you, ma’am” style by legendarily quick director William Beaudine who made movies in less time than it takes for me to respond to e-mails. The film is as short on sense as it on the budget so your enjoyment depends mostly on how much you like Bela Lugosi, with frequent B-movie face Wallace Ford and Louise Currie in sturdy support as newspaper journalists who flirt with each other as they pursue the story of the strange killings. Still, the best actor is probably Ralph Littlefield as the weird guy who constantly spies on everyone in the movie with a smile on his face and seems to have nothing to do with the story until the offbeat closing joke.