Columbia Pictures aren’t known for great 1940s serials and nothing in The Monster and the Ape will make you think any different. At fifteen chapters that add up to almost five hours, it’s a bad combination of an above-average length and below-average action scenes. It even repeats one cliffhanger. Busy B-movie director Howard Bretherton bangs out this one with a rusty hammer and not enough nails. Meanwhile, the only cast member who has anything resembling screen presence is Willie “Sleep N Eat” Best, running through his usual comic relief lily-liver act, the only role he was allowed to play in old time Hollywood.
About the only reason to recommend this to anyone other than the most deep-digging cliffhanger aficionados (I guess there are a few still alive out there) is that the first chapter isn’t half-bad as these things go. It sets you up for something good and weird.
The first scene is in a laboratory where a seemingly harmless group of scientists present to a room of reporters their advanced new robot invention called The Metalogen Man. It looks like a cross between an Aztec sculpture and Darth Vader with an antenna on its head. If all goes well, this menacing thing will soon “free the human race from the shackles of manual labor and industrial enslavement” (a nice of way of saying that it’s gonna put a lot of people out of work).
So, they turn on Metal Head via radio control and make him lift up a large granite block with one hand. Then they make him rip off a heavy-duty locked door straight from its hinges, a valuable skill when solving industrial enslavement.
The press is enthused. The Metalogen Man might move suspiciously like a guy in a clumsy metal suit who can’t see, but it works.
Later that same night, the scientists who invented the Metalogen Man start dying.
At the hands of an ape. One of those stealth ninja apes who can hide in the backseat of your car for a few miles and then jump up and treat your throat like a tube of Colgate Sparkling Mint.
Obviously an evil genius is behind this and it’s no spoiler to say that it’s George Macready, one of the scientists, because Bretherton’s direction to him seems to have been “Just be a really bad liar”.
All appears to be lost until two-fisted engineer Robert Lowery steps in to help out. He’s a tall, sturdy young guy named Ken Morgan and you can tell right away that no trap doors, collapsing ceilings, car crashes, moving tracks that lead straight toward a lit furnace or any of the other usual cliffhanger situations are going to take him down.
Yawn.
One odd thing: Though The Monster and the Ape definitely has an ape, it doesn’t exactly have a monster. I guess the robot is meant to be The Monster. Wouldn’t The Robot and the Ape have been a better title? Or The Mechanical Man and the Ape (if nobody in 1945 knew what a robot was)? This is keeping me up at night.
We won’t even get into how the ape is only in this for a few chapters and doesn’t rate being mentioned in the title. (Kids love apes, I guess. Fine.)
Truly trivial trivia: Howard Bretherton later directed Because of Eve, one of the infamous old “sex hygiene” films that were shown in tents on roadshows and that always climaxed with real-life birth footage and shots of genital sores. Those things are always atrociously directed and slapped together. Going by this serial, Bretherton was the perfect guy for the job.