Most of the films featured in this regular article, Shitizen Kane, are boisterous and relentless in their delivery of madness. They illicit massive belly laughs and howls of pain. They keep us glued to the screen; as hard a gluing as any solid Hollywood film could achieve. They are the kings of shit films. But sometimes, a film of Shitizen Kane proportions can be a quiet achiever; its hysterical rubbishness slowly bubbling to the surface throughout its running time. This is the case with Return of the Ape Man.

 

RETURN OF THE APE MAN
USA, 1944, Phil Rosen

Bela Lugosi is Professor Dexter, a mad scientist obsessed with freezing people and bringing them back to life. John Carradine is Professor Gilmore, Dexter’s sometimes enthusiastic, but mostly grounded and boring sidekick. Return of the Ape Man opens with a rather poorly written and sensationalist newspaper article that tells us a “notorious tramp” has gone missing. Slow news day, huh? We then cut to said tramp on an operator table, frozen and seemingly dead, with Dexter and Gilmore looming over him. Dexter injects him with some sort of miracle liquid that wakes him up. He’s cold, but perfectly healthy. He happily ignores the fact that he remembers nothing about “last night” (he’s actually been frozen for four months) when Gilmore throws a measly five bucks in his direction. Happy with his experiment’s success, Dexter decides to go dig up a caveman and bring him back to life. He finds one and all goes swimmingly, until Dexter comes to the conclusion that he must remove part of someone’s brain and place it inside the reanimated caveman and Gilmore has, very understandably, an ethical crisis.

Let’s get one thing straight, just so no one gets disappointed: Return of the Ape Man is a big fat fucking liar. For starters, there is no “ape man”. A big and hairy caveman, for sure, but only a man. I suppose throwing the words “ape man” into the title was purely a marketing device. But seriously, if you put this in your title sequence…

… then give the audience this…

… you’re bound to piss a few people off. Personally, I found it pretty funny. This film is also, despite its title, in no way a sequel to The Ape Man (1943), which oddly enough also featured Lugosi. And worst of all – this is hilarious – George Zucco, whose name is so prominent on the film’s poster and the opening credits is in the movie for only a few seconds! According to IMDB trivia:

George Zucco was hired for the part of the Ape Man and showed up for initial costume fittings and preliminary make-up applications, but he fell ill prior to shooting and was replaced by Frank Moran. However, his contract required that he receive third billing, so even though he appears in the film for only a few seconds, he is still billed third.

Without Lugosi and Carradine, this would be mostly a waste of time. No matter how terrible some of the films these two starred in over the years, their presence is always nice. Both these screen legends put in more effort than Return of the Ape Man deserves, making the film infinitely more watchable. Here Lugosi is already past his prime, but it is at least before the truly dark times of Ed Wood. The film’s script does Lugosi no favours – that said, it does us many in terms of laughs. Lugosi’s character is a smooth-talking mad scientist, and the script takes “mad scientist” to new levels of insanity. Professor Dexter begins randomly blowing up mountains of ice in the middle of a random spot in the Arctic on the off chance of finding the frozen remains of a caveman. Sure, the film allows him to find an “ape man”, but his wild and random methods are still hysterical. Not only that, there’s also Lugosi’s out-of-the-blue decision to put part of one man’s brain into the caveman’s brain – Carradine’s confused reaction says it all really.

Much like Lugosi’s Professor Dexter, many of the supporting characters in Return of the Ape Man are idiots. The policemen who feature in the film’s action-packed finale are unbelievably moronic; their actions constantly corrected by a normal civilian. My favourite moment of policeman-idiocy occurs when the ape man is running away with Gilmore’s niece in his arms, a cop takes out his gun to fire at him despite the girl obviously in the firing line. The girl’s fiance literally has to push the cop’s gun out of the way and point out the danger of him firing. The cop, completely befuddled, nervously agrees. The film’s monster – the caveman/ape man – is the ultimate idiot. In the world of Return of the Ape Man, a caveman’s natural instinct is to strangle everything that it comes in contact with. (When a part of another person’s brain is implanted in the caveman, this strangling instinct actually becomes a little disturbing. The caveman now has part of a brain that tells him not to kill, but still he cannot help himself.) The caveman (spoiler alert, I guess) even winds up being his own killer through plain reckless stupidity. He doesn’t like dummies either:


Return of the Ape Man is a brisk little film running under an hour in length. You get Bela Lugosi, a non-ape man cave man, John Carradine, strangling and a silly yet enjoyable story. This is not bad movie-making at its finest, but it provides adequate giggles. On top of that, it’s a fascinatingly odd part of forgotten cinema history. And if that’s not enough, you also get this: