NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES

Julio, the son of Dr. Krallman, suffers from a terminal stage of leukemia and is therefore close to death. The doctor, however, does not give up and tries, as a last resort, a surgical operation that would rejuvenate and cure the boy, but as a first step, he needs a heart strong enough to withstand the effort. Krallman, therefore, helped by his assistant Goyo, kidnaps a gorilla from the city zoo and implants the animal's heart into his son's body. From that moment, Julio transforms into a bloodthirsty beast for blood and sex, escapes from the laboratory, and wanders around the city raping and killing women. The police initially think it is the gorilla that was reported missing. René Cardona, the king of Mexican exploitation, the one who made famous - cinematographically speaking - the luchador El Santo and gave birth to René Cardona Jr., has in his career a series of must-see films for lovers of celluloid oddities, but perhaps his most sensational and adorable horror is "Korang – The Terrifying Human Beast." Known in his homeland as "La horripilante bestia humana" and in English-speaking countries as "Night of the Bloody Apes," "Korang" is a concentrate of all the best of Mexican exploitation and not only: luchadora (the female wrestlers of lucha libre, a sort of Mexican wrestling), killer monsters, lots of joyfully splatter violence, and a downpour of naked women. In short, watching a film like this stimulates the slightly perverse child that is in all of us. Be careful, however, we are still talking about a fiercely trashy film, so all the beauty of a film like "Korang" is inevitably filtered through a special lens that transcends the ugly. Therefore, you are warned, Cardona's film has often ridiculous dialogues, discount tricks and special effects, and general aesthetic poverty. The story is then a simple pretext to stage monsters and gratuitous violence, without caring about narrative plausibility and not even remotely about scientific plausibility. Given all this, how can you resist a film that begins with a female lucha libre match and continues as a surgical horror? And then "The Terrifying Human Beast" with a fake facial makeup that enjoys undressing only beautiful women? And the gratuitous nudity of Norma Lazareno? Priceless. Then in "Korang" we find a series of splatter scenes that will surely make the happiness of many horror lovers: severed heads, scalps, gouged eyes, stabbings, and detailed open-heart surgeries that - it is said - are real, recovered by Cardona from who knows where. Ending in the style of King Kong brings a tear to your eye. In short, a cult film!