Lame old dark house comedy about a rich man (Lionel Atwill) threatened by a killer known as The Gorilla. So he hires private detectives (The Ritz Brothers) to investigate. Bela Lugosi plays the butler. Patsy Kelly the loud-mouthed maid. Anita Louise plays Atwill's niece. The old dark house elements were OK but the comedy was like having your toenails ripped off one by one. The Ritz Brothers were so painfully untalented I have to wonder how they ever became even moderately successful. It was sad to see Atwill and Lugosi playing in something like this. Fans of Bela Lugosi will be particularly disappointed. The movie is often advertised today as a Bela Lugosi movie but his part is minor and he has nothing to do. He's literally the butler, opening doors and the like. There's no twist to it. The most he gets to do is be straight man to the annoying Patsy Kelly, whose voice knows two levels: loud and louder. Avoid this unless you're a Lugosi completist and need to see all of his movies.

The Gorilla is a low budget picture with a lot of low comedy in it, courtesy of the Ritz Brothers. In this film the three brothers play detectives hired to guard the person of rich millionaire Lionel Atwill. You might want to question Atwill's sanity with that move, but believe it or not there's some method to his and everyone else's madness.This film has a really great ensemble cast with everyone looking like they're having one rollicking good time making this film. In the Atwill mansion on a dark and stormy night where a killer known as The Gorilla has made threats on Atwill's life besides those mentioned are butler Bela Lugosi, maid Patsy Kelly, sailor Wally Vernon, Atwill's niece Anita Louise and her fiancé Edward Norris, disgruntled investor with Atwill's firm Paul Harvey, and a mysterious stranger Joseph Calleia. After a couple neat plot twists, The Gorilla's identity is revealed.I loved Patsy Kelly best in this film, but Bela Lugosi gave a lot of his lines a nice deadpan twist to them. Even Lionel Atwill who also plays mostly sinister characters has a twinkle in his eye here.20th Century Fox did a fine job on this low budget comedy that is still a real treat.

The 30s and 40s produced some good comedy/horror films - Cat and the Canary, The Ghost Train, One Body Too Many, Hold That Ghost, etc. Unfortunately The Gorilla cannot be added to the list, being a jaw-droppingly unfunny vehicle for The Ritz Bros. Their overripe mugging fails to raise a single laugh...All the elements are there - spooky house full of secret passages, raging storm outside, a rampaging Gorilla at large, a murder mystery, the presence of Lionel Atwill and Bela Lugosi, etc. All this works to some extent - indeed to me the film is only worth watching for the two horror stars. Lugosi wears an amused smile to great effect in most of his scenes, and Atwill is his usual bluff excellent self.Every time The Ritz Bros, show up the film quickly sinks into the mire. This might have worked better with Laurel and Hardy, or The Three Stooges, but the results here are pretty dire. The treatment is also very stage bound, as the action never once leaves the house. The mystery isn't really up to much, either, concerning a mysterious murderer known as The Gorilla threatening his victims with warning notes before bumping them off 24 hours later. Atwill is in line to be his next victim.I wish he'd picked The Ritz Bros....

Slapstick comedy featuring the Ritz brothers. Who are the Ritz brothers? I don't know, I've never heard of them until now, but they seem a very cheap and shoddy imitation of the Marx brothers. They play detectives out to catch "The Gorilla", a man who kills people after sending them threats 24 hours in advance. The Ritz bros. bungle and trip their way to discovering the truth of the matter, and hilarity is supposed to ensue. It doesn't. The comedy falls flat--or maybe not enough, as sometimes it's supposed to--and the plot is completely illogical.The movie gets some props for generally trying to have fun with the hidden passageways motif and Bela Lugosi's usual outrageousness, but the problem with camp is that when it's camp horror, it's funny, and when it's camp comedy, it's not, meaning that this movie is kind of suspended between both by boredom and disinterest.--PolarisDiB