The main reason I decided to watch this is because it has an appearance by former Our Ganger-and current East Side Kidder at the time-Ernie "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison as some associate of someone at a newspaper building. Oh, and I was also pleased to see someone from my favorite movie-It's a Wonderful Life-in this one: he's J. Farrell MacDonald who I know played the guy who castigated George Bailey for hitting his father's tree with his car before he then thinks Bailey-in the Pottersville sequence-is crazy for thinking he doesn't know what the name of his town is! Anyway, he's a police captain here. So this is one of Bela Lugosi's poverty row movies of the '40s, huh? Well, as pretty entertaining as he may be here as a man with an ape face, I found myself mostly bored watching this thing but then I'm up really late with a sleepy demeanor right now so that may be why. Anyway, The Ape Man may be worth a look for any Lugosi completists out there but nobody else.

Wow some of these low budget "b" movies are so wonderful, this one is at or near the top of the spectrum, Bela Lugosi is just charming in this one, he has to get some kind of serum from people that he needs to turn back into full human. But he can't do the killing himself he has his Ape do it for him,, I just love all the back and forth banter that he has with the Ape. the part I loved the best was when the Ape looks at his empty bowl on the floor, looks up at master shakes his head and then looks at the bowl again in utter disgust. the Ape is cheerful to follow his master whenever the chance arrises every once in awhile he's a little disagreeable as far as listening to master, but the two are a pleasure to watch together, I love the plot. the characters, and the Ape,, what's not to love from this 40's classic horror movie.

This is a 1 point or a 10 point movie. 1 if you want to be sensible, but 10 if you love the Ed Wood or pre-Poe Roger Corman school of film. Terrible script, dreadful acting, poor lighting, and worse sound than a Caruso or Nellie Melba recording 40 years earlier.Bela Lugosi does a poor ape imitation, and wears a very rough prototype of the mask Roddy McDowall wore in 'Planet of the Apes.' He monkeys about (sorry!) with one Emil Van Horn wearing a full gorilla suit - he looks exactly like the one (called Ethel) that Oliver Hardy ended up with when the circus went broke. (Stanley got the flea circus.) Lugosi & another scientist have been fiddling about with 'glands,' so when Lugosi decides to test it on himself... The only way to keep himself away from the furry side of life is to keep filling himself with human 'glands' from the recently deceased. He steps out into the night and orders 'Ethel' to murder people - it's 'The Murders In The Rue Morgue' all over again.Hard to tell whether this was supposed to be funny or not - wisecracking journalists who annoy the editor by calling him 'chiefy,' brain-dead Irish policemen, bubbling retorts in the cellars of an old dark house etc. Clearly this was made when Lugosi's life was turning into a tragic horror story all of his own, and accepted any old rubbish to pay for the drugs and the booze.One kind of wishes for Abbott & Costello or The Three Stooges to turn up, but no such luck. The star turn is the wonderfully named Miranda Urecal (almost born to appear in cheap horror films) who plays Lugosi's sister, screaming energetically or fainting at the drop of a coffin lid.This isn't quite as funny as Ed Wood's stuff, but better than nothing now the hockey season's finished. The ending's quite amusing, and make sure you spot Charlie Hall (like Ethel, a left-over from the glory days of Laurel & Hardy) at the very start.

"The Ape Man" (1943), directed by legendary hack William Beaudine (the man who gave us "Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter" [1966] and "Billy the Kid versus Dracula" [1966]), this b-movie gives us a deliciously hammy, over-the-top performance from Bela Lugosi, who had gone down a long way since his myth-making role in Tod Browning's "Dracula" (1931). The plot is the usual hokum: a crazed scientist, Dr. James Brewster (Bela Lugosi), with help from his more sane counterpart, Dr. George Randall (Henry hall), injects himself with spinal fluid that turns him into an ape man. But at sixty-nine minutes, the film moves so fast that plot logic is never anything you spare a great deal of thought on. Wallace Ford (who apart from having minor roles in a few Hitchcock movies and featuring in lots of TV shows, is most famous for starring in the brilliant "Freaks" [1932]), Ralph Littlefield and Louise Currie are decent and the whole movie on the technical side, is quite competent. A fun film for people who enjoy the works of Edward D. Wood Jr.