SimianScope

Although it might not have scaled the box office heights of behemoths like JURASSIC WORLD, the recent KONG: SKULL ISLAND was nevertheless a massive hit with moviegoers worldwide and likely to kickstart a franchise world that will include city-levelling scrapping with the likes of Godzilla. Kong himself is a cultural icon comparable with his nuclear-age nemesis Gojira, as well as other silver screen scarers like Dracula and the Alien franchise’s xenomorphs. The latest instalment of the rebooted PLANET OF THE APES saga hits screens soon and there are plenty of imit-ape-ors (boom!) that left us with films great, good and oh-so-bad. It’s only ape-propriate (boom!) that we give a little love to the greatest gorillas, the monkeys with the most and the primates you love to hate. It’s time to go ape (boo… ah, you get the idea).

- James Evans

The original King Kong came early in cinema’s history and at the virtual dawn of talking movies. The year before Kong made his début, Bela Lugosi starred in one of the first ‘mad scientist does mad things with an ape’ films Murders in the Rue Morgue, which found him trying to create a mate for his talking gorilla by kidnapping young women and injecting them with ape blood. Things did not turn out well. In the following years, the mad scientist and apes theme would resurface, and it continued in films well into the ‘40s with titles like Dr Renault’s Secret, in which George Zucco tries to turn an ape into a man (which is quite racially troubling these days). Lugosi would have more encounters with the simian sort in films like The Gorilla (albeit in a minor role in a knockabout ‘comedy’ starring the long-forgotten Ritz Brothers), The Ape Man (1943), and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (which ‘boasted’ woeful Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis knock-offs Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo). His contemporary Boris Karloff got in on the murderous monkey act too, with 1940’s The Ape, which featured him wearing a dead gorilla’s skin to murder people for their spinal fluid.