A few months ago, the Alamo Drafthouse was showing Night of the Bloody Apes on the Weird Wednesday midnight show. I was all prepared to go and had talked Laylah into joining me, but she had to be on a plane the next morning and didn’t want to miss the sleep. Luckily, Netflix had it. Unluckily, she hasn’t had time to come over and watch since it arrived, what with the law school thing going on. But, in the meantime, I’ve watched the rest of the DVD, which included Feast of Flesh and a wealth of special features designed solely for me.
Lots of previews for movies far too bizarre to remember anything of. Four short subject films, including a burlesque of a stripper (eventually down to pasties and whatever passed for a thong in the 1950s) being carried around by an ape, a short of four topless chicks bathing with each other in a stream on film stock that would have embarrassed Zapruder, a female wrestling championship round announced by the most condescendingly misogynistic man I’ve heard in a really long time, and, um, a fourth one.
As for Feast of Flesh, it was your average Phantom of the Opera knockoff where the masked organ player stalks the 20-something party set on the beaches of Argentina, first hypnotizing young women in dated bikinis with his music (which, to be fair, had a haunting quality to it) and then overdosing them with heroin once they annoy him and leaving their bodies strewn on the beaches. And he might have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those pesky cops!
The plot has nothing to recommend it; I was just barely able to keep my attention on it over the three days it took me to watch, and I’ve reconstructed some of the particulars from the imdb link above. It’s not impossible that I simply made up other details. If you can watch it and get a more accurate summary of what happened, then you’re a better man than I.
The reason to watch this, aside from the outstanding extras from a bygone movie era, is to laugh at what Argentinians and Americans considered shocking in 1963, including topless dancing girls, topless ocean swimmers (in all cases, the nudity can only be verified in slow-motion or frame-by-frame), bodies with large hypodermics sticking out of the chest, and lipstick lesbian volleyball players. According to imdb, that was enough to earn an X-rating in the United States. In any case, I’ve revealed every interesting point the movie has to offer, so unless you’re actually me (I’ve found that very few people are), give this one a pass.