Watching Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster last weekend got me hankering for the kinda movie that's a sure-fire source of pleasure in my home: a good old-fashioned man-in-a-gorilla-suit flick. Fortunately, I have a small pile of public domain DVDs for just that very need, so this weekend I spent some teevee time with The Ape, a 1940 Monogram cheapie starring Boris Karloff. "Suggested by the play by" Adam Hull Shirk and adapted by Curt Siodmak (a prolific horror writer, one year away from his script for The Wolfman), the movie centers on small-town doctor Bernard Adrian (Karloff), a kindly, if obessed, sawbones living in the movie small-town of Rock Creek.

Though Doc Adrian is the subject of much harsh gossip in the village — and his house the target of regular rock throws by local kids — he still has one patient: paralyzed Francis Clifford (Maris Wrixon), who appears to be the last victim of a polio epidemic which struck the community not long after the doctor arrived. Her grease monkey boyfriend Danny (Gene O'Donnell) remains suspicious of the good physician ("I don't like things I can't understand," he states during Francis' treatment), but the wheelchair-bound girl has faith in Doctor A. Since she appears to be Adrian's only patient, we can't help wondering how he's able to live in a comfy house with a private lab — and keep an aged housekeeper in the place besides — but The Ape never answers that question.

Adrian's been experimenting on runaway dogs, and believes that an injection of fresh spinal fluid is just what Francis needs to be able to walk again. So when the Posts Combined Circus comes to town and a brutal animal trainer is bloodlessly mauled by a mistreated gorilla (portrayed by an uncredited Ray "Crash" Corrigan, who also played the beast in Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla), Adrian steals the dying trainer's spinal fluid to give to Francis. The injected fluid seems to help — our girl can feel her legs for the first time in years — but before the doc can give her a second injection, the vial of fluid rolls off a table and smashes to the floor.

What to do? When the escaped gorilla shows up at Adrian's house after scenting the trainer’s jacket, Adrian improbably subdues the creature, kills it with just one stab in the back, then removes its skin to impersonate the gorilla on a rampage. Fortunately, Doc's skinned gorilla suit looks perfectly like a store-bought gorilla suit — right down to the simian face and protruding mouth — so nobody can tell the difference, even though the gorilla-suited Adrian walks in a suspiciously upright fashion.

First victim of the mad doctor's faux gorilla rampage proves to be the town's greedy and adulterous banker — a good choice since no one in town appears the least bit distressed by his death — though the moneyman proves as stingy with the spinal fluid as he apparently is with loans since Adrian is only able to get one good injection's worth from his body. His next two times out in the ape suit prove remarkably ineffectual, however. He's shot with a 22. by one of the rock-chucking kids, then stabbed and ultimately shot some more by sheriff's deputies after wheelchair Francis sees him staggering in his costume towards his home. Rolling up to the house just in time to see the sheriff take off his gorilla head, she rises from her wheelchair and slowly walks toward the dying Doc Adrian. Guess the doctor didn't need to get that third bottle, after all.

Called "the silliest movie of his entire career" by Psychotronic movieguide man Michael Weldon (hard-core Karloff-ians may choose to offer up other entries: I'd nominate The Terror, if only for Jack Nicholson's legendarily miscast performance as a Napoleonic Era French Lieutenant), The Ape is a mercifully brief (the budget DVD I watched claims the flick is 62 minutes long, though the version it showed only had 57 minutes of actual movie) slice of cinematic dopiness that — while it doesn't deliver as much monkey time as you'd like — still managed to momentarily satisfy my burning desire for man-in-gorilla-suit action.

Only thing that would've been better: one of Toho's King Kong movies (King Kong Versus Godzilla, King Kong Escapes – now there's a hefty chunk o' hard-core gorilla suit fun!

The latest Soderbergh and friends outing has arrived on the big screen, and while it is overall a fun experience, I cannot call it a great movie. Calling it merely “good” would be much more accurate. It is a definite step up from its predecessor, but does not climb as high as the original remake.

I also think that this may have been the wrong time of year to release a film such as this. The whole big time scam setup, the plethora of stars, and the way it all plays out just makes me think it would have been better suited as a December release. This is especially true with the already high number of sequels that have hit the screens, and will continue to do so through the summer.

The crux of this outing is a fateful meeting between Elliot Gould’s Rueben Tishkoff and Al Pacino’s Willie Bank.

The pair were partnering on a new casino, but Willie had a different idea for the “partnership.” In other words, there was to be no partnership. The shock of this turn of events caused Rueben to suffer a massive heart attack. Now, this is considered to be just as bad — if not worse — then if Bank had shot him, and is not going to go unpunished. Enter Danny Ocean (Clooney). He rounds up the gang and together they set out to hurt Bank the best way they know how — in the wallet.

Together, the gang from the prior two films rejoin forces to rig slot machines, roulette, blackjack, and craps, all in the effort to make Willie Bank lose, well, his bank. How do they aim to do this seemingly impossible task? Well, they send one guy (Casey Affleck) off to rig the dice, another (Eddie Jemison) off to rig the card shufflers, Brad Pitt to do something to the slot machines, and someone doing something else to the roulette balls. There is also something about Bernie Mac and a domino game that isn’t all that well explained.

This caper film has moments of fun, but I felt I was kept in the dark for long stretches. When the plans came into play, I did not feel like I knew what they were doing. There was a lot of talking, but we are only given bits and pieces of the plot, of the caper, and of the reasoning. The vast majority of the hows and whys were left to off-camera conversations, not too mention how they got their hands on the tunneling machine, or how they got it tunneling under Vegas without anyone noticing.

Partway through this third outing, I pretty much gave up on trying to track the plot points and piece everything together. It all seemed to point towards a pointless exercise in futility. So, rather than pay attention to all of that, I decided to just sit back and enjoy the scenery and the collection of stars that turned out.

It really feels like a vanity project for Soderbergh and his team, like a bunch of stars decided to get together and make a movie. What kind of movie would be perfect for a large ensemble of stars? Why, a caper film of course. It requires a team of people to get things done. They get together and start shooting, making it up as they go along, working from a loose outline. Fun? Sure. Best way to make a good movie? Probably not.

The sad thing is that with so many stars, there did not seem like enough for all of them to do anything meaningful. Often, they end up getting stuck doing little more than sitting around. For example, the great Don Cheadle is left sitting around for much of the movie, watching the tunneler, or Bernie Mac who sells a domino game, or Scott Caan who is sent after Casey Affleck in Mexico. None of these guys do all that much. The story, as it is, just does not leave much room for everyone to do anything.

Bottomline: So, in the end, what you have is a movie peppered with big stars. On the surface it is plenty of fun, but once you scratch said surface the exercise begins to deflate as there is not much existing framework to support it. The performances are fun, many of the sequences are fun, and the movie looks very good. It is a prime example of a movie where the parts are greater than the whole. Worth watching, but not destined to be remembered.

Mildly Recommended.

Christopher Beaumont spends much of his time writing about entertainment when he isn’t sitting in a movie theater. He is known around the office as the “Movie Guy” and is always ready to talk about his favorite form of entertainment and offer up recommendations. Interests include science fiction, horror, and metal music. His writings can be found at Draven99’s Musings, as well as Film School Rejects.