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.