Friend, killer, lover, specimen ...
The guinea pig
Cinema persistently tries to achieve what science so far has not: make a man/monkey mashup. In The Doctor's Experiment; or Reversing Darwin's Theory (1908) men are turned into apes, while in Balaoo the Demon Baboon (1913, twice remade) a doctor has a go at the reverse, with the side-effect of turning them murderous. In 1932's Murders in the Rue Morgue, women are injected with ape blood (they die); in Return of the Ape Man (1944) Bela Lugosi swaps John Carradine's brain with that of a gorilla (again, doesn't go well). The Man Without a Body (1957) tells of an impressionable gent who submits to the ministrations of a scientist who has been seeing what happens when you play switcheroo with monkey heads.
The erotic cipher
King Kong resonates because, much as Kong repels us, we empathise too: who hasn't been rejected by the object of...
The guinea pig
Cinema persistently tries to achieve what science so far has not: make a man/monkey mashup. In The Doctor's Experiment; or Reversing Darwin's Theory (1908) men are turned into apes, while in Balaoo the Demon Baboon (1913, twice remade) a doctor has a go at the reverse, with the side-effect of turning them murderous. In 1932's Murders in the Rue Morgue, women are injected with ape blood (they die); in Return of the Ape Man (1944) Bela Lugosi swaps John Carradine's brain with that of a gorilla (again, doesn't go well). The Man Without a Body (1957) tells of an impressionable gent who submits to the ministrations of a scientist who has been seeing what happens when you play switcheroo with monkey heads.
The erotic cipher
King Kong resonates because, much as Kong repels us, we empathise too: who hasn't been rejected by the object of...
- 8/3/2011
- by Catherine Shoard
- The Guardian - Film News
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