DER GORILLA VON SOHO - "Gorilla Gang" (1968)

 

It's time for another Edgar Wallace Wednesday down in The Dungeon, so hold on to your popcorn, and get ready for "Gorilla Gang!"

 

Edgar Wallace haunts all of us each and every day, and yet most people don't even realize it, but trust me, he's watching!

It's Cinco de Mayo, so I decided to watch a German film with Spanish sub-titles while drinking Margaritas, and I suggest you do so too!

One thing for sure, no matter what language it's in, anything is enjoyable when it has a soundtrack composed by Maestro Peter Thomas.

"Der Gorilla Von Soho" was also known as "Gorilla Gang."

In Spanish, that translates roughly to "Pandilla de Gorilas."

To you it might just look like some goof in a gorilla suit, but the reality is that it's

"A monster that strikes fear into the heart of a whole city!"

"A strange bar in London's Soho District...........

 ............Conceals many a mystery!"

 

Strange indeed! 

The wealthy patrons get drunk and either paint, or take pictures of a bunch of semi-nude Adam & Evil models!

As always, there are those tricky Edgar Wallace elements, like this safe with a pistol in it that shoots the unsuspecting person who opens it, square in the chest!

Sir John is not in this film but is replaced with another perv from Scotland Yard, the amazing Hubert von Meyerinck as Sir Arthur, who was also in a ton of other Edgar Wallace films like "The Man With The Glass Eye," "The Hunchback Of Soho," and "Again The Ringer." 

Here's some more info from the German Wikipedia site about Hubert provided by my Editor in Berlin that is pretty interesting.

 

 "I remember a gay actor we called 'Hubsi,' Hubert von Meyerinck. He never boasted of it himself, but on Kristallnacht he ran across Kurfürstendamm shouting, 'Whoever among you is Jewish, follow me.' He hid people in his apartment. Yes, they existed, the decent people whose words you could believe that it was difficult to become a resister in those days. People like Meyerinck were marvelous, wonderful."
- Billy Wilder: in an interview with Der Spiegel, Special, June 1997

This gorilla looks like he just got back from the hair stylist!

The Gorilla Gang use this ambulance as their getaway car after they pull a job.

In one scene, the gorilla dives into the open back door!

"With one vicious slash they severed the jugular vein of an entire city!"

 

 

"People disappear mysteriously!"

The fact that she has the "Sergeant Pepper" album hanging on her wall, and the other exposed record is by the phenomenal jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal, shows that this gal has got good taste in music, but too bad that's not going to be good enough to save her life.

"Nobody knows the hideout of the horrible monster," but that doesn't stop them from trying!

Victims get drowned so that the gorillas can get the insurance money! The difficult part was filling out all the paperwork!

Darn, who'd a thunk? 

It wasn't a gorilla at all, but just some moron in a gorilla suit instead!

Just in case you missed it on the last gorilla movie, here's Glen Armstrong again with the classic

"Gorilla Suit Blues."

Even after the whole ordeal is over, horndog Sir Arthur continues to investigate in his own special way!

SPACE PATROL U. K. / "The Robot Revolution" - 1963

Here's an episode from the British version of SPACE PATROL that ran from 1963-68. The original US series ran from 1950-55, weird, so what's going on here?.. The original name is PLANET PATROL! Anyway, I digress. This has nothing to do with Gerry Anderson.

It starts with the Galasphere ship landing on Mars with our gang inside.

Time to relax from the trip and chat with old friends.

Professor Heggerty has just obtained a new singing and dancing plant from Uranus! His talking pet bird Gabbler is fascinated by the thing! Talking plant from Uranus...

Captain Raeburn and two crew members are there to check out the underwater farms beneath the sea with the help of over 1000 robots. They take their hover boards out to the location and swim in some awkward looking diving gear.

Then, there's an underwater earthquake and for some crazy reason the robots go haywire!

They conk people over the head and then take over the transit lines.

I just love this shot of that robot on a mission of mayhem.

Professor Heggerty monitors one of the rampaging robots attacking Marla, but what can he do, there are so many of them!

Gabbler is taking care of the plant from Uranus when one of the out of control robots enters the room. But when the plant starts singing and dancing, the robot just stops moving and falls right over!

Professor Heggerty gets a brilliant idear and records the plant from Uranus's singing and then plays it over all the loud speakers!

And sure enough, the robots eat their own dust.

After the ordeal, the gang relaxes and they chat it up again, another adventure in the books.

Giving some credit to the men behind the scenes. Have a good week guys.

KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER EP 01 - "The Ripper" (1974)

 

Here's a pretty cool Saturday Night Special for you, the first episode of the 1974 TV show "Kolchak: The Night Stalker."

 

Before he died in 2006 at the age of 83, Darren McGavin managed to rack up 184 credits. He was a busy man, and besides Kolchak, he was the lead man in 79 episodes of "Mike Hammer" and was in the great film "Mission Mars" with Nick Adams, just to name a couple.

 

This first episode was called "The Ripper," because there's a modern day Jack the Ripper on the loose in Chicago, but is it a new guy or can it possible be the original Jack the Ripper even though he should have been long gone many decades earlier.

You might think, as is often the case in a show like this, that Carl Kolchak is a detective, but he's not, he's a newspaper reporter!

 

Carl is a free thinker, and because of it, he gets a lot done, but at the same time, he's in trouble most of the time for getting involved in things that aren't really his business!

Of course the first place The Ripper hits is a strip club!

The crimes of The Ripper are fast and furious, and just like the original, all the victims are women!

The next victim was a contestant in the "Miss Physical Therapist" beauty contest.

Unlike my Editor Lord Litter, who reminded me to watch this show, Carl and his editor are constantly going at each other! Simon (Psycho) Oakland as Tony Vincenzo was no slouch himself, and has 162 credits that include "West Side Story," two episodes of "The Twilight Zone," and one episode of "The Outer Limits."

Kolchak really wants to go after this Ripper guy, but Tony assigns him to pick up the duties for the "Dear Emily" advice column where people write in and ask annoying questions, while the regular writer is out.

Pursuing The Ripper, Carl sees some very strange things that just don't make sense. The guy can leap down off of multi-storied buildings without getting hurt, appears to have super human strength, and may possibly even be invulnerable!

At one encounter Carl takes a picture, but the film doesn't show anything at all.

Who or what can this Ripper actually be?

Next stop for The Ripper is the "Sultan's Palace" massage parlor, and it's not because he's feeling stiff!

This gal is not impressed with The Ripper's cane, but she will be soon.

Kolchak goes to the massage parlor to check it out for himself after that girl is murdered, and he gets arrested by this blonde female undercover cop for being a perv.

Thanks to Kolchak, they zap The Ripper with electricity, and are finally able to bring him in, but he uses his uncanny inhuman strength to knock the jail cell door right out of the wall!

Kolchak remembers that one of the letters to Emily that he had previously ignored, was from an old lady who said that the guy who lived across the street from her was a weirdo, and suddenly it all made sense, but the only other thing he remembers is that it was in a blue envelope, so they comb through all the letters looking for it, so they can get the envelope.

Kolchak goes to the dilapidated house described and breaks in, and when The Ripper returns home, Kolchak hides in the closet!

Most of the show is at night and it's very dark, and this is the first and last time we actually get to see the face of The Ripper.

Will Kolchak live through this harrowing experience? 

Well, he better, because there are still nineteen more episodes.