Although today’s audiences know him for co-scripting 1933’s classic King Kong (if they know him at all), the prolific Edgar Wallace once held name recognition so powerhouse-high, he was his own brand, with hundreds of his novels and short stories adapted for the screen. Some of them, The Gorilla Gang included, even begin with an audio welcome from the man as his blood-spattered logo appears over the action.
So what if he had been dead for more than 30 years? The Wallace moniker made bank, baby! It’s easy to see why. His mysteries are simple, often deceptively so, as is the case of this Gang, alternately known as The Gorilla of Soho.
Represented by Inspector Perkins (Horst Tappert, in a role he reprised for the following year’s The Man with the Glass Eye) and his investigation partner, Sgt. Pepper (Uwe Friedrichsen, No Survivors, Please), Scotland Yard is baffled by a string of slayings in which the victims — all males traveling from other countries, yet with no UK relatives — are killed only on misty nights and retrieved from the Thames. Our heroes also possess knowledge of a syndicate whose members work solely under the shroud of fog and dressed in gorilla costumes, but Perkins and Pepper fail to consider potential linkage, despite it being as obvious as a connect-the-dots page torn from a preschooler’s coloring book.
It takes the translation skills of former nurse and current African language specialist Susan McPherson (Uschi Glas of Wallace’s The College-Girl Murders, also directed by Alfred Vohrer) to realize that 1+2=homicide, after she is brought in to decipher semilegible hieroglyphics scrawled on a plastic baby doll discovered on the waterlogged corpse of a millionaire wool merchant from Canada. Bringing Ms. McPherson along for assistance, romantic possibilities (for Pepper) and eye candy (for you, dear viewer), the law enforcers track leads that take them to a Salvation Army-esque nonprofit, a nudie bar, a nunnery and — none too soon — the lair of the acrobatic “apes.”
Aided tremendously by a swingin’ Peter Thomas score as big and brassy as some of the ladies for hire in the aforementioned club, The Gorilla Gang is colorful with its criminals, both in characterization and eye-popping appeal. Going down smooth, just a tad naughty and (in case you weren’t paying attention the first time) involves murderers disguised as goddamn gorillas, this is one Bacardi-and-dice-game of a killer krimi. —Rod Lott