Damn you all to… planet Ape?

I’m guessing this is not in fact an original poster for this “film” (the taglines are more like the ones from one of its follow-ups, and the “company logo” is suspiciously similar to that of American International), but I kind of like it anyway cos it’s for one of my favourite stories of 1970s exploitation film distribution…

A small but I think legible enough actual newspaper ad for the film dated February 18 1977, so although I don’t know exactly when this thing came out it obviously had to be circulating by then. Revenge From Planet Ape was, in fact, nothing more or less than a Spanish horror film called Tombs of the Blind Dead originally released in 1972, about a sect of medieval Knights Templar that come back from the dead after having been executed for performing black magic centuries earlier. It played in the US under its proper name, but someone at a company apparently called Beyond International Pictures (whose only IMDB credit is this) decided to re-release it as a Planet of the Apes sequel.

The fact that the previous film in the series had pointedly declared itself the last of the series was an easily ignored problem; the fact that Tombs of the Blind Dead conspicuously contains no apes was harder to overlook. Still, not a problem: all that Beyond had to do was a bit of quick surgery on a few scenes, redub it in English, add a new opening about humanity having destroyed a civilisation of apes three thousand years ago, and hope people thought the undead Templars looked… at least kind of simian. Bingo. “New” fodder for the drive-ins and who cared if the crowds were confused. As this sort of thing goes, it’s genius of a particularly warped and stupid sort.

Astoundingly, when Blue Underground put Tombs out on DVD in the mid-oughts, not only did they go so far as to include the distinctly different original Spanish and American versions (the latter being a substantial re-edit, not just a dub job) but they also dug up a print of Revenge From Planet Ape and included the different title sequence as a bonus feature (this being how I discovered it myself; apparently some actually suspected BU of having cooked it up themselves as a hoax but then the original ads were found). This is the sort of thing that I always liked about small boutique exploitation labels like BU, they have a tendency to go that extra mile for these little films of relatively minor interest when much bigger studios couldn’t even be bothered to make a 16×9 transfer of some of their bigger films back in the day…