. . . proving that the pontiff's American minions* decreed that APES OF WRATH was a state-of-the-art sex education film in 1959 (please see *this movie is not yet rated), APES must be taken with more than just one grain of salt. APES breaks little new ground for the Church in theorizing that babies are delivered to parents by storks, with no necessity for any Hanky Panky between Mom and Dad. Parochial school kids of the 1950s still may have asked Sister Maria some uncomfortable questions, such as why the stork delivers so many babies with birth defects. The stork would have to be blind not to notice that baby Matthew has stubs where his feet should be, Mark is a hemophiliac, Luke has Down's Syndrome, and John is Hydroencephaleptic. "What's up with THAT?" Smart Aleck Martha might heckle. Cleverly adopting an explanation wholly familiar to most parish kids, APES discloses that the stork is an unreformed alcoholic! Things have gotten so bad, that he's shown delivering "babies" of the wrong species to a couple of "moms," one of whom is--gasp!--UNMARRIED, and a male to boot! So APES not only serves as a carefully crafted Sex Ed parable, but also makes a call for moderation in drinking. If, Heaven forbid, folks persist in sousing as much as the stork, soon we'll be blessed with gay marriage!
Review of Apes of Wrath
