Blu-ray: Link

Man’s strange relationship with other species haunts this freaky simian horror film from Psycho IIdirector Richard Franklin. Man’s strange relationship with other species haunts this freaky simian horror film from Psycho IIdirector Richard Franklin. Terence Stamp is Dr Phillips, an archetypal, lab-coated mad scientist, grumpily testing the limits of ape intelligence, and Elisabeth Shue zoology student Jane, unwisely offering help at his remote Gothic mansion, where the most developed ape, Link, is his besuited butler and begrudging factotum. There’s something of The Island of Dr Moreau in Phillips’ arrogant, eventually overthrown genetic tyranny. “He’s missed the bus by a lousy 1%!” he rails at the apes’ shortfall from human civilisation. As he clambers over tables and into cages, the gap looks narrower than he thinks. The Doc is tweedy, superior and seedy, with vague designs on his young student, and a bedroom piled high with copies of his one, well-regarded book; his second, mordantly named