Conquest of the Planet of the Apes

Essential, and the angriest film anyone made with this name on it. Set in 1991, after a plague has killed every cat and dog, it opens on a city where apes have been trained as domestic servants and are conditioned with electric prods in public squares, and it is filmed in the concrete plazas of a brand new civic development so that the whole thing looks like an architectural rendering with slavery in it.

Nobody involved was being subtle. The film was made a few years after a decade of American urban uprisings, the staging of the ape revolt quotes news footage directly, and Caesar's closing speech is addressed to the audience about what the oppressed eventually do. It is startling that a studio released it as a summer sequel.

Which version you watch matters more here than anywhere else in the series. Test audiences found the ending too brutal, so the theatrical cut was shortened and a conciliatory voice-over was added over the final moments, softening Caesar's position into a plea for mercy. An unrated restoration puts back the original ending and the full violence of the uprising, and it is a markedly harsher and better film. Seek it out if you can.

The budget was the smallest yet and it shows in the crowd sizes and the reused masks. None of that matters much. Roddy McDowall, playing the son of the characters from the previous film, is the spine of it.