John W Chance Here's a good concept wasted. It's a mixture of Ed Wood's bizarre writing talents and a text book example of bad movie making.On their honeymoon at his mountain home, Dan Fuller's wife, Laura, (played by Charlotte Austin) encounter his gorilla, Spanky, which he keeps in the basement-- Dan is apparently a big game hunter. In one of the several high points of the film, she shows an almost animal attraction for the gorilla, and vice versa. Later that night in the bridal chamber, the gorilla sneaks in and they again have another smoldering staring session, climaxed by Spanky pulling off her nightgown. (Is Ed Wood trying to tell us something?) Naturally, the husband shoots and kills the gorilla.Dan then has a psychiatrist conduct hypnotic regression sessions on Laura, as she had been previously talking to him about the possibility of having had past lives. We then discover that in her past life, she had been a gorilla! Of course, the 'hypnotic regression' theme was obviously drawn from the number one best selling book of 1956, 'The Search for Bridey Murphy,' in which a doctor regressed an American housewife who spoke in an Irish brogue and recounted in great detail her previous life as Bridey Murphy in Cork County, Ireland in the 18th century. We also can't help catching a little spin here on 'King Kong' (1933), for in this case the girl has a thing for the gorilla too! Dan then decides to take Laura with him to 'Africa' on safari for new animals. Here the film takes a sharp turn into obvious bad movie making with a Must To Avoid in capital letters: the dual personality theme is abruptly dropped and forgotten for the next 30 minutes or so. Instead we are subjected to pointless sequences of a tiger running through the jungle, fighting what appears to be a crocodile, and finally attacking Dan, who had been cluelessly stalking towards the camera seemingly oblivious to Laura's screams or the roars of the tiger, in non tension building shots.Finally, in the last five or six minutes of the film, Wood's ambivalent identity theme returns, as does a gorilla, who sweeps a sexually hungry looking Laura off her feet and takes her to the Bronson caves where she becomes queen of the gorillas. The end.As others have noted, Charlotte Austin's sexual stares are the high point of the film, and the low point is the needless and extended middle section that could have been totally dropped. If only the tightly done and well scripted first fifteen minutes could have continued with the development of Laura's sexual 'awakening!' We keep waiting to see her turn into a gorilla, as was done by Raymond Burr in the much better 'Bride of the Gorilla' (1951), but it never happens; we get the tedious tiger segments instead. A good concept has been disappointingly wasted here.Charlotte Austin's sexual stares linger in the mind, but not the rest of the film. I'll have to give it a two and half.

thepringlegame i was pleasently surprised at the first half an hour of this film. i was expected the usual hand held cameras, dodgy acting, minimum scene listing etc. i came to the conclusion that this film must have been made later into Ed Woods career until i looked at the box and saw it predates Plan 9. granted the stock safari footage later in the film and the impression we get that Ed Wood forgot his own plot during the indian tiger's sequence, this film i would rate higher than the rest of his other works. underneath all that is bad you can genuinely see that he had a vision.

counterrevolutionary This awful flick offers little scope for screenwriter Ed Wood's unique, uh, "talents," being mostly made up of boring stock footage. There's hardly even a plot, which may be a mercy considering what Ed Wood's plots tend to be like.The whole "queen of the gorillas" thing is introduced early in the film, and then just dropped until about seven minutes from the end, as our protagonists head off to Africa to capture some giraffes and rhinos (Howard Hawks so ripped this off for HATARI!) and hunt panthers and tigers.Yes, tigers. Much of the stock footage they had featured a pair of tigers, so either Adrian Weiss or Ed Wood came up with the notion that a ship carrying a pair of tigers had wrecked on the African coast.Uh, yeah.

Leslie Howard Adams Let me see if I have this straight; Adrian Weiss produced it, Adrian Weiss directed it, and Adrian Weiss wrote (relative term) it, but this is an "Ed Wood film.?" Heck, he probably improved it. And it was most likely his imput that had Charlotte Austin staying with the gorillas over Lance Fuller. After all, in the dark, gorilla fur/hair could possibly pass for cashmier.