Captive Wild Woman
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, NR, 61 m, 1943
Directed by Edward Dmytryk. Stars John Carradine, Evelyn Ankers, Milburn Stone, et al.

Captive Wild Woman, one of the more obscure and less distinguished Universal monster movies, would be an even deadlier affair if it weren’t for the presence of that lean and wily sleaze, John Carradine. He plays the picture’s requisite mad scientist, Dr. Sigmund Walters, an authority on all things glandular. Despite the screenwriters’ best attempts to confound us with a lot of scientific doubletalk, even a Liberty U grad can see that the science on display here is as shaky as a Parkinson’s victim in a Briggs and Stratton Flyer on a Bolivian mountain road. No matter, Carradine is such a great actor that he can make you believe the sun is cold. (His steely commitment to the part is a thing of beauty; he clearly takes delight in playing evil so-and-sos.) When ol’ doc Walters isn’t busy misdiagnosing patients or writing crackpot treatises for scientific journals, he’s conducting weird experiments in his basement laboratory. His plan, I think, is to create a Nietzschean sub-race by way of glandular transplants. So far, he’s grafted a guinea pig’s glands into a rabbit, a frog’s glands into a white mouse, and a Snork’s glands into a Nac Mac Feegle (don’t quote me on that last one), and each time the subject has taken on a different appearance. (Of what, it’s not clear; the characters don’t elaborate and the filmmakers are either too lazy or too cheap to show us.) When the doctor confesses to his ever-loyal assistant, Miss Strand (Fay Helm), a desire to start carrying out trials on humans, he gets an earful about ethics and legalities and such. “I see you’re not truly a scientist at heart,” he tells her, his eyes giving off a crazy sparkle that’s common to those with a God complex. “The things we’re trying to do, one must be daring.” (He would’ve been a man after Josef Mengele’s heart.) And so begins the search for a proper human specimen.

Enter Dorothy (Martha Vickers), who has come to the doctor’s sanitarium upon the recommendation her big sister, Beth (Evelyn Ankers). It seems that Dorothy is suffering from lethargy and a lack of appetite, so the doctor (who believes all sicknesses are glandular in nature) decides to commit her and put her through a battery of tests. Meanwhile, Beth’s lion tamer boyfriend, Fred Mason (Milburn Stone), has retuned from fleecing an unspecified jungle of twenty lions, twenty tigers, eleven leopards, six zebras, and one very big gorilla named Cheela (played by the legendary Ray “Crash” Corrigan). One afternoon while Dr. Walters is strolling through the grounds of the circus where Fred works, he meets Cheela and is immediately taken with her “above-average intelligence.” His offer to buy the ape is laughed off by the big top’s big cheese, Mr. Whipple (Lloyd Corrigan), so he hires a disgruntled former employee to steal her away in the dead of night. Of course, being the dishonorable shit that he is, he decides upon delivery to do a number on his new partner in crime by pushing him into Cheela’s not-so-loving embrace. Then it’s back down to the lab to take some of Dorothy’s glandular secretions and inject them into Cheela. Needless to say, Miss Strand isn’t entirely down with all this, so Dr. Walters takes her life and uses her gray matter to boost Cheela’s IQ even further. (Don’t expect me to tell you how it’s done; the action here is about as coherent as a piece of Indonesian elephant art.) 

The operation is a whopping success: Cheela mutates into a swarthy hottie played by “the Venezuelan Volcano” herself, Acquanetta (insert the hair spray joke of your choice here). Since the moniker that was hung on her former, hairier self will no longer do, the doctor renames her Paula Dupree, which may be some sort of inside joke but I don’t have the interest or energy to look into it. To see if she still holds sway over the other beasties, Dr. Walters takes her back to the circus for her human début. The timing couldn’t be better: Just as Fred’s mishandling of a perilous routine is about to wind him in the maw of a hungry lion, Paula steps forth and stares the cat into submission. (And here I thought the lion was the king of the jungle. What a pussy!) This so impresses Mr. Whipple (whenever I hear that name, I feel like squeezing a roll of Charmin) that he hires her to be a part of Fred’s act. (Strange, though, how nobody ever mentions Paula’s aversion to speech.) Eventually, Paula develops amorous feelings for Fred, but when she catches him sucking face with his main squeeze, she goes ape shit and transforms into a half-gorilla, half-woman whatsit. Not much else happens: The Ape Girl snaps the spinal column of an innocent bystander (off-camera) and that’s about it. 

During the opening credits, Captive Wild Woman gives a big shout-out to Clyde Beatty for “his cooperation and inimitable talent in staging the thrilling animal sequences.” Beatty doubles for Stone in the long shots of the lion taming acts, and his backside is on screen so much that you wonder why the producers didn’t just let him turn around and play Fred for the rest of the picture. (Well, for one thing, he didn’t have Stone’s bland matinee idol looks.) Beatty carried more than a few B-movies in his day (The Big Cage, The Lost Jungle, Perils of the Jungle), so I’m sure he could’ve handled this stinker without breaking a sweat. Lord knows that making Beatty the star would’ve served the continuity of more than a few scenes; all that cutting between the back of Beatty’s melon to the front of Stone’s kills the movie’s already shaky tempo. (The material featuring Beatty appears to have been lifted from a different movie, probably The Big Cage.*) And it’s not as if Captive Wild Woman didn’t have enough problems already: George Robinson’s photography looks like crap, John B. Goodman and Ralph M. DeLacy’s art direction is drab, and Hans J. Salter’s musical score is nothing more than a hodgepodge of stock cues. Incredibly, Captive Wild Woman spun off two sequels: Jungle Woman and The Jungle Captive. Both are sans Carradine, which means neither is worth seeing. 

August 17, 2009   

*It was.

© Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.