Jungle Woman
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, NR, 61 m, 1944
Directed by Reginald Le Borg. Stars Evelyn Ankers, J. Carrol Naish, Samuel S. Hinds, et al.

Jungle Woman, the second installment in Universal’s harebrained trilogy about an exotic beauty who mutates into a homicidal semi-simian (and sometimes a full-blown gorilla) whenever she becomes infatuated with a member of the opposite sex, is an appalling cheat. The picture runs just over an hour, but it squanders a third of that time by recycling footage from its predecessor, Captive Wild Woman, much of which was also assembled from other sources—chiefly The Big Cage, a junky circus drama that featured “the world’s greatest wild animal trainer,” Clyde Beatty, flogging the living daylights out of some very big (and very confused) cats. Worse, there isn’t one shot of the blooming Ape Girl until we visit her in the morgue at the end of the show; all of her mortal monkeyshines happen off camera. I doubt anybody with a fleck of refinement will ever point to Captive Wild Woman as an example of great Universal Horror, but most can agree that it had a mindless, junky appeal. It also had John Carradine, who was positively corking as Sigmund Walters, the unorthodox doc whose experiments with glandular secretions helped turn a roly-poly ape (played by Ray “Crash” Corrigan) into the shapely Paula Dupree (Acquanetta) and then back into a roly-poly ape. Walters and his unholy creation were both deader than disco by the time the curtain fell on Captive Wild Woman, but Jungle Woman returns to the scene where the gorilla was brought down by a bluecoat’s bullet and cuts new reaction shots of another glandular specialist, Dr. Carl Fletcher (J. Carrol Naish), into the proceedings. After detecting a flicker of life in the creature’s eyes, he takes it back to the sanitarium where Walters hung out his shingle and prepares to pick up where his late colleague left off. As you would expect, the gorilla escapes (or at least we’re told it escapes; the penny-wise, pound-foolish studio apparently wouldn’t see bringing Corrigan and his raggedy monkey suit back for a few hours work), but Fletcher’s ensuing search of the sanitarium’s grounds turns up something a lot purdier: Paula, who seems to be more out of it than Spicoli at 4:20. (Look, the doctor doesn’t know she’s the gorilla, but we sure as hell do, so how we’re expected to buy that she had the time—let alone the presence of mind—to find herself a flawlessly fitting outfit after shedding her fur is beyond me.) With the help of his imbecilic assistant, Willie (Eddie Hyans, a Cash Flagg type who seems to have learned everything he knows about the mentally challenged from Of Mice and Men), the magnanimous medic puts his journey into “another man’s province” on hold while he tries to draw Paula out of her mysterious funk. In Captive Wild Woman, Acquanetta was conspicuously mute (though nobody in the picture ever seemed to notice); she was relegated to gazing into the middle distance. Jungle Woman permits the actress to finally speak, and while a similar development in The Bride of Frankenstein may have added poignancy to Karloff’s scenes with O.P. Heggie, it only serves here to reveal Acquanetta’s limitations as an actress. God knows she’s easy on the eyes, but succulent gams, ample fun bags, and a slammin’ caboose can only hold this reviewer’s attention for so long (which is still longer than most, mind you). When the quality of a film is already middling at best, assigning a bunch of dialogue to a leading lady who can’t act her way out of a paper bag doesn’t strike me as a wise move.

When Jungle Woman finally gets all that mind-numbing exposition out of the way and settles into the story proper, it becomes an almost tolerable distraction—something to fold laundry by. The energy goes up a tad after the doctor’s daughter, Joan (cutie pie Lois Collier), arrives at the sanitarium with her fiancé, Bob (Richard Davis). The Ape Girl gets one look at this smiley slab of beefcake and goes ape (literally) with desire, slaying any unfortunate soul who gets between her and her object of affection. Actually, she only racks up one kill: Willie, whose co-workers assume that because he’s retarded he must also be responsible for all of the other nasty happenings around campus—that is until the ignorant fools discover his corpse. Eventually, Fletcher realizes that Paula and the vicious beast that’s been offing the help and terrorizing his family are one in the same, so he throws his Hippocratic Oath out the window and gives the Ape Girl a lethal injection. (Though it happens in silhouette, this is the only time we see somebody interact with the creature.) Fletcher’s fate at the inevitable coroner’s inquest hinges upon whether he killed a woman or an animal (there’s nothing in the law, I guess, that provides for a womanimal), so we’re subjected to a lot of heated philosophical exchanges before someone gets the bright idea to go and check out the stiff in the morgue. No joke: The credits inform us that it took three screenwriters to come up with that piece of business, and here I thought Universal’s writing staff consisted of nothing more than a monkey and a typewriter. There might as well have been a monkey in the director’s chair; Reginald Le Borg’s (The Mummy’s Ghost) work here is as flavorless as a plain rice cake. But Naish (looking a bit like Charlie Chaplin in his Limelight phase) almost single-handedly saves the day. He’s the consummate actor, giving his all to whatever ridiculous lines Universal’s sorry excuses for scribes push on him. But it’s hard to say for whom he’s performing; kids are going to feel gypped when the monster doesn’t show up and adults aren’t going to have much patience for the movie’s sloppy science. Jungle Woman appears to have been made without an audience in mind. That’s probably why you never heard of it. 

October 23, 2009

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