Big game hunter Dan (Lance Fuller) brings his new bride Laura (Charlotte Austin) to his mansion before they head off to a honeymoon safari in Africa. He keeps a gorilla named Spanky in the basement that he is planning to donate to a zoo, but Spanky and Laura seem oddly attracted to each other--Spanky touches Laura through the cage bars and she doesn't pull away--and that night (presumably after Dan and Laura have taken care of their conjugal duties and gone to sleep in separate beds), Spanky breaks into their bedroom and fondles Laura, eventually ripping off her Angora fur negligee. Laura puts up little resistance, but Dan shoots the gorilla dead. Laura says she felt as if somehow, she knew Spanky, and when a psychiatrist puts her in a trance, she has visions of a past life as an African gorilla. Oddly, no one seems perturbed by this news, and Dan and Laura head off to Africa, where the movie goes in a whole new Tarzan-ish direction, as Dan and his faithful assistant Taro start bagging animals to export to zoos, and are eventually called on to go after two Indian tigers who have escaped from a cargo ship. Meanwhile, with gorillas all around, Laura starts to feel the pull of her former life and becomes the willing captive of a couple of gorillas. Dan tries to free her, but ultimately she chooses to stay in the gorilla cave while he heads back to civilization.
The fairly cheap sets and use of stock footage obscure to some degree just how kinky this story (written by known Angora fetishist Ed Wood) is. After all, bestiality is at its core: when Spanky escapes his cage, he's clearly horny for Laura, and as for her, one gets the feeling that Laura might not have stopped Spanky if Dan hadn't woken up. The "happy" ending implies that she will be a sex slave to the gorillas--she has reverted to her gorilla state psychologically but physically she's still a human woman. The narrative is a bit of a mess. Just as the regression plot is getting interesting, the film shifts from supernatural fantasy to jungle adventure so the filmmakers can stuff a lot of stock footage in (mostly from an obscure 1940s Sabu film) that has nothing to do with gorillas. Lance Fuller is a little more handsome and polished than the typical 50's B-sci-fi and horror star; Charlotte Austin spends most of the important scenes in a daze, maybe because the director didn’t know what he wanted out of her character. If she looked too scared, we might not buy the regression plotline; if she looked too turned on, the kink element might have shot up a few notches (and that might not have been a bad thing, but it would have been a whole different movie). So she settles for drab acquiescence. Occasionally interesting if never compelling. [Streaming]
1 comment:
With a plot synopsis like that you just know I'm going to buy this movie.
And it's available on a double-header DVD paired with THE WHITE GORILLA. That's an offer I just can't refuse.
Ed Wood may have been a terrible director but he could write some crazy fun screenplays.
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