1944’s Jungle Woman is a sequel surely nobody asked for to 1943’s Captive Wild Woman, which itself repurposed a ridiculous amount of footage from circus picture The Big Cage made a decade earlier. Some this feels like an endless regression or an infinity mirror, as footage from 1933 as reused in 1943 returns in 1944. Universal must have been very ahead of their time as concerns environmental matters, as they must have been huge into recycling.
Most of the cast returns for this installment, and what we see of the preceding film is in the form of flashbacks. Talk about adding insult to injury. I’m pretty sure one of the flashbacks to the earlier movie then goes to a flashback in that, meaning we have gone three layers deep in what should be the definition of a straight-forward movie. We only have an hour to fill, but so much of the runtime is spent rewatching a movie. In a way, The Big Sleep is less complicated.
Not that this isn’t easy to follow. The plot is again so goofy, and yet so easy to follow, as to make this the kind of thing you can half pay attention to and still pick up everything. Honestly, when the characters are defined as thinly as they are here, we feel no vested interest in them, their well-being or their goals.
The heroes of the previous film, Evelyn Ankers and Milburn Stone, return only to give testimony at an inquest ran by coroner Samuel S. Hinds and D.A. Douglass Dumbrille. Their testimony provides the framing device for much of the reuse of material from Captive. Then J. Carrol Naish brings us up to the present in his flashback, but not without retrofitting himself into material from the first picture, where this mad scientist was inexplicably in the stands at the circus, watching Stone perform when the mysterious Acquanetta had to rescue the big cat tamer from the cage.
The inquest is because Naish is accused of murdering Acquanetta, who herself had died in the preceding film, though she had been shot while in gorilla form. Yeah, that’s as crazy as it sounds. We’re talking about a woman who is basically a were-gorilla.
Naish resurrects her for reasons I never quite understood. Maybe none were ever given, as it is pretty easy to let your attention lapse while watching this. Did I already say that? Sorry, but I don’t remember if I did.
The curiously named Acquanetta gets more to do in this than in the last film, where she mostly just stood outside a cage and flared her eyes at assorted vicious animals. She (or, at least, her character) gets up to a fair amount of action. One fleeting but memorable moment has her single-handedly bending in half what is supposed to be a large metal ashtray.
In a startling change from the last picture, she even gets some lines to speak, though her vocal delivery is flat and awkward, sounding almost exactly like some early speech synthesizers. Still, I reacted to her first words like Cary Grant did in Arsenic and Old Lace when his long lost, and now unrecognizable, brother says something: “IT SPEAKS!”
Largely, she is subjected to psychological examinations by Naish. In one bit, he gives her an insultingly simple test where a word is missing from a sentence. For each, she needs to provide the missing verb or adjective. I was waiting for a noun to be required, and for her guess to be “patronizing doctor”. But she is soon getting the upper hand and framing Naish, the most mild-mannered mad doctor to ever grace the screen, with accusations he physically abused her. False allegations of abuse made by a woman against a man—I’m betting that won’t play well today.
This gets the interest of Naish understudy Richard Davis and stirs feelings of protectiveness in him. This is all part of Acquanetta’s plan to separate Davis from fiancée, and Naish’s daughter, Lois Collier. If that won’t work, there’s always brute force, such as the film’s one effective moment of suspense, when all we see is a ripple of water as she swims underwater, so as to overturn a canoe the lovebirds are occupying.
It is a shame the film doesn’t have more scenes like that, as it opens with a moment right out of the Val Lewton playbook. It is the moment leading to the murder charges, as we watch a struggle play out entirely in shadow, as Naish and Acquanetta fight.
If there is anything positive to say about the experience of watching this, it is how hard it leans into the goofiness. There are many unintended laughs, though most will be the result of how little effort was put into the production. At one point, an alleged “jungle noise” of indeterminate origin is heard, when the source is clearly some guy just off-screen who has been ordered to make a “jungle sound”. Too much of the runtime has Naish running around in the bit of Universal backlot shrub that is supposed to be a forest, calling for Acquanetta’s character in the same manner one tries to summon a missing dog. Richard Davis polishes his boot while singing that “A hunting we will go…” tune I have only ever heard in various Looney Tunes. A groundskeeper says the slaughter in a chicken house is the worst thing he has seen since the destruction of Vienna, and I highly doubt that. At the end of the picture, everybody at the inquest goes down the hall to the morgue to see the corpse of the were-gorilla, which seemed as unlikely as it was inappropriate. After this, the D.A. and the coroner make the snap decision to drop the murder charges. Ah, the whimsical nature of our justice system…
To my completely slack-jawed bewilderment, Jungle Woman would be followed by yet another sequel, resulting in a Captive Wild Woman trilogy. Even stranger, not even Acquanetta would be returning for that one. I can’t blame everybody for bailing, as the roles are all thankless and threadbare here. The sole standout is Eddie Hyans in the dim assistant role usually occupied by Lon Chaney, Jr. There is something about Hyans’s voice that had me in fits of laughter every time he spoke. It was like a parody of a bad actor playing Lenny in a community theatre production of Of Mice and Men. I think the filmmakers would have been better off ditching the movie they made and instead make Of Mice and Gorilla Women.
Dir: Reginald Le Borg
Starring J. Carrol Naish, Acquanetta
Watched as part of Shout Factory’s blu-ray box set Universal Horror Collection: Volume 5