For lo, a great plague came to pass over the land. In the first year, there was the Captive Wild Woman. And it was a warning to the people, a horrible thing made largely out of The Big Cage, a picture made a decade before. But the people did not change their evil ways, and Universal did smite them with the sequel Jungle Woman, a punishment twice-fold, where reused footage from a much older film that was repurposed in the previous film was then shown in flashback. And still the people stuck steadfast to their sinful ways, and another year brought the third and last plague, 1945’s The Jungle Captive. And the people finally saw the light and Universal no longer saw fit to punish them further.
The third time was a charm for this quite weird and, frankly, largely bad series. Almost everything from the first two entries was jettisoned, including the cast. We also will no longer be subjected to any flashbacks from anything, whether the previous two installments or 1933’s The Big Cage, which was reused to a preposterous extent in the two previous films.
There is even a new actress as Paula, the were-gorilla that is the only constant through this series. But the curiously named Acquanetta has been replaced by Vicky Lane. This actress looks nothing like her predecessor. Maybe being brought back from the dead for a second time resulted in a metamorphosis, like a butterfly. A butterfly that is a woman who occasionally changes into something this is part gorilla.
The mad scientist who resurrects her this time is Otto Kruger. He is a respected scientist by day, though even that work seemed awfully suspect to me. The film opens with him about to restore life to a rabbit which has been dead for 12 hours. Secretary Amelita Ward seems way too excited about this, and I wondered if the rabbit dying meant she failed a pregnancy test, as “the rabbit died” was a common euphonism back then for being in that condition. Fun, though irrelevant, fact: the rabbit always died in those tests back then, as the procedure involved examination of its ovaries post-mortem, this being after it as injected with the woman’s urine. Shooting up a rabbit with somebody’s piss and then killing it. Talk about insult to injury.
If there was anybody who would knock up Ward, it is boyfriend Phil Brown, who is Kruger’s lab assistant during the day. Brown is not his assistant, however, in the doctor’s extracurricular activities. And another fun, and random, fact: Brown went on to be Luke Skywalker’s uncle in Star Wars.
At night, Kruger is working to first bring Paula the gorilla woman back to the land of the living. The man’s only assistant for this is Rondo Hatton, an actor with a truly distinctive appearance, per his battle with acromegaly. In addition to retrieving the corpse of Paula, he is effective at making new corpses, a whimsical habit of his which Kruger can’t seem to break. At one point, the exasperated Kruger berates him with, “Why do you have the urge to kill every time I ask you to do something?” Hatton is not the man to send on small errands, such as going to the convenience store to get milk. I can imagine him as The Dude, in The Big Lebowski, except following up writing a check for a small carton of half-and-half by killing the kid running the register.
Kruger will kidnap Ward to use her blood to reanimate Paula. I have no idea why he wouldn’t abduct a different woman, possibly one with no obvious connection to him. Hatton is instantly smitten with Ward, but Kruger says she isn’t for him; instead, he says the ape girl Paula is more his assistant’s type. Ouch! And the final plan has Kruger intending to plant Ward’s brain into Lane’s body, and I have the strangest feeling Brown might come to approve of this once he sees the results.
The new Paula isn’t as good at controlling animals as she was in her previous incarnation. When played by Acquanetta, she could just stand outside a cage and flare her eyes to quiet lions and tigers (effect on bears unknown—sorry). As Ward, she can’t even seem to control the dogs that patrol outside the house that is Kruger’s base of operations.
Most of the cast seems to be having a good time in this, though Ward’s deliberate lack of expression makes it difficult to tell whether she is. But nobody is having a better time than Jerome Cowan, the police detective investigating the various strange proceedings. I especially liked his interrogation of Brown and Ward, which he disguises as a casual conversation, beginning each question with something like, “Now, if you were a suspect, I’d ask you a question like…” and then asking that exact question. I also like his response to somebody who asks what the corpse of a morgue attendant is doing in one of its drawers: “The obvious.”
This is a deeply goofy movie, where a prominent doctor has a book that is simply titled Brain Surgery, and which he is apparently going to use an instruction for exactly that. It is the kind of script with dialogue like, “Don’t be a fool! We’re scientists, not sentimentalists.” I’m not sure being a sentimentalist was ever a paying job, but I’m interested in being employed as one if such a title still exists. It is the kind of movie where a photo of a crime scene in the paper has helpful text saying “FILE STOLEN” on it with an arrow pointing to the particular file cabinet drawer from which it was purloined, as if that was the most pertinent information.
To my considerable surprise, Jungle Captive is the most enjoyable of a trilogy of films, the first two of which were quite bad. Though I watched this trilogy in order, I believe this last installment could be watched without having seen the others. It may not be a good picture in most conventional terms, but there is much to be enjoyed when in the right frame of mind. I wasn’t concerned it is slight and wacky, and I’m pretty sure it has all manner of flaws in logic and various unanswered questions I don’t care to explore further. One exception concerns this exchange: “This only proves half a theory” “What’s half a theory?” Oh oh oh—I know this one: it’s a “theer”.
Dir: Harold Young
Starring Otto Kruger, Vicky Lane, Amelita Ward, Phil Brown, Jerome Cowan, Rondo Hatton
Watched as part of Shout Factory’s blu-ray box set Universal Horror Collection: Volume 5