El diablo bwana

The first film shot in 3D finds an inebriated Robert Stack pining away for his fiancé and trying to get a railway constructed in the heart of Africa at the turn of the last century. He's in British Equatorial Africa which later became Kenya colony and where the Sahara meets the veld. What's stopping the progress of the colonial British dream of a railway from Capetown to Cairo is a pair of lions.

These two lions have the natives scared out of their wits. Lions are not known to attack humans, you leave them alone and they'll leave you alone unless they're hungry. But these two, a male and female have developed a real taste for human flesh. Showing no fear of man or anything man made, they attack humans indiscriminately at will. No one wants to work until this lion problem is solved.

Stack's got both a lion problem and an unsatisfied testosterone problem. The second is remedied by the arrival of Barbara Britton, no one it seems can deal with the first.

Bwana Devil was shot in Africa and it's writer Arch Oboler owes a lot to Moby Dick. These two lions and Stack's obsession with them are taken from the Herman Melville classic. Good thing Barbara Britton arrived when she did, she provides something Captain Ahab didn't have.

Best scene in the film and it's almost laughable was when these three white hunters, best in their line of work are imported by the railroad to kill these lions. So what do the lions do, but actually enter the private railroad car where the hunters are hoisting a few with Nigel Bruce who plays Stack's sidekick and a doctor and proceed to kill them all and carry the cadavers off for a later snack.

Presumably based on a true story according to the credits, don't you believe it. The 3D jungle scenes are nice, but it's attached to one ridiculous story.