Curucu, Beast of the Amazon

Universal, which brought us massive hits like E.T. and the Jurassic Park movies, were responsible for this.

It is the worst of the Universal monster movies of the 1950's, but I loved it. It is one of the better so-bad-it's-good movies and the thing that surprised me the most was that it was shot in colour, despite the low budget.

The 'monster' has to be seen to be believed. The main female lead in this, Beverly Garland, is used to fighting out of this world monsters as she fought the 'carrot' in It Conquered the World.

See this if you get the chance. It is worth watching just to see the 'monster'.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5.

Good thing the producers went up the Amazon River for location shots, because headline monster Curucu amounts to a big lump of moldy cheese. Then too, for some unknown reason the screenplay tips its hand halfway through, killing what little suspense there is. But we do get a good look at comely Beverly Garland getting menaced by about everything that creeps, crawls, or oozes through the jungle. Plus, she confirms her title as the Queen of Scream with at least three ear blasters. Good thing hunky John Bromfield is on hand to handle the hero stuff. Still, the movie was something of a treat for 1956, that is, before color TV made such travelogues everyday fare. Now the movie is little more than a very obscure curiosity.

(In passing-- Catch the script's sneaky probing of modernity. Tupanico {Payne} wonders whether the Indians really are better off after entering the white man's money economy. Unless I missed something, the probing is surprisingly left unresolved. It's a provocative note in an otherwise sloppy script.)

Hoping to quell the fears of superstitious natives, a rancher and a doctor head into the Amazon jungle to find a supposedly awakened demon but learn of a dangerous native tribe lurking in the area and must stop it from spreading.

Overall this was a pretty disappointing and thoroughly disappointing effort. What really tends to hold this one down is the fact that there's not a whole lot of time here spent among the confines of the genre, tending to focus far more frequently on the Adventure drama aspects of the story. The majority of the film is simply watching the two and their guide trek through the jungle and commenting on the different animals present in the area which is then shown in stock-footage inserts of the specific species told they're observing only to then be treated to widely different levels of film-stock quality to showcase that. The piranha attack is the most egregious, showing badly-framed underwater footage in black-and-white no less despite the rest of the film being in color from an angle that has nothing to do with what they pointed to but is just clumsily thrown in since it's a piranha attack footage, while shots of the animals brawling and fighting each other tends to dominate the main parts of the film that it's entirely possible to forget there's a creature at the center of the film. That aspect doesn't help the film any further as there's only two attacks by the creature in the entire film and is then twisted around into another storyline thread which is dropped off the film quite easily and early which is quite troubling and again makes it hard to believe this was supposed to be a horror effort all along. These here make this one quite hard to get into as a horror film, despite having a fairly decent amount of stuff about it. Despite only being seen twice, each of the attacks aren't all that bad and manage to get some mild suspense from them as the creature stalking them in the jungle before jumping out to launch the surprise attack makes for a few decent times here. Likewise, the film also manages to get some decent mileage out of the fantastic brawl at the end as the two rival Indian tribes get into action and begin fighting each other in a fairly large-scale scene, from the fire-laced huts and the hand-to-hand brawling and the long-range battles with the spears and arrows coming into play to make a fine action scene that's quite exciting. Even still, that also plays more into it's Adventure setting that it tends to wash away the positives here and aligns this more as a flaw here.

Today's Rating/PG: Violence.

Curt Siodmak seemed to have a passion for writing B movie scripts, and and it seems he believed so much in this one that he had to direct it as well.

It's in the running for the worst movie I ever saw, with the standard jungle movie setup- Americans go on an expedition in the jungle and get attacked by a variety of jungle natives- including the paper mache looking title monster. They say this movie was shot on location in the Amazon jungle (I don't think the term "rain forest" existed in 1956). If so, I've got to hand it to the cast and crew for going above and beyond for this one. I wouldn't have wanted to risk coming back with malaria or jungle rot for this movie.

With all that being said, if you look at all the lifeless and hollow stuff coming out of Hollywood in recent years, this one just might be good enough to be classic schlock cinema now.

Any movie that has a scene of the hero smoking while the doctor is giving him his annual medical check up has to be a classic.

There is validity to every single negative review of this picture, but who cares? Look, I love Ingmar Bergman films, but am I going to kick back with beer and nacho cheese Doritos on a summer Saturday afternoon watching "Cries And Whispers?" I didn't spend all morning cutting the grass to then crash the couch and drown myself in Swedish angst. That's for cold bleak winter nights. For summer I want a jungle, a tight pants adventuress and a hero who can spend an entire week lost in the Amazon and still not have a single day's facial hair. Yes, as everyone agrees without a doubt the movie rips you off and leaves you a chump for ever believing such a thing as truth in advertising exists. But stop crybaby'ing about it already. Get over your disappointment like a big boy and just enjoy the mustard we got. To hell with your Grey Poupon!