Jungle Woman

Sequel to Captive Wild Woman that is often cited among fans as one of the worst, if not THE worst, of Universal's classic horror films. I can't find much good to say about this to argue against that opinion. Frankly, this stinks. I wasn't much of a fan of Captive Wild Woman in the first place so I am a little perplexed as to why it needed a sequel, let alone two (there's another film following this one!). Once they decided to make a sequel, one would hope they would try to improve on the first movie in some way. Instead we get this thing, told through flashback, that utilizes way too many clips of the first movie. If you have to pad the runtime of a movie that's barely an hour, maybe you just shouldn't make that movie.

Evelyn Ankers, Milburn Stone, and Acquanetta all return from Captive Wild Woman. It helps that this movie has the great J. Carrol Naish in it, as well as solid actors like Douglas Dumbrille and Samuel Hinds. Eddie Hyans plays a simple-minded lab assistant named Willie who provides some unintended laughs for his "Which way did he go, George" method of acting. But this is a snoozer for anyone who's seen Captive Wild Woman or anyone who comes into this expecting some kind of cheesy "beast-woman" fun. The lack of any attempt at making this a real monster movie and the constant clips test your patience. It's a very cheap and ho-hum movie that I wouldn't recommend to anyone but those looking to see every film in Universal's classic horror catalog, regardless of quality.

No need to waste time on this sequel mess. Apparently, Universal needed to meet product demand for wartime audiences. So they took a hunk of 1943's Captive Wild Woman and cobbled together some surrounding footage to make something of a story. The result comes across like Val Lewton on a really bad day. The supposedly scary scenes are done in Lewtonesque shadow, but come across as more clumsily cost-cutting than artful. Too bad so many distinguished players (Hinds, Dumbrille, Naish) are wasted in what must have been an embarrassment. I just hope Ankers & Carradine got compensated for the reuse of their earlier footage. But I doubt it given studio dominance of the period. No need to go on. Suffice that this is about the nadir of human-into-animals that were so popular at the time. As Lewton knew, horror needs more than shadow; it needs concept, dread, and mood, elements in short supply here.

Sequel to CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN is often said to be one of Universal's worst horror films, and with some good reason. For one thing the first 15 or 20 minutes agonizingly drone on and on with flashback sequences from the first movie, and has to be seen to be believed (it actually feels like you're watching 3 different films at times). Acquanetta returns as Paula the Ape Woman and it's hilarious to watch her terrible acting performance, especially the robotic way in which she delivers her lines! At least the original had her mute throughout; this one gives her a lot of dialogue she can't handle. Along with the unintended laughs to make things survivable, at least this one features the competent J. Carrol Naish as the latest scientist trying to experiment with Paula, and to its very slight credit director Reginald LeBorg directs a couple of scenes in a Val Lewtonesque manner (such as Paula's creepy attack on a row boat and her eerily stalking her victim through the woods). I've never understood why these films didn't take more advantage of using more of their Ape Woman woman in full makeup to keep things more lively. ** out of ****

This is the second in a series of three ape woman movies Universal made; at the moment I've only seen the first two. This film does follow the events of the first, but it could probably be seen by people who hadn't seen the first, since it does recap things.

It starts with a man walking towards a house, and he is attacked. We see him in silhouette struggle with his attacker, a woman. He sticks her with something, and she collapses. After a newspaper headline explaining a Doctor is faced with a Coroner's inquest, we meet Dr. Fletcher, the man on trial for the death of a woman named Paula. The inquest is a somewhat awkward framing device for the movie. Dr. Fletcher, Fred Mason and Beth Colman (these latter two character returning from the first movie) recall certain events surrounding Paula. Their recollections are, at least to start with, mostly clips from Captive Wild Woman (1943), although Dr. Fletcher's character has been edited into that footage. It grows somewhat awkward when Fred Mason testifies about a conversation he had with Dr. Fletcher about past events: we're watching a recollection of a recollection.

It turns out Dr. Fletcher discovered that the ape Cheela, who had seemingly died from a gunshot wound near the end of the first film, still had some vital signs. Dr. Fletcher nursed Cheela back to health, and upon hearing something about Dr. Walter's experiments, also buys Dr. Walter's estate, including the sanitarium from the first film. The recollections about Cheela and Paula are complicated by something Fred Mason tells Dr. Fletcher, information that was not in the first film that I recall. Mason says that before he brought Cheela to the US from Africa, he'd heard stories of a Doctor in Africa who turned humans into animals. It was rumored that Cheela was one of those animals. If that was true, then it would mean that Paula was a woman who'd been turned into an ape, and then turned into a woman who sometimes reverted to being an ape.

Cheela escapes, and Dr. Fletcher and his incredibly annoying (and poorly acted) helpmate Willie go searching. They find Paula instead. In the first film, once Paula had reverted to being an ape, she could only turn back after Dr. Walters gave her a series of treatments. In this film, she can turn back and forth; whether she can do so at will is not clear. Also unclear is whether she turns completely into an ape, or into an ape-woman: a halfway stage we'd seen her in in the first film. There is something much later in the film that definitely suggests the latter possibility is the correct one.

Paula is uncommunicative until she meets Bob, the sweetheart of Dr. Fletcher's daughter. She is instantly smitten. While this copies an element from the first film (Paula is obsessed with a man, and her jealousy makes her dangerous and animalistic), in the first film her obsession was at least somewhat justified. Mason had been kind to her while she was an ape in Africa, and on the ship all the way to America. Her obsession with Bob seems to be only that he is the first reasonably attractive young man she's met since becoming human again.

There's a scene in which Dr. Fletcher has someone compare Paula's fingerprints to those found on a lock which had been violently broken. He discovers that the patterns of the fingerprints are identical, except in size - one is at least twice the size of the other - and a somewhat "anthropoid" character of the larger one (or both?). Do apes have fingerprints? I don't know; I do think that scene could have been fleshed out a little more, and could have been interesting.

There were a couple strange things about the inquest. Dr. Fletcher had accidentally killed Paula by giving her an overdose of a sedative; the overdose was because he injected her while they were struggling. It would seem that would have been a defense in itself. Thus, Dr. Fletcher, Fred and Beth would not have had to bring up the story of Paula being an ape- woman. However, the court is willing to believe the story of Paula being an ape-woman if it can be proved, which seems a bit incredible. What is strange in connection with that, is that the coroner says if Paula was not human, then the court would have no jurisdiction for murder charges. Certainly she was human enough! Again, the defense would logically be that the death was accidental (and arguably self-defense as well).

Jungle Woman (1944)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Dr. Carl Fletcher (J. Carrol Naish) is on trial for the murder of Paula (Acquanetta) when several people are brought into testify including Beth Mason (Evelyn Ankers). Soon we are told how Paula ended up coming to the home of Dr. Fletcher and why things spun out of control.

JUNGLE WOMAN is a sequel to CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN and is the second of the three film series. For the most part you can't help but call this one of Universal's worst films right down there with SHE WOLF OF London. Even if you don't consider it one of the worst it's hard to defend me calling it one of their laziest films.

I say lazy because a lot of this film is just flashbacks to the first movie and this just adds a very cheap feel to the picture. One has to wonder why they needed to use the flashbacks since I'm sure most people would have already seen that movie. Or, if they were going to use flashbacks, they could have used less of them to get people caught up on the story. I would also argue that the entire courtroom scenes were boring and didn't add anything to the picture.

The most shocking thing about JUNGLE WOMAN is the fact that there's not too much footage of the ape woman. Did CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN not meet the studio's box office expectations so they went cheap here? I'm really not sure but even capable actors like Naish and Ankers just come across as boring here. Milburn Stone also returns and of course there's Acquanetta who is completely wasted here.