aka Queen of the Gorillas

• Directed by Adrian Weiss
• Written by Edward D. Wood, Jr.
• Starring
  • Charlotte Austin
  • Lance Fuller
  • Johnny Roth
  • William Justine
  • Gil Frye
• Produced by Adrian Weiss and Louis Weiss

Watching a movie is a different experience if you go into it knowing that Ed Wood, patron saint of bad B-movies, contributed the screenplay. For one thing, you know that the dialog will have been crafted with a tin ear, and that the characters will react to their situation in ways that bear no resemblance to the behavior of actual human beings. For another, you leap on every possible echo of Wood’s own rather bizarre predilections. Wood was at the same time both the world’s largest Boy Scout, fresh-faced and appreciative of spectacle even when couched in threadbare cliché, and a crossdressing fetishist who used his movies, consciously or not, as vehicles to reveal his soul on the big screen to an audience which probably wouldn’t accept him if he showed up in all his angora-festooned glory. (Ted Newsom produced a documentary several years ago, Ed Wood: Look Back in Angora (1994), which examines Wood’s life with clips of his movies that are much more insightful and entertaining as clues to the man behind the film than as examples of quality cinema.)

In this case, it doesn’t matter that Wood only wrote the script based on a story by the producer/director Adrian Weiss. There are more than enough clues, from the manner in which the copious stock footage is folded into the narrative to the fuzziness of the female lead’s wardrobe, that any creative vision manifested by The Bride and the Beast is definitely Wood’s.

And now, a brief moment of hawt human-on-human action!

The bride in question is Laura (the adorable Charlotte Austin), fresh from her nuptials and on her way to her wedding night with husband Dan (Lance Fuller, a passable substitute for John Agar). Dan’s manly in all the ways that seem utterly alien to us half a century later. By profession and avocation he’s a big game hunter who spends half of his time in Africa and owns a house full of trophies to prove his prowess. He also peppers his repartee with Laura with such endearing comments as, “Like I say, marry ‘em, lead ‘em out in the middle of nowhere, take their shoes away, and you’ve got a wife that’ll do very nicely,” or, “That marriage license cost me six bucks — you know, I can buy six wives for that in the middle of Africa.” Note that the script isn’t setting him up as the boorish knuckle-scraper who will get his come-uppence; this is simply how men treated their gorgeous brides five decades ago. Right?

Along with their other supposedly-cutesy banter is the expository note that Dan has a gorilla at his house which he’s raised from a baby. It’s now an adult, caged in the basement, which means that it’s now Steve Calvert in a suit he bought from Ray Corrigan, Hollywood’s gorilla player supreme, when the latter got to old to caper around in fur suits. Laura gets to meet the ape soon enough, and there’s a certain something which passes through them — a fascination on her part, and a tenderness on his that manifests itself in stroking the angora fur of her sweater. Reading a subtext of bestiality into this interplay (especially with Dan looking on, harumphing with jealousy) doesn’t come too hard. I mean, “meeting a gorilla chained in the basement on your wedding night” almost sounds like a euphemism. But it took someone of Ed Wood’s particular clueless genius to name this forthright creature of the Id “Spanky.”

“Hi. I’m Spanky.  That’s also my name.”

Well, Spanky is a little upset when Dan takes his new playmate away, but Dan’s got his own gorilla in the basement to introduce Laura to, so we go upstairs… she changes into a darling 1950s negligee.. they kiss tenderly… and next thing you know, they’re asleep in twin beds. (The most horrifying image in this movie by my scorecard.) Laura twitches and moans, then wakes and paces the floor with a cigarette. Meanwhile, Spanky seems to sense her agitation, bends the bars of his cage, and creeps upstairs. There is a tender silent moment as Spanky strokes the hair of the apprehensive-but-not-exactly-scared Laura, until Dan wakes up and pulls a gun from his nightstand. As he turns away, Spanky rips Laura’s negligee off, and even though the audience sees nothing but the backs of her bare shoulders — jeez, they actually screened this in the ’50s?

So. Sparky gets a bad case of lead poisoning, and Dan wraps Laura up in some comforting angora. Their ensuing conversation is a lot less agitated than you’d think it would be when you consider that the honeymooning bride was getting some really creepy attention from a gorilla in the middle of the night. Laura’s starting to wonder about reincarnation, of all things, because she has reoccuring dreams about animals, and what with the weird connection the gorilla had with her… Dan pats her head paternalistically and goes back to sleep in his twin bed, while Laura has a dream…

“Say, is that some more stock footage over yonder?  Let’s go check it out.”

…a dream of African stock footage! Name an animal from some filmed safari, and it’s here! This is not simply the standard budget consciousness that we’ve come to expect from any production involving Ed Wood. No, the Weiss family owned the rights to a truckload of jungle footage, and made this movie specifically to utilize it. In other words, this dream is just the opening act.

In the morning, Dan brings family friend Dr. Reiner (William Justine) to the house to administer some hypnosis and find out about Laura’s dreams. She quickly goes into a trance, Reiner leads her on a past-life regression — and more stock footage erupts! Every animal of the African jungle or serengeti is represented (except gorillas, of course, because the contrast between real apes and men in suits would be too much for even this movie to spackle over), but as Laura tells Dr. Reiner from her trance, all the animals are running from her. And she discovers why when her dreaming trance-self looks into the water and sees her reflection: she’s a gorilla!

Now I want you to realize that we’ve not even hit the halfway mark of this short feature, and already the new bride of a big game hunter has “shared a spark” with a captive gorilla named Spanky, engaged (one assumes) in her initial marital intimacies, and seen the gorilla shot in front of her as it strips her naked. Then it’s revealed that she’s actually a reincarnated gorilla herself! Honestly, where can the movie go from here?

“Pardon me, I’m lost. Could you direct me back to the movie I originally came from?”

I’ll tell you where: straight to Dullsville on the stock footage express. Dan decides to disregard Laura’s regression and Dr. Reiner’s warnings because he and Laura (who doesn’t remember anything she learned under hypnosis) are about to depart on their honeymoon — to Africa! That means stock footage plane rights, stock footage boat rides, meaningless scenes as local officials who know Dan quite well welcome them on their trip, stock footage safaris and sightseeing tours… The only times our main characters aren’t pointing off screen at something filmed a decade or more before are when the stock beasties purportedly “menace” the couple, specifically Laura. I’d like to think that after she’s threatened by a venomous spider and a couple of rhinos, she’d say, “This is all fascinating, but honey, could we just get a hotel?”

And then there’s the tigers. “Tigers?” you ask increduously. “Tigers in Africa?” Yes, there was a shipment of tigers that crashed in Africa and two escape into the African jungle, which means that the Weisses could use entire discrete chunks of Man-Eater of Kumaon (1948), a forgotten “epic” about killing tigers in Bangladesh. It’s depressingly easy to blend that footage into the new Africa-based story; a set dressed as an Indian jungle looks a lot like one dressed as an African jungle, after all, and Dan’s entourage was already populated by the Hollywood philosophy of “If they’re dark, they’ll look African,” including a blend of African-Americans, Latinos, and olive-skinned Europeans with cocoa powder rubbed into their hands and faces.

See, this is why you always pack your best negligee on your jungle expedition.

From this point until three minutes to the end, it’s a tiger drama with our hapless actors spliced into pre-existing footage, with costumes and plot points warped to work with bits from a movie a decade old. And then, finally, we get back to gorillas — when Laura hits her head, goes into a daze, and is carried off complacently to live among the apes. Dan goes back to America, shaking his head in befuddlement. The end.

Sure, Plan 9 From Outer Space or Bride of the Monster are more fun and giddy, and the absence of Ed Wood’s name from the directorial credit sullies this movie’s purity, I suppose. But neither of those movies spent their time (when not dealing with tiger attacks) skirting the edges of bestiality. Neither of them contains a hypnosis-induced ode to the pleasures of angora (”Soft, like a kitten,” Laura mutters as she squirms in a trance). And let’s be fair, neither of them contains a leading lady as adorable as Charlotte Austin. I can’t really judge her acting skills from her performance here, as the dialog is as inane as anything which ever flowed from Wood’s typewriter. And it’s not fair to judge her skills by the fact that her best-remembered features are probably this movie and Frankenstein 1970 (1958), and that only a supporting role. All I know is that she’s pert, perky, and fit, and that her writhing under trance or the influence of past-life memories is positively orgasmic — I can’t imagine her intentionally being so “exposed” in her acting technique for a movie she says she only did to make a house payment, but it’s there nonetheless. (Bonus screencap: Click here and tell me if it’s just my imagination.)  It’s just another layer of the perfect-storm lunacy which turned what could have been a turgid excuse for reusing jungle footage into an unbelievable piece of outsider cinema.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 3, plus 1 gorilla
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 3
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0