Hell's Headquarters

A man has died in Africa, so a letter is sent to Jack Mulhall telling him that his partner has put a large amount of valuable ivory in a hut. Several people go after it in this poor Poverty Row jungle picture.

Andrew Stone had been directing features for four years by this point, but he was a still a director for hire. Here, working from a bad script, editor Frank Atkinson and he cut in a lot of poorly coordinated back-projection pictures of African wildlife that look like they are rejects from TRADER HORN into a soggy plot that is mostly about people wandering about the jungle, pausing occasionally to point or scream at snakes, hyenas, elephants and cheetahs.

It would be another five years until Stone acquired enough pull to because a writer-producer-director, usually working with his wife Virginia. As an auteur he was not a great one, but a capable worker, mostly in moderately-priced programmers and A movies through the early 1970s. At some stage he divorced Virginia and remarried. He died in 1999, aged 97.

During the 1930s and 40s, Hollywood must have made a bazillion jungle films. And, aside from a few (such as the Johnny Weismuller 'Tarzan' films), most were just terrible--consisting of super-low production values, lots of stock footage to pad the film and bad acting. In this sense, "Hell's Headquarters" is yet another film in this grand tradition! When "Hell's Headquarters" began, the first thing I noticed was just how bad the acting was. Actor after actor delivered their lines like dyslexics reading cue cards! It was pretty funny, actually--and occasionally worse than you'd find in Ed Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space". As for the story, a man and his daughter agree to finance an expedition to get ivory in Africa. There are two problems--the money they use is the last of their once-substantial fortune and the man they entrust it to is pure evil. He's already murdered one guy to learn the secret location for the ivory--and he seems very ready and willing to do it again. This gets to one of the biggest problems with the film's plot--Phil is so obviously evil you wonder how the man and daughter don't recognize it immediately. He does a lousy job of hiding it and spends most of his time beating natives and acting nasty in a variety of other ways. Now this isn't completely dull, as the film occasionally manages to be interesting--such as the scene where the man breaks his ropes by putting his hands over the fire as well as the grisly ending. But, most of it is just one-dimensional and silly. While not a horrible film, it certainly isn't good by any standard.