The Bride and the Beast

Well, all I can say is Ed Wood strikes again. Like Orgy of the Dead, this is another movie where he wrote the screenplay. And, as per usual, the results are exceedingly strange. This one is about a woman who falls in love with a gorilla called Spanky because it transpires that she was an ape in a previous life. Well of course, she was. This one sets the scene well initially with some deeply strange early sequences, with our leading lady looking in that dreamy way into her gorilla dreamboat's eyes. But then our heroes relocate to Africa to check out stock footage and oh my goodness, they check out a LOT of stock footage. So much in fact that the film grinds to a halt as we watch giraffes running away from Landrovers and tigers kicking about (oh yeah, there are tigers in this stock footage Africa my friends). Things do perk up by the end though when Spanky the monkey returns and we have more human-ape love action. Its often borderline unwatchable but its also exceptionally wrong-headed , so naturally its one to endure.

Seeing Ed Wood's name as screenwriter, I flapped my arms like a fly drawn to fly-paper. Expecting a whirl through 1950's cheeze land, for which Wood was infamous, I instead got something I wasn't expecting. Not that the flick's either good or cheezy in the conventional senses: it's not. But the 78-minutes does manage to be a little different.

Back in the mid-50's, a Colorado housewife (Bridey Murphy) claimed a regression through hypnosis to a former life as a 19th century Irish girl. It became a hot public story at the time. People liked to imagine, I suspect, what previous lives they too might have had. Anyhow, I expect Murphy's story inspired this episode of movie regression.

Overall, the flick's plot is oddly flatlined by too much African stock footage that pads rather than develops; plus a leading man (Fuller) whose face remains frozen regardless the level of danger. Too bad he couldn't get interested, but then this cheapo was a comedown for his rising career. Then too, the loose gorilla suits that badly need a fitting don't help. Together, these elements unfortunately drain rather than promote the story's unusual potential.

On the other hand, tbere's leading lady Austin's sterling performance, more worthy of an A-production than a cheapo. Catch her beautifully shaded expressions in a role that could easily have gone over the top. Too bad her career was so brief. Then too, the ending came as a big surprise to me. All in all, it's an exceptional climax for the conformist 1950's.

Anyway, the movie's an obscurity for good reason, unless, that is, you like a lot of big cats pointlessly running around stock footage jungles. Nonetheless, writer Wood does manage to come through in the end. So thanks Ed for the memorable last touch.

"The Bride and the Beast" starts off well with lots of potential that this could be a pretty good movie. The plot revolves around a man, his newlywed wife, and her strange connection with gorillas. Then the couple goes to Africa and the movie unravels. Forget all about the first part of the movie. Put it on the shelf for a while because you won't need to remember it again until you get to the end. You next get lots of terrible stock footage of African animals and the plot takes a side road as the husband hunts down two tigers. It's almost as though it turned into a Safari movie and a boring one at that. As you watch the different animals, the background scenery changes dramatically from shot to shot. The scenes, especially of the animals are shot in all different kinds of terrain. Very poorly done. At this point there is barely a string connecting the beginning of the movie to the middle. This goes on for quite a while. Nearing the end of the movie, they drop the safari and hunting and go back to the man, woman, gorilla plot to end the movie. It's too bad because this one had a chance if they just stuck with the original plot throughout the film. The Bride and the Beast" is disjointed and boring, not recommended.

Laura Carson (Charlotte Austin) has just married big game hunter Dan Fuller (Lance Fuller.) On her wedding night she finds herself strangely attracted to Spanky, a gorilla gone bad that Dan keeps locked up in a basement cage. Before you can say "Ed Wood wrote this," there are gun shots, nightmares, hypnotism, and Dan's unhappy discover that bride Laura may be the reincarnation of a gorilla queen! Can you dig it? Now and then a bad movie becomes unintentionally hilarious, but most of the time bad movies are simply bad. BRIDE AND THE BEAST actually teeters between the two, and this is largely due to the two leads: even in the face of producer-director Adrian Weiss' obvious lack of talent, Austin and Fuller prove unexpectedly competent, and they actually manage to hold the worst of the dialogue at bay. What this means, however, is that BRIDE never self-destructs in the ludicrous way of such films as PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE--and in consequence it isn't so much unintentionally hilarious as it is unintentionally amusing in a mild sort of way.

The film is full of absurdities. Dan Fuller's basement, where the ill-fated gorilla Spanky is caged, has a refrigerator, but illumination is provided by torch. Servant Taro (Johnny Roth, in what seems to be his only film role) is very obviously a white man in bad "native" make-up; he runs around saying "Bwana" a lot. There is a lot of canned wild animal footage, shots of Africa that look suspiciously like shots of South America, and men in bad gorilla costumes. And Ed Wood being Ed Wood, he just can't resist writing references to angora sweaters into the script.

The print is mediocre, but it is worth pointing out that it was probably never very good to begin with, and the DVD release comes with several bonuses of no interest. Fans of cult films, and especially die hard fans of Ed Wood, will enjoy it--and for their sake I give it three stars. But just about every one else should give it a miss.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Just married, big game hunter Dan Fuller (Lance Fuller) and his drop-dead-gorgeous bride Laura (Charlotte Austin) drive to Dan's home to do what newlyweds do, but only after they've said hello to Dan's gorilla Spanky (Ray Corrigan), who is kept in the basement. Having taken a fancy to Laura (he's not the only one), Spanky busts out of his cage and creeps upstairs to take a closer look, whipping off the woman's night-dress, leaving Dan no choice but to go for his gun.

Shaken by the experience, Laura suffers from nightmares about the jungle, so Dan calls in his doctor friend, who uses hypnotism to try and get to the root of the problem. Regressing Laura, they learn that she was a gorilla in a past life, which doesn't bode well for her honeymoon... in deepest, darkest Africa: gorilla country! Against the doctor's advice, the Fullers continue with their planned excursion, happily hunting and trapping wild animals, but the fun stops when they are faced with two escaped man-eating tigers, and Mrs. Fuller is carried off into the jungle by a gorilla, who wants her to be his queen!

Anyone who knows a thing or two about Edward D. Wood Jr. (co-writer of The Bride and the Beast ) surely can't help but be amused by Laura's fondness for angora sweaters. But that's not the only funny thing about this movie... I mean, there's a gorilla called Spanky that's clearly a man in a fancy dress costume, the whole notion of being the reincarnation of a gorilla is quite preposterous, and it's patently clear that lions weren't available to the film-makers, so they had to try and work a couple of tigers into the plot instead. And that ending!

That said, the film isn't as inept as one of Wood's directorial efforts, Adrian Weiss being a competent enough director to make his movie appear relatively professional, despite the daft plot; it's no work of art, but he knows how to compose a scene and keep the pace lively, even with an overreliance on stock footage at times. It doesn't hurt either that Austin is such a babe: she's a delight whenever she is on screen (even when Laura is encouraging her heroic husband to slaughter another magnificent wild animal) and it's a shame that she didn't go on to bigger and better things.

I had fun, hence my probably overgenerous rating of 5.5/10, rounded up to 6 for Austin.