Las mujeres salvajes de Wongo

I think that if Ed Wood were alive today or could make his complaints felt from beyond this mortal coil, he'd be haunting the Medved Brothers who dared not include The Wild Women Of Wongo in their list of the 50 Worst Films. Next to this Plan Nine From Outer Space plays like Citizen Kane.

This story is set on the mythical islands of Wongo and Guna and it seems as though the gene pool has played one dirty trick. The men of Wongo look like the inbreds from Deliverance and the women like playboy bunnies. On the other hand in Guna land, the men are these gorgeous beach boy surfer hunks and the women look like someone left the pound door open one night.

Both islands worship the crocodile god and the croc demands some sacrifices every so often. When one of the Wongo women actually subdues and kills the crocodile god, the theological implications are cataclysmic.

There are some hairy ape men like creatures who invade both the islands and it takes a while for them to come to a common plan of alliance.

That's about the sum and substance of this awful film which was shot in the Everglades on location. This film must have been a great after midnight third feature in the drive-ins when folks could look at the Guna men and Wongo women if they needed a little extra inspiration for the night's fun.

There's a parrot who serves as a kind of Greek chorus to all the silly goings on and when the parrot gives the best acting performance in the film, you KNOW how bad this is going to be.

Yes, this was a bad movie (I watched it in a double bill with the similar-toned prehistoric tongue-in-cheek 'Prehistoric Women'--both from Mill Creek's 50-pack 'Nightmare Worlds'), but it was charming, short and sweet, and I enjoyed it. I wouldn't watch it again, probably, but it was decent fare to see once. I thought the way the credits were animated was cool (a low-budget Saul Bass), and I wouldn't have minded being trapped by the Wongo tribe, if I time-travelled back to that time, myself! At first, I thought they had misspelled Adrienne Barbeau's name, but no one looked like her in the film, and she would have been really young anyway.

It intrigued me that Tennessee Williams actually directed at least parts of the film. Though this film falls into the 'so-bad-it's good-territory, I'm glad it was made. Not everything has to be either a $300-million monster or Hamlet.

Wild Women of Wongo, The (1958)

** (out of 4)

As the film opens up a narrator tells us that some experiment was done on the island of Wongo. On that island all the beautiful women were given ugly men. On another island the beautiful men were given ugly women. When the ape people attack the two sides might come together so that the pretty can be with the pretty and the ugly with the ugly. Sound stupid? Well, it is and that's why this film came off mildly entertaining. The movie has the reputation of being one of the worst ever made and I won't argue that but at the same time it kept me entertained just because of how stupid it was. The movie even features some music that is best known from being used in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, which would be released the following year. I don't think it's ever explained why the looks of the people were mixed up to begin with but I'm sure it wouldn't have made any sense anyways. As is to be expected, the performances all are extremely bad and sometimes it does give us some laughter. The director does what he can with the material but the color is pretty good and the locations are certainly nice to look at. There's also quite a bit of footage of some of the wildlife and that's a plus. The movie doesn't feature too much of a story as we see women (or men) get kicked out of their tribes, have to find, look around, fight some more and then look around some more. Fans of bad movies will want to check it out but others should stay far, far away.

(Spoilers) Strangely made movie thats so badly acted that it comes across as a movie worthy to be classified with such bad movie epics as "Plan Nine from Outer Space" and "Manos: The Hands of Fate". In fact the film actually has a piece of music thats straight out of the soundtrack of the film "Plan Nine from Outer Space" that was released a year after, in 1959, in it.

Wango, as well as Goona, were islands created by Mother Nature back some 10,000 years ago where the men of Womgo were boorish brutes and the women were gorgeous babes and in the case of the people on the island of Noona the men were Greek Gods and the women were homely wallflowers.This made dating romance and marriage among the young couples of Wongo and Goona an act of duty rather then an act of love.

This all changes when one of the young men of Goona, the son of that islands king,traveled to Wongo by canoe to get the men of both islands to united against an invasion of ape-men from another island. The women of Wongo seeing the handsome Goonaien went ape over him which lead the jealous men of Wongo plan to kill him before he left the island. This was foiled by the Wongo women when they prevented their men from murdering the handsome Noona man which had them kicked out of the island by their man-folks.

Meanwhile, out of camera range, the ape-men attack Wongo and kill and scatter the men there leaving them to wounder through the forests and waterways to Goona. Back in Noona The men are given, through trial and fire, their chance to prove their manhood by their elders by being thrown out of their village and into the jungle without their spears to protect themselves. This leaves them open to be captured by the armed Amazon-like Women of Wongo and taken as slaves back to their island, which seems to have been abandoned by the invading ape-men.

At Goona the men of Wongo, who are lost in the woods, run into the women of Goona and the both boorish and homely men and women hit it on and fall head over heels in love with each other. The story ends with both the Men of Goona and Women of Wongo falling in love with each other as the Women of Goona and Men of Wongo did earlier. They all live happily ever after with Mother Nature as usual correcting herself from the mistake she made when she at first created the incompatible, to each other, men and women of Wongo and Goona. As for the invading ape-men? they must have gotten lost in the woods and were never seen or heard from again.

I saw this on a UHF station during the 70's, and was amazed by it even then. It really is a must see for lovers of bad film. I finally found a video recently, and the movie's awfulness has held up very well. Bad movies often don't live up to the hilarious reviews found in the Golden Turkey books written by the The Medved brothers, but Wild Women of Wongo does on most levels. Really, what were these people thinking? The dance of the dragon god is worth the price of admission alone.