Mistress of the Apes

I don't know about you, but I sat through a good thirty minutes of this movie without a complaint. Why? Because, I felt it would have been a worthy investment to sit through the terrible opening of the film, with its terrible story line and its terrible acting, just to get to see Jenny Neumann have sex with an "Ape Man." I never got to see it because it never happened. I don't know what version you guys watched but I sat through a 90 minute badly lighted movie with hopes to see 30 seconds of a nudity. Was it worth it? No. But it has been on the video rental shelf for the past 20 years and still gets rented because of that fact. By reading the title and looking at the front cover, there is hope that there's going to be at least one animal sex scene in the movie.

One of bad film master Larry Buchanan's best. Features a stupid yet potent mix of sex, bad science, fake jungle sets, horrible makeup, and incredible music ("She used her charms to tame the wild, she thought of everything except what to name the child"). A very cute-sexy blonde babe leaves the city (the "Urban Jungle") for what is said to be Africa after a hospital accident. She finds a tribe of "Near Men" (they only have one female, but it gets killed). The Near Men look like football players with some mud packed on their faces, but they are said to be apes. She learns their grunt language, breast feeds their baby, and, in the interest of science, starts having rampant sex with all of them. Movies don't get much better.

I agree with the other reviewers that if you're looking for a sex film here, you're going to be pretty disappointed. The lead Jenny Neumann has some brief nude scenes, but Barbara Leigh (suprisingly) and British cheesecake actress Suzy Mandel (shockingly) do not. Still Neuman, who was also in "Hell Night" and the Australian film "Stage Fright", is absolutely stunning, and to my knowledge this is the only film where she gets naked at all (Leigh and Mandel, on the other hand. . .). The plot is indeed completely absurd. A woman goes to "equatorial Africa" (it looks a lot more like California) with a group of greedy mercenaries where they encounter a lost tribe of "homo habilitus", basically the missing link between ape and man. After a trigger-happy mercenary shoots the small tribe's only female (which raises a lot of interesting questions of how they've been able to survive so long), the heroine decides to step into the breach, and--bestiality be damned!--she wet nurses one of the infants and makes love to one of the "near-men", eventually become the new "mistress of the apes".

While I can't entirely discount the exploitative value of this movie or the appeal of Neuman, Leigh, and Mandel (even if the latter two are mostly wasted), the best reason to see this really is the director Larry Buchanon. Sure, Buchanon was not the most skilled director in the world, but he was kind of the cinematic equivalent of the punk rock/ garage band that maybe can't play their instruments too well, but are always energetic and creative. And just like I personally prefer a band like that to anything the overproduced LA corporate music industry perennially craps out, I prefer the cash-starved and somewhat incompetent regional directors of the 60's and 70's like Buchanon (who made most of his films in Texas)to any of the modern multi-billion dollar Hollywood stooges like Michael Bay. But while there are still independent bands around today, TRULY independent filmmakers like Buchanon are a rapidly dying, if not already extinct, breed.

Of course, this is not Buchanon's best work--I prefer his classic early 60's film "The Naked Witch" or his bizarre Bergmanesque coming-of-age/sexploitation film "Strawberries Need Rain"--but any Buchanon film is usually worth a look as far I'm concerned, and this one is certainly no exception. See this just for the unique brand of insanity that was Larry Buchanon

I was hoping that Mistress of the Apes would be an enjoyable piece of jungle sexploitation, with gorgeous blonde lead Jenny Neumann being the female equivalent of Tarzan, swinging through the trees in nothing but a loincloth; this is most definitely not the case.

Neumann plays Susan Jamison, wife of a famous anthropologist, who travels to the Congo region to try and find her missing husband, unaware that he has been murdered by poachers. What follows is a rather tepid adventure, with Susan and her pals Laura and Paul learning the truth and trying to avoid becoming the poachers' next victims, while also befriending a troop of ape-men, the missing link between Australopithecus and homo sapiens.

While there is a little exploitative content - most notably the (not-too-graphic) rape of Laura by the baddies, and Susan breast-feeding an ape-child (who looks just like any ordinary baby) and having sex with one of the lucky banana-eating knuckle-draggers - the film is mostly a real snooze fest.

As a fan of horror films and the art of special effects make-up, I found that the most interesting thing about the whole movie was the fact that the ape-men makeup was created by Oscar winner Greg Cannom (The Lost Boys, The Mask) and Oscar nominee Rob Bottin (Robocop, The Thing).

This movie seemed to promise B-movie T&A. I don't remember it existing. In fact, I remember a tremendous dearth of it. What I do remember is bad acting, a stupid script, and a general lack of quality that could have been saved by a little follow-through and a little less restraint. I mean, all of the sex was implied and, by the standard of interspecies copulation, it was paradoxically chaste. And therefore, something I would expect to see on "USA Up All Night." They wouldn't even have the edit the thing.

Personally, I know I couldn't bear through it again. But maybe I was expecting something a little more Russ Meyer.

If the MST3K crew were still around it might make interesting material.