The White Gorilla

Fascinatingly awful, this composite of Ray Corrigan (as the gorilla) waylaying Ray Corrigan (as the hero), interspersed with an extraordinary amount of cheesily acted old serial footage, has to be seen to be believed. Sad to say, the hero of the serial is Frank Merrill, a champion gymnast who was still a household name when I was growing up. Mind you, the chubby little jungle boy, riding on the trunk of a real elephant, does a creditable turn, but the rest of the serial players, especially including hero Merrill, heroine Gilbert and heavy Belmour (or Belmore) are strictly from hunger, enacting in a weirdly exaggerated style that went out of fashion around 1910. On the other hand, the animal footage of snapping lions would be still tolerably exciting, but it's ruined by poor presentation at the wrong speed.

As for the talkative framing story of the white gorilla, it will enthrall only Mr Corrigan's keenest fans. Production values can only be described as Poverty Row minus. It's sad to see Francis Ford, Lorraine Miller and an unflatteringly photographed Charles King mixed up, however briefly, in this charade.

Just when you start to think this film isn't as bad as it sounds, it gets as bad as it sounds. It doesn't bother me that there's more stock footage than there is new footage, but it does bother me that they used the same stock footage clips two, three, & four times each! The narrator is integrated into the storyline verbally, but of course can't be integrated into the storyline physically, because the stock footage which comprises the main storyline is based on a 20 year old (at the time) silent movie! To get around this minor problem, the narrator takes the role of a voyeur. He's constantly hiding in the bushes, "observing" others (who of course can't see him because his footage won't be shot for another 20 years or so after they finished filming their part). The narrator rambles on constantly about why he didn't take a shot at the lions who were trying to eat humans, or why he didn't do this or do that. That would be OK, too, but after a while it just makes the narrator (who's the supposed "hero" of the film) seem like a wimp. The real hero of the film is a fellow named "Bennett" (actually Tarzan in the silent serial). There's lots of loose ends that are never tied up (like exactly what happened to Bennett, the Voodoo Priestess, & the little Jungle Boy). There's several fights between the Bad Black Gorilla & the Bad White Gorilla that are never resolved. They fight, then the narration goes elsewhere, then the two gorillas bump into each other again, act surprised, & start fighting again. When you mix all this nonsense together, you come out with one Good Campy Fun movie that must have had an influence on Ed Wood. The "African" wildlife scenes (from the silent serial) are actually pretty good, although non-African animals (like tigers & orangutans) are mixed in just to keep the viewer guessing at which continent this film actually takes place. I guess my favorite scene is the one in which Bennett has to save a damsel in distress from a newly discovered animal: a meat eating hippo! A word of caution to parents: although this film is certainly good fun for the kids, too, the Something Weird Video version contains several shorts after the feature, which contain full nudity, which is not stated on the video box.

How cheaply can you make a movie?

Take a couple of actors, have them shoot a few scenes, then splice them in to scenes lifted from a silent film and you've saved a fortune.

Such is the case of this story of a jungle expedition gone wrong. Told mostly in flashback by a survivor of the ill fated trip this is a movie that gives penny pinching a rich reputation.

Almost the entire film is told in voice over narration and its a scream. Its perfectly awful and a great deal of fun to listen to. The movie itself is a bad movie lovers dream as mismatched silent footage is put together in some really interesting ways. A small white kid travels on the trunk of an elephant, a group of native villagers bounce about at the wrong frame speed, and our hero watches it all in footage with a different grain and normal running speed.

This is a bad movie thats fun.Grab the popcorn and some friends and feel free to add your own commentary.

Warning: this is not a good movie in the conventional sense. If you want a good movie look elsewhere, but if you want a bad rib tickler look no farther.

Harry L. Fraser, the writer and one of the producers of this movie, was also the writer of Perils of the Jungle, the 1927 serial from which he took the archive footage. The serial did have good animal scenes, so it's hard to fault Fraser for finding a way to recycle what would otherwise be badly outdated and unusable silent footage. The problem, as every other commentator has noted, is the impossibility of integrating the two films smoothly, and the terrible plot -- if there is a plot -- of the new footage.

Frank Merrill, the hero of the 1927 serial, did play Tarzan in two later movies, Tarzan the Mighty and Tarzan the Tiger, but he was playing a different and unrelated character in Perils of the Jungle.

Crash Corrigan, the hero of the new wrap-around movie, made a specialty of playing gorillas, and he often played other roles in the movies in which he donned the gorilla suit, but I believe this may be the only movie in which his human character directly confronts his animal character.

Anybody who thinks Bela Lugosi's poverty row horrors represent the absolute pits of 40s film-making has yet to see The White Gorilla, a piece of stinking crud of the cut-and-paste school of exploitation that even makes Jerry Warren's Creature of the Walking Dead start to look good. You may even begin to regret unkind words you've had for cut-and-paste 80s ninja pap peddler Godfrey Ho.

Any giggles at how bad this movie is will soon subside into yawns and groans as the sixty soul-scarring minutes of animal stock footage and recycled silent movie scenes take their toll on the viewer's dignity. The only reason it gets a rating of 3 from me, as opposed to a 1 or 2, is the occasional appearance of the guy in the white gorilla suit with the unusually large posterior.

"With every bone in my body aching, I limped away," the protagonist says at one point. You will likely feel much the same after sitting through all of The White Gorilla, a barnstorming candidate for IMDb's Bottom 100 list if ever there was one.