Untamed Women

Untamed Women (1952)

** (out of 4)

Officer Steve Holloway (Mikel Conrad) is picked up by the government adrift in a raft. He's been missing for many months and can't remember anything so a doctor (Lyle Talbot) gives him a serum that will bring his memory back and force him to tell the truth. Steven then tells the story of himself and three friends whose plane was forced down and they ended up in a raft and landed on an island. The island is ran by a group of women who date back to the Druids and they also have dinosaurs, an erupting volcano and a group of "Hairy Men" they must battle. Hal Roach must have made a killing selling off dinosaur footage from his 1940 film ONE MILLION B.C. because it has been featured in countless poverty row flicks including this one here. UNTAMED WOMEN has the reputation of being one of the worst movies ever made. There's no question that it's a very badly made movie but thankfully it's hammy enough to where you should be entertained (if you enjoy bad movies). There are some pretty memorable bad moments but the highlight of the entire film has to be the scene where one of men, suffering from issues with his mother, walks off into a forest where he gets attacked by a flesh-eating plant. His three buddies come to the rescue and just seeing how this scene plays out had me laughing out loud. Another funny sequence happens once the men are in the ocean on their raft. It's raining as hard as you can imagine yet the men's hair and clothes aren't even wet. I guess we can all give Michael Caine and JAWS: THE REVENGE a break now because the sequence here is even more pathetic. The performances are all pretty bland but the four male actors are at least entertaining enough and help draw you into the movie. The female performers were clearly hired for their looks and clearly not their acting ability. The dinosaur footage is all rather campy and there's some footage from a couple others movies but I couldn't identify which ones. Some of it might have been new because there's some stuff dealing with what looks like a large porcupine. The volcano footage at the end is yet more stock footage but at least it looks somewhat good. At 70-minutes we can be thankful that the film doesn't run too long as that's just about the right amount of time for a flick like this. Cult favorite Lyle Talbot appears in a few minutes worth a footage and he's always nice to see. UNTAMED WOMEN certainly isn't for those looking for art films but if you like cheap, generic genre movies then it's certainly got enough bad moments to be entertaining.

Okay, so it's a notch or two below the works of Orson Welles, but connoisseurs of tacky B-movies from the 1950s will find much to enjoy in this tale of four Air Force men who crash their World War II plane in the South Pacific and who then wind up on an island inhabited by a colony of beautiful women dressed in cavewoman chic. Especially notable is the dialog spoken by these women. Here are my four favorite lines: (1) "Thy lips are parched and dry." (2) "The ways of men are strange to us, O Sandra our priestess and protector." (3) "The strange-tongued one speaketh in riddles." (4) "They be only four and ye be many."

There are visual delights as well, such as the footage of nervous-looking lizards crawling around miniature rocks and trees in an attempt to palm themselves off as some kind of dinosaurs. And then there's the exploding volcano in the final reel!

However, these charms can't equal those found in "Island of Lost Women" because that movie has a more attractive cast. The females in "Untamed Women," for example, look like runner-up beauty queens from a small high school in Oklahoma, and the men are routine specimens who keep their clothes on. On the other hand, the females in "Island of Lost Women" rank on the va-va-voom scale and the two men are hot-looking hunks who shed their shirts faster than gay strippers at a New Year's Eve party.

And finally, would someone explain why a woman from a two-thousand-year-old Druid culture living on an uncharted Pacific island be called "Sandra?"

Untamed Women has pilot Mikel Conrad who has spent time on a rubber raft being rescued and is now in the hospital. He and his crew have crashed in the Pacific (I think because the film isn't real specific) laying in the bed totally mute and in shock. Dr. Lyle Talbot administers some sodium pentathol and Conrad like Ishmael tells his tale.

After sinking an enemy cruiser, the bomber is hit with flak and has to ditch in the ocean. The crew bails out and eventually four of them reach an uncharted island that the mapmakers missed.

The uncharted island was really losing currency at this time. There just aren't any of those in the Atlantic and in the Pacific during World War II, the Americans and the Japanese probably charted everything that was left, but I digress.

Once on the island Conrad and his crew run into all kinds of things, a tribe of Neanderthals who need some women because these guys definitely haven't had their itches scratched in like forever, a tribe of Amazons who are descended from Druids scattered to the four winds after the invasion of Britain by the Romans, a volcano everybody worships and for good measure some prehistoric beasts thrown in courtesy of One Million BC. I think you can figure out the rest of the plot with these elements.

The movie leaves this location purposely vague. At one point the usual guy from Brooklyn who pops up in all war movies says that if they get back on the ocean the enemy might pick them up and they'll spend the rest of the war in a concentration camp eating raw fish and rice. Clues that these guys could be in either theater.

These Amazons are without men because the Neanderthals have killed them all off in previous raids. They like what they see in this stranded bomber crew who speak so foreign, but want to make sure they're not with the Neanderthals. As for their looks, in those animal skins with Fifties styled hairdos, they look like a line that any Las Vegas club would be proud to have.

Untamed Women just goes to show that Ed Wood did not direct all the bad movies from this era.

"Untamed Women" was a long forgotten United Artists release from 1952, its star Mikel Conrad having previously directed and starred in 1949's equally obscure "The Flying Saucer," which never suggests that its saucer comes from outer space. Director W. Merle Connell stayed on the fringes of Hollywood, usually as an editor, though among the films he photographed were John Carradine's "The Unearthly" and Phil Tucker's "The Cape Canaveral Monster." This was the last feature for screenwriter George Wallace Sayre, whose prior credits include the 1939 Boris Karloff vehicle "The Man They Could Not Hang," John Carradine's 1944 "Alaska" at Monogram, and the studio's 1945 Charlie Chan entry "The Shanghai Cobra." The late 40s and early 50s saw a rather large number of low grade 'Lost World' efforts like "Unknown World," "Two Lost Worlds," "Lost Continent," "The Jungle," and "Captive Women," all utilizing the same stock footage of lizards posing as dinosaurs from Hal Roach's 1940 "One Million B.C." "Untamed Women" is told in flashback by the only survivor of a WW2 bomber crew of four whose plane went down in the Pacific, drifting for days before reaching an island inhabited by scantily clad cave women, their first thought to capture the 'hairy men' who have a history of killing. Once the quartet prove to be friends, the girls fall all over each other to claim one as a mate, despite the protestations of high priestess Sandra (Doris Merrick). The boys survive attacks from a man eating plant and a single roaming dinosaur before a large number of cavemen appear to claim their brides (reliable Bronson Canyon again), most of their ammunition used to repel them. The entire pointless exercise concludes with a volcanic eruption that claims all the lives on the island, save the one man who overcomes his amnesia to tell the impossible tale. Lyle Talbot is the one familiar face, as the doctor who opens and closes the picture, his best known genre credits opposite Bela Lugosi, "One Body Too Many," "Glen or Glenda," and "Plan 9 from Outer Space." There's always camp value in seeing perfectly coiffed models trying to pass themselves off as prehistoric women, their tribal dances offering additional eye candy, and there is some attempt to meld live actors with stock footage but it's really a lost cause, these Untamed Women all looking quite docile to this viewer.

This film begins with an Army pilot named "Captain Steve Holloway" (Mikel Conrad) undergoing treatment in a hospital after suffering from a head injury which has affected his memory. As it so happens his bomber was hit by Japanese flak and he and his crew were subsequently forced to ditch the plane somewhere in the Pacific. After drifting in a life raft for 8 days they finally come upon an uncharted island where they are taken prisoner by a small party of native women back to their camp. At first the high priestess named "Sandra" (Doris Merrick) wants to have them killed. However, after much dancing and deliberation the rest of the women convince her to have the men mate with them instead. Unfortunately, this idea doesn't appeal to Sandra who unties them and forces them into the wilderness where they encounter all sorts of dangerous prehistoric animals and flesh-eating plants-and it's then that things become even more hazardous for everyone concerned. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this was a rather low-quality B-movie from the 50's which suffered from substandard acting and an even worse script. Likewise, although the special effects weren't that bad for this particular time-period, it should be noted that much of it was acquired directly from a previous film "One Million B.C." which diminishes my regard for the imagination and talent of those involved in producing it even more in my view. That said, I don't consider this to be a very good film and I have rated it accordingly. Below average.