Maîtresse des singes

I bought this film based on various descriptions I had read of it and the fact that it is a Larry Buchanan piece. I was really let down. Larry must have purchased some old film at a yard sale, the color is all washed out and some of the scenes almost look black and white. The first 30 or 40 minutes are quite boring and even the action scenes are lackluster. The "near men" look like a troop of Jose Canseco look alikes.I felt embarrassed for Jenny Neumann's acting inability. And the Mistress of the Apes song is incredibly dumb. The film is not even "it's so bad it's good" quality. Sadly, one time viewing only.

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 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).

One guy mentions that his rifle is a REMINGTON 308! A few times. It's one of the more legible lines of dialogue in this Larry Buchanan - how does this guy keep getting money to get work? - trashfest. Poor acting, directing, sfx (what there are of them) in this silliness that's really miss titled. There aren't any apes in it - there are 'missing links' who are just dudes wearing masks and look like they got picked up off Venice Beach. I can't even tell what the story was about other than searching for a lost archaeologist. Just another of Larry's terrible movies.

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.