Mistress of the Apes

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.

Okay, forget Ed Wood, Jess Franco or even Al Adamson. If you are interested in investigating quirky filmmakers, try Larry Buchanan. Perhaps best known for Mars Needs Women, The Naked Witch and TV re-makes of AIP drive-in classics, Buchanan was responsible for this quickly and cannily lensed piece of exploitation shot in Malibu State Park and "dressed" as Africa. Of main interest to fanboys is the presence of the exaulted Barbara Leigh as the wife of an unscrupulous profiteer. A knowing finger on the pause/slow advance button on the remote about 45 minutes into the movie will prove why she is so venerated.

The story is not really worth detailing; just the elements that are intriguing or shocking: Stuart Lancaster plays his usual lecherous self, Barbara Leigh gets raped not once, but twice (and quite unnervingly, too), the young bride breast-feeds a "near man" baby, and the recurring "Ape Woman/Ape Love" song that completely undermines any serious consideration of the subject matter. I mean, this is BAD 70s white-boy funk. Finally, the miscogenation of the lead actress with one of the "near men" is enough to raise some eyebrows.

The dialog--as is usual for a Buchanan opus--is priceless and quoteable. To detail these joys would be gilding the lily of audience investigation...

My source is an OOP video from Pan-Canadian (cover by Boris Vallejo!)

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.

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).

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