Safari Drums

The Bomba The Jungle Boy Pictures series was running out of gas by the time Safari Drums were telling Johnny Sheffield that a movie company was in the neighborhood shooting. Safari Drums adds a mystery element to the proceedings here.

Now granted the Bomba series was intended for juvenile audiences, but just by looking at the cast list you should be able to tell Sheffield and Commissioner Leonard Mudie just who was the individual who killed an archaeologist and is hiding with the film crew. I think most of the juveniles in 1953 could have told as well.

Emory Parnell is the producer/director who wants and stages unusual action shots, Barbara Bestar is the film star, Paul Marion is the cameraman and Douglas Kennedy is their guide. Things never go quite right for Parnell in this film.

Bomba's adventures are getting a bit thin here.

Johnny Sheffield, Bomba the Jungle Boy, faces off with a dangerous jungle guide, which he takes on with the help of his jungle animal friends. As with most all the Bomba films, there's a ridiculously small budgets, lots of stock footage, and some embarrassingly bad looking backlot jungles. Stick with the early Weissmuller Tarzan films if you need a black and white jungle adventure fix.

An amateur film crew comes to Africa to shoot some footage. They don't just want any old wildlife footage (which is a shame as the Bomba series had more than enough of that to go around). They want something exciting and unique. When they hear about Bomba the jungle boy, you can pretty much guess their reaction. It also turns out one of the film crew is a murderer and it's up to Bomba to figure out who it is. Douglas Kennedy is in the cast so I'll let you put two and two together on that particular plot point.

Another Bomba movie starring Johnny Sheffield. This is the first of the series released under the Allied Artists brand. Sheffield is good in the lead but it's not exactly Hamlet. The only other regulars in the series besides Sheffield and his chimp are the Scrooge McDuck-ish Leonard Mudie as Andy Barnes and Smoki Whitfield as Eli. Barbara Bestar plays the requisite cute girl in the film. She's one of the more forgettable female guest-stars in the series. Which is all the more strange since she's one of the few Bomba seems romantically interested in. The movie makes use of stock footage as well as footage from previous Bomba movies, which just makes the whole thing seem cheap. Routine entry in the series with little to recommend it above the others, save for nice fight scenes between Bomba and a panther and Bomba and a lion. Those fight scenes are Hollywood movie magic. But there's also a fight between a lion and a tiger that is very much real. That won't sit well with many today. The irony is that in staging this fight between the two animals just for footage, writer/director/producer Ford Beebe becomes exactly like the arrogant filmmakers in this story.

Safari Drums (1953)

** (out of 4)

Number nine in the Monogram series has Bomba (Johnny Sheffield) once again in the jungle minding his own business when some movie people show up to film some animals. Bomba gets involved when it turns out that one of them murdered a man and the jungle boy must also be sure that the men don't try to harm any of his animal friends. By this time in the series there's no question that they were running out of fresh ideas and the films were becoming quite a hard chore to sit through. Thankfully this entry is a step up from the previous ones and I'd argue that the final ten-minutes here are the best moments in the series to date. With that said, the typical issues are still here including the ultra low-budget that really doesn't allow the filmmakers to do too much. As usual, there are way too many scenes where nothing is going on other than cast members standing around talking about stuff that really doesn't add up to anything. These dialogue scenes might work if they were actually saying something interesting but rarely does anything you care about come from their mouths. Another problem is of course the stock footage but at times this can add some campy charm. As with the previous films, Sheffield is at least entertaining in the part and you can tell he's giving it his all even though he probably shouldn't be. Barbara Bestar plays the love interest here and the supporting cast includes Emory Parnell, Douglas Kennedy and Paul Marion. I won't spoil who the killer is but the actor makes for a good villain. The final ten-minutes has more action than any of the previous movie put together. This includes a sequence where the filmmakers (in the movie) get a tiger and lion to fight a rather violent battle, which might offend some. There's also the action/chase sequence with Bomba that contains some nice drama. SAFARI DRUMS isn't a classic and it's not even a good movie but for a Bomba movie it's certainly not bad.

Bomba the Jungle Boy smells a rat when a rifle-happy team of filmmakers invades the African jungle to shoot a moving picture--and, Bomba fears, to shoot innocent wildlife as well. Turns out one member of the nefarious troupe has robbed a local guide of his diamonds and killed him, so a drum warning is played for Bomba to keep the unit preoccupied until the police arrive. Thoroughly routine low-budget adventure, the first "Bomba" episode to bear the Allied Artists distribution logo, is sluggishly-paced, with much of the action taking place via stock footage. Johnny Sheffield's Bomba wrestles (clumsily) with a panther and a lion, while the requisite 'pretty girl' (Barbara Bestar) wrestles with the hokey dialogue. *1/2 from ****