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Hunters are trapping and killing lions in Bomba's jungle. Bomba has feelings on this. Fifth entry in Monogram's series is pretty weak with an especially talkative Bomba this time around. The pluses are the animals, particularly the lions, and Sheffield's earnest performance. Morris Ankrum and Douglas Kennedy play the lion hunters. Kennedy is the heavy, which was hardly new territory for him. Ankrum's the nicer one. Ann E. Todd plays his tomboyish daughter who takes a liking to Bomba and vice versa. This was Todd's final movie before an early retirement. Woody Strode appears briefly as a native. This is a fairly standard Bomba movie. Which is to say it's an unremarkable B jungle adventure for kids. Still, a decent time-passer on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

It's Bomba the Jungle Boy (Johnny Sheffield). He's playing with the lions when he spots an injured male which has been shot by hunters. Bomba is forced to do a mercy kill. He confronts the Maasai but they insist that it's not them. Tom Forbes and his daughter Jean meet up with his partner Marty Martin who is trapping and killing animals.

I like the animal-friendly message of this movie although there is some animal-unfriendly lion wrestling. No matter how unfriendly, it is still impressive stunt work. The native people are not simpletons or unthinking savages. They actually have a big part in the plot. It may not be modern or that good but it is as good as Bomba movies get.

These movies were made for kids back when kids had decent role models to look up to. Bomba was a gentle young man with the right attitude and the right morals to show kids. Not like today's 'heroes' that kill and maim and blow up everything and drive cars along the streets like every one else is a stunt driver on the road.

I would much rather live in Bomba's world than today's world. It is too bad that times changed, for the worse, and these kind of movies ended. Like with the "B" western movies, we always knew who the good guy was and what he stood for and in the end he showed us all that the right way is the best way and always produces winners.

With Johnny Sheffield's smile and gentle way of talking, it is a shame that he ended his movie career, but he did much better with the money he made from these movies to build his future. He wasn't just a boy raised in the jungle with animals after all.

I already said it yesterday, when you have seen a BOMBA movie, you have seen all of them. But it's not a default, it's charming, enchanted, naive, fun, agreeable to watch if you watch them with the "proper" eyes. The topics are all close to nature, animal defense, against colonialism, the villains are most of the time White ones, as in any Tarzan or Jungle Jim feature. You like it or don't. No locations, only celluloid jungle and many footage stock shots about animals. You can easily see a jungle setting and the next scene you are deep into savannah.... You see a gorilla in the forest just before seeing an elephant in thee bush, or even a giraffe.....But that belong to the charm of this film series, firget any realism. It is destined to kids, adult kids. Or kids adults. Ford Beebe was a serial director and then westerns and adventures B pictures. He had no ambition but good skills with a camera.

Johnny Sheffield as Bomba has such low-keyed charisma and an easy gait that he commands attention even when he's not saying anything, which is sometimes preferable to the lines he's given. Bomba finds an injured lion in his territory and accuses the local villagers of leaving it to die (they deny it, even though a custom of their tribe is to send a young man out into the wilds to kill a lion as part of his initiation). Meanwhile, 'bwanas' have invaded the jungle with a permit to trap lions to sell back home to zoos--and one of the white men has a psychotic bent and an itchy trigger finger. One of better movies in the "Bomba" serial is still loaded with repetitive and recycled scenes, cheap back projection and nature footage from stock. Still, the editing is nimble enough so that the plot at least moves instead of being bogged down in the padding, and the supporting cast is strong. Douglas Kennedy is a worthy adversary for Sheffield's jungle boy (sprouting a little chest hair here), and the natives are finally given some personality quirks to make the subplot interesting. Bomba wrestles both an alligator and a lion, plays with lion cubs, relays messages to the birds (a bit embarrassing) and flirts innocently with the proverbial girl. Fans of the series could hardly expect or ask for more. **1/2 from ****