The Wild Women of Wongo

Outrageous camp factor, and every bit as weird and mindless as you've heard.

"Oh, Priestess, we request permission to find mates!" The narrator explains: "Nature made a mistake." Two independent tribes that mistrust but leave each other alone finally interact, as an alliance to fight some other weird tribe is proposed, then rejected. A parrot is perched somewhere, and periodically shows up to mock the characters, as if we the audience aren't doing that already.

Basically, some prehistoric guys and gals from each tribe run around the forest and occasionally meet each other. There's one girl (from the "pretty woman" tribe) who beats the snot out of a baby crocodile, and the monster people show up briefly. Her tribe has women with 50's hair styles, shaved legs, lipstick, and other make-up. The other tribe has women with buck teeth and attitudes that scare their sheepish men.

Beware of the soundtrack. They actually use some of the same music as the infamous "Plan 9 from Outer Space," and this movie makes that one look good by comparison. The acting is oafery, the director must have been out in the sun too long, and the story line is uhh, was there one? There's only one way to watch this: MST3K style. Get your buddies together and mock the thing, when it isn't bashing itself that is.

Wild Women of Wongo, The (1958)

** (out of 4)

As the film opens up a narrator tells us that some experiment was done on the island of Wongo. On that island all the beautiful women were given ugly men. On another island the beautiful men were given ugly women. When the ape people attack the two sides might come together so that the pretty can be with the pretty and the ugly with the ugly. Sound stupid? Well, it is and that's why this film came off mildly entertaining. The movie has the reputation of being one of the worst ever made and I won't argue that but at the same time it kept me entertained just because of how stupid it was. The movie even features some music that is best known from being used in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, which would be released the following year. I don't think it's ever explained why the looks of the people were mixed up to begin with but I'm sure it wouldn't have made any sense anyways. As is to be expected, the performances all are extremely bad and sometimes it does give us some laughter. The director does what he can with the material but the color is pretty good and the locations are certainly nice to look at. There's also quite a bit of footage of some of the wildlife and that's a plus. The movie doesn't feature too much of a story as we see women (or men) get kicked out of their tribes, have to find, look around, fight some more and then look around some more. Fans of bad movies will want to check it out but others should stay far, far away.

This 1950s bad movie classic takes us to Wongo, a tropical place (shot in Florida) where the women of Wongo have trouble with their men. When a very, very handsome stranger tells them about a place called Goona only a few miles away, where very, very handsome men are looking for beautiful companions, they are quick to consider their options...

I think the scene when the daughter of the king pretends to be engaged in a "life-or-death struggle" with a small rubber crocodile must have been worth the admission fee alone, although the talking parrot made me cringe every time... must be on screen every 5 minutes at least. The "leopard skin" jungle outfits of the 1950s are naturally nowhere near what Tanya Roberts was allowed to almost wear in the 1980s, so I wonder how hot "Women of Wongo" really seemed in the 1950s? As far as the male models (the word "actor" would be out of place) are concerned, one of them actually rose to stardom afterwards: Ed Fury became Ursus in the Italian cinema series.

Yes, this was a bad movie (I watched it in a double bill with the similar-toned prehistoric tongue-in-cheek 'Prehistoric Women'--both from Mill Creek's 50-pack 'Nightmare Worlds'), but it was charming, short and sweet, and I enjoyed it. I wouldn't watch it again, probably, but it was decent fare to see once. I thought the way the credits were animated was cool (a low-budget Saul Bass), and I wouldn't have minded being trapped by the Wongo tribe, if I time-travelled back to that time, myself! At first, I thought they had misspelled Adrienne Barbeau's name, but no one looked like her in the film, and she would have been really young anyway.

It intrigued me that Tennessee Williams actually directed at least parts of the film. Though this film falls into the 'so-bad-it's good-territory, I'm glad it was made. Not everything has to be either a $300-million monster or Hamlet.

I saw this on a UHF station during the 70's, and was amazed by it even then. It really is a must see for lovers of bad film. I finally found a video recently, and the movie's awfulness has held up very well. Bad movies often don't live up to the hilarious reviews found in the Golden Turkey books written by the The Medved brothers, but Wild Women of Wongo does on most levels. Really, what were these people thinking? The dance of the dragon god is worth the price of admission alone.