The Wild Women of Wongo

I think that if Ed Wood were alive today or could make his complaints felt from beyond this mortal coil, he'd be haunting the Medved Brothers who dared not include The Wild Women Of Wongo in their list of the 50 Worst Films. Next to this Plan Nine From Outer Space plays like Citizen Kane.

This story is set on the mythical islands of Wongo and Guna and it seems as though the gene pool has played one dirty trick. The men of Wongo look like the inbreds from Deliverance and the women like playboy bunnies. On the other hand in Guna land, the men are these gorgeous beach boy surfer hunks and the women look like someone left the pound door open one night.

Both islands worship the crocodile god and the croc demands some sacrifices every so often. When one of the Wongo women actually subdues and kills the crocodile god, the theological implications are cataclysmic.

There are some hairy ape men like creatures who invade both the islands and it takes a while for them to come to a common plan of alliance.

That's about the sum and substance of this awful film which was shot in the Everglades on location. This film must have been a great after midnight third feature in the drive-ins when folks could look at the Guna men and Wongo women if they needed a little extra inspiration for the night's fun.

There's a parrot who serves as a kind of Greek chorus to all the silly goings on and when the parrot gives the best acting performance in the film, you KNOW how bad this is going to be.

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.

Ever see a puppy that was so ugly it was cute? That describes this dog of a movie. Gilligan's Island meets Ed Wood gone terribly wrong. Plot? It never thickens. Rather it starts out as thin as rice paper and remains just that transparent. Dialog? The dialog coach was sent out for coffee. Acting? It is to laugh. Sets? Well, none really. Special effects? Uh, there was that rubber alligator. Makeup? Think: Blue hair meant to look grey. But hey, it IS in colour. Maybe they should of thought about that before they called for makeup. Reality? This movie is a cinema dog rocket. But if you can get into Ed Wood meets Gilligan ... It IS kinda cute and good for a chuckle or two. But not much else.

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.

(Spoilers) Strangely made movie thats so badly acted that it comes across as a movie worthy to be classified with such bad movie epics as "Plan Nine from Outer Space" and "Manos: The Hands of Fate". In fact the film actually has a piece of music thats straight out of the soundtrack of the film "Plan Nine from Outer Space" that was released a year after, in 1959, in it.

Wango, as well as Goona, were islands created by Mother Nature back some 10,000 years ago where the men of Womgo were boorish brutes and the women were gorgeous babes and in the case of the people on the island of Noona the men were Greek Gods and the women were homely wallflowers.This made dating romance and marriage among the young couples of Wongo and Goona an act of duty rather then an act of love.

This all changes when one of the young men of Goona, the son of that islands king,traveled to Wongo by canoe to get the men of both islands to united against an invasion of ape-men from another island. The women of Wongo seeing the handsome Goonaien went ape over him which lead the jealous men of Wongo plan to kill him before he left the island. This was foiled by the Wongo women when they prevented their men from murdering the handsome Noona man which had them kicked out of the island by their man-folks.

Meanwhile, out of camera range, the ape-men attack Wongo and kill and scatter the men there leaving them to wounder through the forests and waterways to Goona. Back in Noona The men are given, through trial and fire, their chance to prove their manhood by their elders by being thrown out of their village and into the jungle without their spears to protect themselves. This leaves them open to be captured by the armed Amazon-like Women of Wongo and taken as slaves back to their island, which seems to have been abandoned by the invading ape-men.

At Goona the men of Wongo, who are lost in the woods, run into the women of Goona and the both boorish and homely men and women hit it on and fall head over heels in love with each other. The story ends with both the Men of Goona and Women of Wongo falling in love with each other as the Women of Goona and Men of Wongo did earlier. They all live happily ever after with Mother Nature as usual correcting herself from the mistake she made when she at first created the incompatible, to each other, men and women of Wongo and Goona. As for the invading ape-men? they must have gotten lost in the woods and were never seen or heard from again.