The White Gorilla

This film seems to leave you with more questions than it answers, such as what the heck were they thinking. Take the old country store setting add 4 guys sitting around spinning yarns, set it in the jungle and you have the start. Next add silent era footage for the action and put our hero on the outside looking in angle and you have this film. It's actually humorous to watch the hero coming up on the action time and again and always having a good excuse for not getting involved. The term slacker might come to mind but hey, since he has no time machine well all he can do is watch. The gorillas fighting each other is highly laughable. I almost half expected a right cross or left hook to be thrown. Another funny spot is our silent era hero saving the damsel in distress from the attack hippo. That extremely rare menace of the jungle. And of course who can leave out the end where the black gorilla comes upon the dead white gorilla, his sworn enemy and feels remorse. I mean jeez, give me a break. I almost expected to hear the black gorilla (in his best Zachary smith impression) to start with. "oh the pain, oh the agony of it all." In the end Ray Corrigan sums up the moral of the tale which wasn't the same one I came up with, but hey it's his gig. If you can find this movie cheap it is worth a look.. Other than that don't waste your time.

They must have had some leftover film and an old silent movie. Some Saturday afternoon, everyone got together and put together the bulk of this. Then a couple monkey suits left over from an old Lugosi film, a little narration, a scene in a trading post set, and voilà, you have a dumb movie. It apparently takes place in Africa but there are animals from all over the world. The elephants are mostly Indian elephants and there are tigers and lions. The story is about as lame as you can get in that there is no closure anywhere. Issues are never tied up. The narrator, Crash Corrigan, spends almost the whole movie thrashing around in the weeds, spying on people. He doesn't do anything to help. There is also a silly looking little boy who has dominion over animals and black natives. It goes around and around and never gets anywhere. This is a real bomb.

The White Gorilla is a jungle movie shot in 1945 but it looks like it was made in the early thirties and often reminded me of the much older silent pictures. The reason for this is that this movie used stock footage that was available from films going back to the silent picture days. The main problem with this is that it just doesn't fit it well. Some of the old footage is put in at the wrong times. There are many times that the speed isn't even right. When watching this movie, it is very obvious that something is amiss here. This stock footage that was used just plain looks too old and out of place. It is a great detraction from what little plot there is to the movie. The stock footage that was used makes this look almost like a comedy. There just isn't too much going for this film. Being a low budget film is one thing but there just wasn't enough effort made in making this movie.

Harry L. Fraser, the writer and one of the producers of this movie, was also the writer of Perils of the Jungle, the 1927 serial from which he took the archive footage. The serial did have good animal scenes, so it's hard to fault Fraser for finding a way to recycle what would otherwise be badly outdated and unusable silent footage. The problem, as every other commentator has noted, is the impossibility of integrating the two films smoothly, and the terrible plot -- if there is a plot -- of the new footage.

Frank Merrill, the hero of the 1927 serial, did play Tarzan in two later movies, Tarzan the Mighty and Tarzan the Tiger, but he was playing a different and unrelated character in Perils of the Jungle.

Crash Corrigan, the hero of the new wrap-around movie, made a specialty of playing gorillas, and he often played other roles in the movies in which he donned the gorilla suit, but I believe this may be the only movie in which his human character directly confronts his animal character.

Anybody who thinks Bela Lugosi's poverty row horrors represent the absolute pits of 40s film-making has yet to see The White Gorilla, a piece of stinking crud of the cut-and-paste school of exploitation that even makes Jerry Warren's Creature of the Walking Dead start to look good. You may even begin to regret unkind words you've had for cut-and-paste 80s ninja pap peddler Godfrey Ho.

Any giggles at how bad this movie is will soon subside into yawns and groans as the sixty soul-scarring minutes of animal stock footage and recycled silent movie scenes take their toll on the viewer's dignity. The only reason it gets a rating of 3 from me, as opposed to a 1 or 2, is the occasional appearance of the guy in the white gorilla suit with the unusually large posterior.

"With every bone in my body aching, I limped away," the protagonist says at one point. You will likely feel much the same after sitting through all of The White Gorilla, a barnstorming candidate for IMDb's Bottom 100 list if ever there was one.