Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla

BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA (3 outta 5 stars) Okay, this is a lousy movie... but it still entertained the heck out of me. It's so unbelievably bad that you cannot take your eyes away for a second lest you miss something. Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo star as... Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Well, it was probably meant more as a rip-off than an homage... but why quibble? Duke Mitchell is a dreadful singer and he hardly even looks like Dean Martin... they could have dragged anyone in off the street and given him that haircut and they'd have been just as good. Petrillo, on the other hand, is a dead-on ringer for a young, lean Jerry Lewis (whether this is good or bad news depends on your tolerance for Jerry Lewis). Bela Lugosi co-stars as a creepy mad doctor who turns people into gorillas.. or whatever. (Don't expect the story to make any sense.) Really, this movie isn't any worse than a lot of those classic buddy comedy movies of the era. The jokes are corny, the plot is silly and there are totally unnecessary musical and romantic subplots. But. come on, you know you are just DYING to see a movie that mixes together Dracula, Jerry Lewis and monkeys!

... and director William Beaudine. Nightclub performers Duke Mitchell (Duke Mitchell) and Sammy Petrillo (Sammy Petrillo) fall out of an airplane and land on a remote tropical island. The natives nurse them back to health, and Duke falls for the chief's daughter Nona (Charlita). Nona, who was educated in the US, introduces Duke and Sammy to the island's resident mad scientist, Dr. Zabor (Bela Lugosi), who is experimenting with transforming apes into monkeys, monkeys into apes, and humans into both.

This one certainly lives down to its reputation. Mitchell and Petrillo, for those who don't know, were an awful nightclub act that was a direct rip-off of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Petrillo, who looks a lot like the young Lewis and had a gift for vocal mimicry, makes Jerry's comic antics look nuanced and reserved, while Mitchell, a cheeseball crooner, wasn't fit to polish Martin's shoes. Combine their "talents" with a sub-moronic script, no-budget production values, and the directorial flourish of "One Shot" Beaudine, and you have a bad-movie "classic". Seeing the elderly, emaciated Lugosi trying his best in this garbage was both inspiring (he gave it his all even in this trash) and depressing (what's he doing in this trash?). Bela followed this up with his Ed Wood-directed appearances. I can't really say that I would rank this with the more entertaining of the worst movies ever made. I've sat through more excruciating experiences, but this one provided nothing warranting a second viewing. It gets two stars just for Bela being such a trooper.

Like most everyone else here I picked this up in the dollar bin. The quality of the DVD wasn't bad at all and if, as I've heard, this picture was produced for only $50,000 then they did a hell of a job. It's slickly shot and at least as well produced as your average Universal B feature. None of which is to deny the fact that the movie stinks. I've heard that when BROOKLYN GORILLA came out the producers took some heat from Martin and Lewis' lawyers and it's easy to see why. The only other time I've seen a comedy team's act so blatantly stolen was yonks ago when an obscure group called the Pickle Brothers tried to pass themselves off as the Marx Brothers, and who the hell even remembers the Pickle brothers? At any rate Sammy Petrillo's Lewis impression is positively eerie, and to be fair he's only slightly more annoying than the original. Duke Mitchell is another matter entirely. He's so constricted he seems in the last stages of terminal stage fright, afraid to move and frequently slurring his lines. He sings the old standard "Deed I Do" in what is supposed to be a sexy croak which actually makes him sound like a sort of hipster Walter Brennan.

On the plus side: one or two funny gags (inluding a grotesque impression by Petrillo of a totem pole) and a very attractive leading lady. And as I said, the producers sure knew how to stretch a buck.

Okay, once you get past the fact that Mitchell and Petrillo are Dean and Jerry knockoffs, you could do worse than this film. Charlita as Princess Nona is great eye candy, Lugosi does his best with the material he's given, and the production values, music especially (except for the vocals) are better than you'd think for the $50k cost of production. The final glimpses of the characters are a hoot. Written by Tim Ryan, a minor actor in late Charlie Chan films, and husband of Grannie on the Beverly Hillbillies. All in all, WAY better than many late Lugosi cheapies.

Yes, Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo were attempting to ripoff Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Lewis had to take Petrillo to court to make him stop the impersonation (Interesting to note, Lewis was copying black vaudevillian Jimmy Cross' act himself and becoming famous for it, while Cross' race would hold him back). Mitchell is no Martin, but if I had to choose listening to either one, I would choose Mitchell over Martin's crooning. I thought Mitchell had much more life in his singing.

Other than that, had I been Jerry Lewis and I had seen a guy who looked this much like me, I would have signed him up immediately. Petrillo is so strong at resembling Lewis, they could have been boggling portraying twin brothers in a movie, but as the egotistical rift tore between Martin and Lewis, you could just imagine how Petrillo would have gone at it with Lewis. In some scenes, you can see Petrillo is masking animosity as comedy. From beginning to end the only thing that held my attention was 'That's not Jerry Lewis from the telethons.' If Mitchell had bore a resemblance to Martin, the illusion may have been even more convincing. Muriel Landers was a welcome, a rotund woman who is flirtatious and pursuing while not being threatening, something virtually unseen even today in film and television. Not a film to see for entertainment, but to just study and contemplate what is and isn't popular. Lewis was famous, Petrillo wasn't. See if you can tell the difference.