The White Gorilla (1945), by Harry L. Fraser and Jack Nelson

Just. One. More. Gorilla film.

Okay, technically two gorilla films. The Intruder was weird in that the gorillas just sort of interrupted the murder mystery we were already investigating. The Monster and the Girl had something of the same problem, but wholeheartedly attempted to tackle a fusion of the gorilla picture with film noir. Human Gorilla and The Gorilla Man weren't even gorilla movies, and House of Mystery was probably ripping off the silent incarnations of The Gorilla, aka the worst comedy ever written. Then we have The White Gorilla--a movie which was praised for its accidental experimental qualities by none other than William K. Everson himself. The White Gorilla in itself isn't really a movie--it's a shambles of a narrative cobbled together from tiny portions of original footage, stapled onto large chunks of footage stolen from the 1927 serial Perils of the Jungle, all held together in turn by shockingly lame narrations and "looking out from the bushes" inserts. It makes an appropriate pairing with this week's second film, also a mess of editing posing as a "movie." If the jaw-droppingly dumb spectacle of that wasn't enough, the footage from Perils of the Jungle is also really, really bizarre--its presence provides the only way at present to see what that serial might have looked like, as it's not in distribution, despite surviving in at least one archive.

The "plot" of The White Gorilla is as follows: Steve Collins, jungle guide, has just returned to Morgan's Trading Post in some part of Africa after escorting an explorer named Bradford on a quest for...something. At present, Collins is badly injured from a brawl with a white gorilla--something his comrade's at the post don't believe in. He has to tell the story of the White Gorilla, however, and thus we enter his flashback. We first Bradford and his assistant Hanley captured by some of the natives but freed by the authority of a five-year-old white boy who can apparently talk to animals. Collins follows Bradford as Bradford follows the jungle boy, leading him to a jungle girl, who is threatened by lions. (These lions are the reason why Collins can't interact with the silent film footage--they have trapped in a tree!) The jungle girl is the daughter (perhaps interracial?) of another explorer who was forced to set up permanent camp in the jungle after he went blind. Hanley ends up killing the old man and causing trouble for the group. This leads to their discovering the Cave of the Cyclops, which is inhabited by the Tiger-Men: Africans dressed as tigers ('cause, y'know, tigers live in Africa) such as those they keep in a pit under the cave ('cause, y'know, tigers live in Africa), who worship a pair of cyclops idols (!). The Cave is full of treasure but is guarded by the Tiger-Men, who are only barely held at bay by the jungle boy's mother, who is feigning insanity to set herself up as the Tiger-Men's priestess, as the tribe believes that insane people are sacred. God, this movie is weird. Anyway, in course of spying on the party as they entered the Cave, Collins was attacked by the White Gorilla and only barely escaped. While Morgan and the others go out in search of Bradford and his companions, the White Gorilla returns, kidnapping first a native child and later a girl who is of significance to the frame story bits (Collins' love interest?). Collins, despite his wounds, goes out after her, and manages to finally kill the gorilla. As for Bradford, Hanley, the jungle boy, the jungle girl, the Tiger-Men, and the priestess lady: "All we found in the tiger pit were the bones." Wow, "how fucking depressing" doesn't even cover how downer of an ending that is.

Whew, that's a lot for 60 minutes. In case you can't tell, there's not a plausible bone in this movie's body. Everything is just ridiculous. I suspect these were the "best cuts" of Perils of the Jungle, but if things were as crazy there as they were here, I really hope one of those archives restores and releases that serial to a wider audience. This is yet another movie where I could really just stop after the synopsis, but I haven't touched on some of the other things, like how they dub dialogue over the silent footage, and how the White Gorilla makes farting/kazoo sounds for some ungodly reason. Collins' narration continues even after he's done telling his story; the inhabitants of Morgan's Trading Post laughingly mock a badly injured man for believing in such a thing as a White Gorilla--and I know people knew what albinism was in 1945. The thing is, there were a fucking lot of these types of movies back in the '30s and '40s, with the infamous 1946 Devil Monster being a recut version of 1936's The Sea Fiend--in term an English-language remake of 1935's El Diablo del Mar! It's important to bring up remakes here because Remake Fever was as much a thing then as it is in our era. Keep in mind that there were two versions of The Unholy Three made within five years of each other, featuring virtually the same cast and virtually the same direction. That instance was part of the movement, however, that saw to the remaking of silent films into more relevant talkie versions...with mixed results at times. It is the same trend that The White Gorilla is a dubiously respectable participator in; at heart, The White Gorilla serves as a pure remake of Perils of the Jungle, which director Harry Fraser wrote after all. But by a combination of a hilariously dated "modernizing" methods (by which I mean they would have seemed horribly dated even by 1945's standards) as well as the sheer strangeness of the original content of Perils of the Jungle, we end up with a movie considerably more like A Night to Dismember than the talkie Unholy Three.

I think that's basically all I can say about this one, besides making the by-now obligatory reference to the fact that the White Gorilla costume was reused that same year for minor B-movie fan favorite White Pongo, of which The White Gorilla is sort of a bizarro version. I definitely cannot recommend The White Gorilla in a traditional sense, but at the same time, it really has to be seen to be believed. A new classic for me.

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House of Mystery (1934), by William Nigh

That the Old Dark House film and the gorilla picture were wedded early on stands to reason. All the time today do we see popular trends welded anxiously onto each other in an attempt to double-dip on certain media markets. I doubt this was the first ODH gorilla movie, but it was far from the last. Indeed, depending on where you look, it seemed almost mandatory for a gorilla to at least be teased as playing a part in the events to come once all the characters were settled in the house. House of Mystery is not a great A-Lister...it's one of the dumb ones. I don't like it for any good reason, and it's perhaps arguable whether I like it at all. This is a rare film where most of my amusement comes from pure gawking, and that probably means it's no good at all.

In one of the weirdest openings I've seen in these films, we start in "Asia, 1913." Archaeologist John Prendergast likes two things here in "Asia": drinking, and dancing girls. When he's cut off from one he turns to the other, in this case seeking out the dancers at the Temple of Kali--pronounced "Kay-LIE" here because white people in the '30s were not great at paying attention to these things. (So we're in India, then, and not just "Asia.") Conspicuously the Temple of Kali features a pair of guys in gorilla suits--they aren't there for nothing, coming to life when Prendergast is brought there after drunkenly killing one of the Temple's sacred monkeys, invoking the curse of Kali when he calls the priests "dogs" and starts whipping them (!!!). Prendergast escapes, taking not only one of the dancing girls with him but also a fortune in jewels. He and the girl seemingly get married, in an amazingly casual subversion of 1910s race relations, and we fast forward to twenty years later. A man named Professor Potter and his wife are looking for Prendergast and believe that he is now living under the name Mr. Pren in a large mansion, having been confined to a wheelchair or pretending such. Alongside an insurance salesman and several other annoying individuals, the Potters go to Pren's house to talk over the terms of finally doling out payments to those who invested in the Prendergast Expedition all those years ago. Unfortunately, it is Pren/Prendergast's belief that the Curse of Kali extends to those who inherit the wealth of the treasure. Thus, all the heirs must stay in his Old Dark House to see the horror of Kali before they can be allowed in on their share. Before long they're all sat down at the seance table, and a gorilla lunges out of the darkness at Mrs. Carfax...

So, I can imagine the first thing you're thinking: are gorillas an actual part of Hinduism? I tried to look into this to see if any sort of research was done on behalf of the screenwriters, and the closest I could come is this: there is a character in a Ramayana named Hanuman who is a monkey-like being in the service of Rama. However, this movie is about the cult of Kali, who, as far as I know, isn't even another avatar of Vishnu, as Rama is. Hindu belief has a less strict sense of orthodoxy than Christianity but as far as I know there has never been an ape cult of Kali in Indian history. This is just the beginning of the movie's many problems.

There's the weird bit where the medium lady's spirit guide is named "Pocahontas," and I'm not sure if she's supposed to be the historical Pocahontas or just a ghost who goes by that name. This is used for a couple of cheap shots equating Indians with American Indians, which is made worse by the fact that the drums that accompany the gorilla attacks are called tom-toms. I found out actually that "tom-tom" comes from Indian and Sri Lankan immigrants to England, where it was adopted by white people as the name for a toy drum and later for part of modern drum kits--so actually this is more accurate than the word's use in the Westerns it's likely to remind audiences of. In the '30s, however, one has to wonder if this is a furtherance of the "Pocahontas" Indian/Indian cross-up.

Regarding the film's racism, then: poor Chanda, Pren's wife, gets treated like shit in this. There's this lovely exchange about her between the girl and the insurance salesman douchebag guy, who--argh--end up together.

Girl: "I don't like the looks of that person."
Asshole: "Person? She looks more like Gandhi's ghost!" (??????)

As far as I know, yes, he is questioning that she's a person. (Also, I'm sure a reference to Gandhi's death won't have a harsh edge to it in fourteen years or so. Asshole.) Now, Chanda came back with Prendergast to become his wife, right? Like...they're married, right? 'Cause we saw them kissing back in India, right? Nooope. It turns out that Lead Gal is the one Prendergast wants, and Chanda is, in the ex-archaeologist's own words, "just [his] housekeeper." JESUS. You can presume from those kissing scenes that he fucked her as soon as he got her back to the homeland, and then proceeded to fuck her in another way by ditching her for other (white) girls. When it turns out that Chanda is the killer, having worked with Prendergast to use trained gorillas to scare off those who are after "his" investment money, you really don't feel bad at all that her last victim is Prendergast himself. When the two of them left India, she was probably about twenty, and so she's in her early forties now, but there's a certain age to her face that would make the film loads better if they decided to do anything with it. Maybe that's why in the end Chanda gets away, with the only assertion that she's caught being a "don't worry about her" from the local cop. Since everyone in this movie is an idiot I'm assuming said cop has no way of catching her and is just trying to cover his ass. Dick.

One has to ask what the makers of this movie thought its appeal was. In order to answer that question, we have to ask what the movie sets out to do. Well, because it's an Old Dark House film, it's basically out to make money off of cheap scares and cheaper laughs. (Seriously, the "comedy" in this is so bad that it nearly becomes good through sheer surrealism.) The slackness of its research suggests that any sort of subtext, including the movie's imperialism (or possible subversion thereof), are probably accidental. Ever since the miracle stories of the days of the writing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the bizarre descriptions of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the West has had an obsession with weird tales, and has primordially linked those tales with the foreign. Whether they be from the forest beyond or the next continent over, people from other lands have been associated with the mystical and monstrous. The trend has only been challenged comparatively recently and it will be a long time yet before the racist aspects of tropes such as it die out completely. Even last year's The Mummy showed that studios at least are still interested in marketing the "exotic" as a source of horror, mystery, and unknown evil. However, to go back and try to answer my own question, I can't imagine a group of filmmakers setting out to make a movie which attempts to make funny the misadventures of abusive, idiotic assholes who--at least in the case of Lead Girl--are punished if they have any trace of redeemability. Oh, wait, never mind, I can imagine such people, because that sort of formula has always been used by movie comedies and is still being used today. Arrrrrggghhhh.

Just gawk, folks. Just gawk at how fucking stupid this movie is, and give it no quarter. You will only find entertainment if you expect nothing and give no fucks about your own well-being.

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The Monster and the Girl (1941), by Stuart Heisler

Okay, I've been mean to you guys. I can't say I'm gonna look at some old-school gorilla movies and then exclusively show you the ones that don't actually have gorillas in them. Of the gorilla movies I watched last year, The Monster and the Girl is probably the best of them in terms of sheer entertainment--it's a double feature all in itself, being punchy noir in its first half, and a sci-fi horror thriller in the second. That makes it pretty bizarre and thus a good fit for the A-List. After this, we'll get back to some of the more usual stuff we do around here, but not before I draw attention to what is surely the most valuable derivation of this exercise in gorilla films: of the four we've looked over, three of them all use the same "hairy" font that this movie does. Interesting...

Young Scot Webster is on trial for the murder of a man named Wade Stanton. We learn from Scot's testimony that he was framed--he was trying to track down a man named Larry Reed, and the trail brought him to an apartment where someone shot Stanton and forced the gun into Scot's hands. Scot's sister Susan gives the full story. She came to the city to "be somebody" and met Larry Reed, whom she quickly fell in love with and married. Except it turns out her beau wasn't planning on footing the bill for their wedding, and indeed there are now several men in Susan's life trying to convince her Reed never existed, who similarly want to be paid for their wedding accommodations. These men are gangsters under the employ of W.S. Bruhl, and it's apparently a recurring scheme of theirs to have "Larry" marry women, rack up high bills in their names, and then vanish, leaving them with a sizable debt, which can only be worked off in one way... (This being a Paramount movie from 1941 they never call it prostitution but you figure out how to read these things at some point.) Scot of course wanted revenge, but the case against him is too stacked, and he's sentenced to death. In jail he's approached by the mysterious Dr. Parry (George Zucco) who wants to extract Scot's brain after his execution. Scot consents to the strange request, having nothing to lose. But then, at exactly the halfway mark, we are in Parry's operating room. A sheet is pulled back. There is a gorilla underneath. Zucco looks down at his brain-in-a-jar and gets ready for the operation...

Ahh. It's sweet, isn't it? This one of those movies that Gets Me. There are quite a few ways in which I use that phrase, when I do use it: sometimes it means a horror film actually scared me, or a shock film actually shocked me. Other times I mean it in a less traumatic sense--it Gets my funny bone, is what I mean. This movie is halfway between. The sudden revelation of the gorilla, and the implicit future which lies in wait for Scot, which swiftly becomes explicit over the next half-hour, is one of the great movie moments of all time for me. After all, it makes sense for the noir film that this movie is to be called The Monster and the Girl for the first half-hour. There is obviously a girl surrounded by several individuals who could easily be called monsters, with either Larry or Bruhl being the biggest contenders for carrying the title's definite article. George Zucco's appearance early on in Scot's trial could potentially help foreshadow the movie's next direction, but one has to think about context. Zucco's primary appearances as a mad scientist--The Mad Monster, Dr. Renault's Secret, The Mad Ghoul, and The Flying Serpent--all postdate The Monster and the Girl. The only prior role which would have contextualized Zucco's appearance for audiences would have been as Andoheb in The Mummy's Hand a year prior. So this would have been a nowhere-twist for its native audience just as it is for those who watch it today.

I realized, while rewatching the film for this review, that the reason why I like these movies is that they are actually extremely pure jokes. Humor arises from a mental gap in expectation, with the expectations in question often relating to learned logic or social norms. That's why comedy is so fucking hard--if you abuse those gaps, it just pisses people off, and you have to avoid abusing those gaps over and over. But in trash movies, people manipulate expectation by accident, and it reveals what I think is a sympathetic sort of worldview. We all have our eccentricities, and in American society at least, we are told to restrain those eccentricities because taking the time to address them stands in the way of makin' money, y'see. (Also a continuously-embarrassed population is easier to manipulate but that's another story.) In trash, people expose those eccentricities--those weird, sideways beliefs about details of life (sometimes mundane, sometimes grandiose) that make them who they are. For better or worse. Trash speaks to a sensibility of individuality, and to a subversion of social norms that is as revolutionary and serious as it is funny. If nothing else, movies like these free up one's imagination. Someone got away with turning this into a gorilla movie halfway through--so why shouldn't your half-baked idea see the light of day? As long as it entertains people?

(I mean it's more complicated than that, but it always is.)

Anyway. I like this movie not only because it suddenly turns into a weirdo sci-fi horror movie (Death Wish with a gorilla is maybe a way of putting it), but because the noir elements on display throughout are actually really well done. It's hard not to love a movie where a gangster tells a lady about to fall out a window: "Watch that first step. It could spoil your makeup." The noir stuff keeps on until the end, including some psychological scenes with the gangsters as they slowly come undone when they realize a huge, strong guy is running around killing their gang in particular, but it's a little hard to take it seriously when there's a man in a gorilla suit lurking around.

The thing is, though, it's not a bad gorilla suit. A lot of other reviews noticed this too: the mask they have for it is strangely emotive, and it helps us hang onto the idea that this is a man in a gorilla's body. Plus the man in the suit is really good at acting like a real gorilla--isn't it nice when you can presume someone watched nature reels at some point to prep up for one of these? Because it's difficult for me to be serious about a man in a gorilla suit, however, I do have to say that watching a gorilla drop down on a man from a tree in a suburban neighborhood is a truly magical sight to behold. It's awesome that the gorilla of this movie is both "good" and hilarious. To have a funny-awful gorilla movie is one thing; to have one that's good but too serious is another; and now I just feel like a glutton.

The Monster and the Girl is a Janus of a movie but at least both faces are nice. I've seen some weird noir fusions now at this point and this is one of the weirdest and best of all of them. If you have a chance to give it a watch, don't miss it.

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