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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