Just married, big game hunter Dan Fuller (Lance Fuller) and his drop-dead-gorgeous bride Laura (Charlotte Austin) drive to Dan's home to do what newlyweds do, but only after they've said hello to Dan's gorilla Spanky (Ray Corrigan),who is kept in the basement. Having taken a fancy to Laura (he's not the only one),Spanky busts out of his cage and creeps upstairs to take a closer look, whipping off the woman's night-dress, leaving Dan no choice but to go for his gun.
Shaken by the experience, Laura suffers from nightmares about the jungle, so Dan calls in his doctor friend, who uses hypnotism to try and get to the root of the problem. Regressing Laura, they learn that she was a gorilla in a past life, which doesn't bode well for her honeymoon... in deepest, darkest Africa: gorilla country! Against the doctor's advice, the Fullers continue with their planned excursion, happily hunting and trapping wild animals, but the fun stops when they are faced with two escaped man-eating tigers, and Mrs. Fuller is carried off into the jungle by a gorilla, who wants her to be his queen!
Anyone who knows a thing or two about Edward D. Wood Jr. (co-writer of The Bride and the Beast ) surely can't help but be amused by Laura's fondness for angora sweaters. But that's not the only funny thing about this movie... I mean, there's a gorilla called Spanky that's clearly a man in a fancy dress costume, the whole notion of being the reincarnation of a gorilla is quite preposterous, and it's patently clear that lions weren't available to the film-makers, so they had to try and work a couple of tigers into the plot instead. And that ending!
That said, the film isn't as inept as one of Wood's directorial efforts, Adrian Weiss being a competent enough director to make his movie appear relatively professional, despite the daft plot; it's no work of art, but he knows how to compose a scene and keep the pace lively, even with an overreliance on stock footage at times. It doesn't hurt either that Austin is such a babe: she's a delight whenever she is on screen (even when Laura is encouraging her heroic husband to slaughter another magnificent wild animal) and it's a shame that she didn't go on to bigger and better things.
I had fun, hence my probably overgenerous rating of 5.5/10, rounded up to 6 for Austin.
The Bride and the Beast
1958
Action / Adventure / Horror / Mystery
The Bride and the Beast
1958
Action / Adventure / Horror / Mystery
Keywords: gorilla
Plot summary
When Laura and Dan get married, she's more interested in Dan's gorilla. It's revealed through hypnosis that she was Queen of the Gorillas in a previous incarnation.
Uploaded by: FREEMAN
Director
Top cast
Tech specs
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She likes her men hairy. Very hairy.
Starts and ends well (?) but the middle is just a dull collection of stock footage
This is not exactly an Ed Wood movie, though when I got it from Netflix his name was plastered on it--not the director and co-writer's, Adrian Weiss. Wood co-wrote this low-budget and creepy film but it lacks the tackiness and cheapness of his own directorial efforts--though it is pretty close. The use of lots of stock footage, while boring, wasn't as ineptly handled and the acting isn't quite as bad as you'd expect in a true Ed Wood picture. In addition, while this is a bad film, so much of it is rather dull and had NOTHING to do with the plot, so it really failed to excite the bad movie buff within me as well.
The film starts off very well for a tacky 50s monster film and I wish they'd have stuck with this story idea throughout the film. However, the beginning and ending are all about a lady who is strangely attracted to gorillas but the middle is just some knucklehead shooting at stock footage of animals and wrestling with stuffed tigers. It's too bad because the plot about a woman who was a gorilla in a previous life is so goofy I wanted to see more. But, after about 20 minutes of this non-sense where she is hypnotized and talks about this past life--nothing else is said about this until about two minutes until the end of the film!! It's like they either forgot or they pieced two different stories together. Either way, when the film finally ends, it gets REALLY creepy, as the male gorilla doesn't exactly kidnap the lady but she goes off with him willingly--supposedly to become his lover. It's never exactly said, but it's strongly implied and you know that's what they were getting at in the final scene with her and her simian lover. Her expression is even happier than Ed Wood's in GLEN OR GLENDA when he first tries on an angora sweater! Talk about kinky!
So is it worth seeing? Well, if you have any taste, definitely not. If you are a bad movie buff, by all means see it. However, if you get bored, fast-forward through the middle--you aren't missing anything you haven't already seen in a Tarzan film! Stupid, but not exactly classic Ed Wood stupid.
Pretty bad
Typical cheap and cheerful cheesiness from the pen of the one and only Ed Wood, delivering a typically nonsensical and unbelievable story. This one's about a wife who finds herself attracted to a caged gorilla - that's right - and soon discovers that in a past life she was none other than the 'Queen of the Gorillas'. Cue lots of stock jungle adventure type scenes, a dearth of sense, and a general 'anything goes' type air. I was hoping for horror but it's in short supply here apart from a few scenes featuring a guy in a gorilla suit prowling around a house. Pretty bad.