Bride of the Gorilla

Bride of the Gorilla (1951)

[Meh]
Trash-o-rama

One of four movies off this DVD of 'Horror Classics' (read: old shit we can't sell) Mr. Blue borrowed from the library, the other three being She-Demons, Sound of Horror (which I will review when I'm done with this) and Attack of the Giant Leeches (which I will review whenever the mood strikes me).

In this particular horror classic, Raymond Burr plays a man in love with his boss's beautiful wife (Barbara Payton) on some jungle island (my guess was somewhere in the Philippines but I'm probably wrong). He murders his boss and marries the girl, however, the murder is witnessed by this random Slovakian wise-woman who puts a curse on him, causing him to turn into an ape-like monster called... shit, I forget what it's called.

Why did she care?, you may well ask. Well, she wasn't really pissed off because he killed the old man, she was pissed off because he dumped her granddaughter or whatever for the other lady.

Anyway, this movie was mediocre at best, but was actually the best movie on the disc and strangely riveting. I don't know why, but I really cared about what happened.

I mean, the story was only barely coherant, being patched together from numerous other movies. Its progressing from scene to scene is merely an illusion created by my brain which seemed to fill in the missing bits. There was a hell of a lot of really irrelevant stuff packed into the seventy minutes (it felt like a lot less, though) and the monster, though shown only briefly, was a major level of suck.

I think perhaps the appeal was the presence of the familiar and comforting faces of Lon Chaney Jr. (as the local, superstitious law enforcement) and Tom Conway (as the local medical professional) - Raymond Burr doesn't count because I've never seen Perry Mason. That's sort of the secret to a crappy horror flick. You have to put a star in it.

END

Written and Directed by: Curt Siodmak. Starring: Raymond Burr, Barbara Payton, Tom Conway, Lon Chaney Jr., Gisela Werbisek, Carol Varga.