One might expect Bride of the Gorilla (1951) to be a more upscale version of The Bride and the Beast, the gonzo Ed Wood spectacle we reviewed the other day. This film, after all, is written and directed by Curt Siodmak, who penned the horror classics The Wolf Man and I Walked With a Zombie; it stars recognizable performers Raymond Burr and Lon Chaney Jr.; it employs much of the same stock footage and misplaced wildlife. Yet where Beast is wildly insane, Gorilla is disappointingly tame: a routine werewolf story in a silly gorilla suit. At a rubber plantation somewhere in the Amazon, passions run hot and superstitions run wild. Tough rubber worker Barney Chavez (Raymond Burr) murders his boss (Paul Cavanaugh) and plans to elope with the man's wife Dina (Barbara Payton). His plans are thwarted by local witch Al-Long (Gisela Wiresbek), who curses Barney to live life as a beast. Soon Barney is experiencing weird mental breakdowns, which move in tandem with appearances of a violent man-ape in the jungle. Local police chief Taro (Lon Chaney Jr.) and amiable Dr. Viet (Tom Conway) try to unmask the culprit before he starts killing humans.
Bride of the Gorilla certainly bears Siodmark's pedigree, cribbing plot elements and several actors from Wolf Man and Zombie and relocating them to a vague jungle setting. Certainly it resembles the Lewton flick in its depiction of a "cursed" family of colonizers at the mercy of supernatural forces, though here the principle victim is Barney, a native who dared to marry a white woman and incurred the wrath of the locals. But when Siodmark tries to discuss culture clash, he can only give Taro hackneyeds line about his "split identity" as a Western-educated official who returns tribal "instincts," or Dr. Viet muttering about how he'll never understand these crazy colored people. Both Taro and Barney represent the dilemma of the "civilized" (or faux-civilized) native who can't bridge these worlds, with Dina and her husband the whites destroyed by them.
As this old racial chestnut (more Kipling than classic horror) suggests, Siodmark's script is as dumb as it is casually offensive. The movie takes place in South America but the white characters have Dutch names and cultivate rubber, suggesting Indonesia; wildlife from Africa (along with the inevitable Australian kookaburra) skulks in the underbrush; natives practice voodoo rituals reminiscent of the West Indies. Gorilla has one or two moments of weird poetry, like when Al-Long spars with one of Taro's deputies (Woody Strode) or Barney's florid monolog about his heightened senses, rejoicing over his ability to "smell a thousand smells." But mostly it's the usual combination of dread mutterings and characters slowly realizing what's obvious tot the audience.
Gorilla tries its hand at psychological horror, suggesting that Al-Long is poisoning Barney with hallucinogenic drugs; some scenes (like Barney glancing his hairy reflection in a puddle) suggest that the transformation being all in Barney's mind. But once the natives start muttering about a rampaging forest demon, there's no doubt this is all real. The movie is directed with the minimum of competence; Siodmark makes no effort to build suspense, with Barney's rampages depicted offscreen and the jungle sequences padded with stock footage. Only in the finale does Gorilla achieve a serviceable tension, before clanking with a monolog by Taro confirming the destructiveness of cultural mixing.
The best that can be said about the cast is that they don't embarrass themselves more than necessary. Lon Chaney Jr.'s role is a big nothing, though at this point in his career he probably wasn't too selective about his projects. Barbara Payton is pretty but vacuous, the movie a dubious highlight in her rocky Hollywood career, while Tom Conway is serviceably suave. Raymond Burr inevitably dominates the film; despite some embarrassing "swarthy" make-up he works overtime to sell Barney's return to monkey, and almost succeeds. Woody Strode's role is small, but he maintains his dignity well-enough, which can't be said of Gisela Wiresbek's voodoo shamaness.
Bride of the Gorilla is watchable, in the way that a lot of movies are watchable when you can't sleep after a rough work day. But it's not really good, either. The movie fumbles some interesting ideas that other movies, including several by its creator, have handled better. At best, it's lazily diverting; at worst, it's racist and dumb.
