One of the great delights in watching old B Movies is how they give free rein to berserk ideas that major studio films wouldn't ever touch. Thus with The Bride and the Beast (1958) - a perverse creature feature scripted by none other than Ed Wood - which makes the sexual subtext of King Kong and a million other monkey movies explicit. Unfortunately it comes with a lot of tedious padding, but you can't have everything. Big game hunter Dan (Lance Fuller) takes his new wife Laura (Charlotte Austin) to his remote country estate on their honeymoon. Dan reveals that he keeps a giant gorilla named Spanky caged in the basement. The gorilla is immediately turned on by Laura, who is similarly intrigued by the big ape, leading to an awkward bedroom confrontation ended when Dan shoots his furry rival. To help Laura overcome her simian sympathies, Dan invites his doctor friend (William Justine) to hypnotically regress Laura, who discovers that she was a gorilla in a past life! This news arrives just before Dan takes Laura on safari to Africa, where they hunt escaped tigers until Laura runs into a pair of wild gorillas. Will she choose her human hubby or her primate paramours?
That Bride even poses the question suggests how warped the whole enterprise is. The opening scenes with Spanky are played absolutely straight, as Wood finds yet another sexual curiosity to dramatize; it makes Glen or Glenda's cross-dressing dilemma positively mundane. The movie doesn't explain why Spanky is even there, neatly packed away next to the icebox, which suggests Dan himself has some explaining to do. Perhaps it's for the best that the movie doesn't fully explore this primate menage a trois, as Dan unceremoniously kills Spanky during a scene that comes perilously close to rape.
There's an obvious Freudian reading to all this, with Dan hiding sexual urges out of sight and Laura finding them more attractive than his civilized exterior. An unsettling racial subtext is also foregrounded with the middle third of the movie devoted to a big game hunt in Africa, padded with laborious stock footage from older films. Dan surrounds himself with a faithful manservant (Johnny Roth) and black porters who play their expected roles, contentedly submissive to the white man; but out there, deep in the jungle, waits someone much less inhibited and far more exciting. As they say, once you macaque, you never go back.
Unfortunately, most of Bride is merely boring. After the nightmarish opening and an amusingly vivid hypnosis scene (culminating with Laura looking into a puddle to see that she's - gasp! - a gorilla!), the movie bogs down in tedious travelogue footage. Director Adrian Weiss (brother of Wood associate George Weiss) struggles to match these images with the cheap sets; one suspects Wood introduced the tiger angle to match stock footage from an Indian-set thriller, with Laura even donning Indian garb that seems singularly inappropriate to East Africa. The loopy bookends disguise that at least half the movie is disposable junk, that the most generous B Movie buffs won't touch.
Still, give The Bride and the Beast its due. While most simian cinema only hints at man-monkey love, Weiss and Wood give a very narrow, very strange sliver of their audience their money's worth. Also give them credit for casting Charlotte Austin, a minor actress whose other notable roles included roles in Monkey Business and Gorilla at Large! Perhaps that tidbit best expresses the spirit of the movie; a joke, and a very strange one indeed.
