Dan (Lance Fuller) and Laura (Charlotte Austin) are newlyweds. They plan on spending their first night alone in Dan’s mansion in the country. Dan is a big game hunter. He has a gorilla (Crash Corrigan) that he got as a baby. The gorilla is now all grown and Dan needs to keep it in a cage in the basement. “Spanky” is too large to handle so Dan is in the middle of making arrangements to have him transported to a zoo.
Laura asks to see Spanky. Laura is fascinated with the gorilla. And the gorilla is fascinated with her. When Laura gets too close to the cage Spanky reaches out and grabs her wrist. Dan begins to panic. Spanky then reaches out and caresses Laura’s hair. When she tells him to let go, he does. Dan quickly takes her out of the basement and warns her that Spanky is dangerous.
That night, after Dan and Laura make love, Laura dreams of Spanky. The gorilla, sensing Laura’s proximity, breaks out of his cage and heads for the bedroom. By now Laura has woken up and is having a cigarette by the fire. Before Spanky enters the room he admires her from the doorway. Spanky rips off her nightgown and is shot dead by Dan.
Later that night Laura dreams about running through Jungle stock footage. She wakes up screaming. Dan goes into town the next day and brings back his friend Dr. Carl Reiner (William Justine). Carl is a psychologist. Carl hypnotizes Laura and does a little regression therapy. He finds out she used to be a gorilla in a past life. Apparently, that explains her love of angora. Under hypnosis Laura again runs through jungle stock footage until she is killed by jungle warriors from central casting.
Despite the fact that Dan just learned his wife was a gorilla in a past life, they still take their honeymoon trip to the African jungle. While in the jungle Laura is almost bitten by a tarantula and killed by a leopard. Not my idea of a honeymoon, but I wasn’t a gorilla in a past life. At least I don’t think I was.
While Dan is busy hunting some Indian tigers that managed to escape into the African jungle Laura hangs out at camp waiting for her true love to appear, and I don’t think it’s going to be Dan.
“The Bride and the Beast” was released in 1958. The movie was directed by Adrian Weiss. The screenplay was written by Edward D. Wood Jr. It is a story about love, marriage, and bestiality. It just proves the old axiom that good girls are attracted to bad boys.
The film is part of the sub-genre of gorilla movies, or gorillasploitation. One of the first movies to depict gorillas was the 1925 silent movie “The Lost World”. Since then, gorillas as a sub-genre have ebbed and flowed but have never gone away. Since “King Kong” in 1933 there have been many apes that were attracted to human females. There is something about that interspecies taboo that has fired man’s imagination. Normally in these types of movies the gorilla falls in love with the woman, but the woman merely feels sorry for the gorilla. Not so here. Laura is full out attracted to hairy beasts.
Despite the kinky subject matter, the movie is also just fun. It is incredibly amazing how much stock footage was crammed into this movie. Some of it actually really good. I loved it. Plus, amazingly, Charlotte Austin, who played Laura, was actually good. For those who have an appreciation for Ed Wood’s style of writing, you will find this film perhaps a little less cerebral but just as entertaining.
How was the movie? It was just too damn stupid. Again, I loved it. This was such a fun movie. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Thanks to Marc for recommending it.