Jungle Jim (Johnny Weissmuller) sees a plane crash into the river. He saves the pilot who turns out to be Ronald Cameron (William Henry). Cameron says he is looking for a missing professor named Dunham (Joel Friedkin) who is the dean of biochemistry at Cairo University. Dunham is here at the request of the University doing some research. The last time anyone saw him he was searching for a rare animal called an Ocongo.
The Ocongo is a relative of the Bongo and the Okapi. It is also akin to the Antelope and the Zebra. It looks like a small horse with stripes on its flanks and neck. The animal has a fondness for eating a plant called the Mandrove. When the Ocongo eats the exotic plant a chemical reaction in the animal’s glands creates a powerful narcotic. The animals are worth a lot of money. Unfortunately you have to kill the animal and extract its glands to get the drug.
A tribe that lives in the Ocongo country worships the animal. When Jim and Cameron get to the village they find that it is deserted. Later they find that the only ones left are the women and children who are hiding in a cave. Leta (Sherry Moreland), one of the women from the tribe tells Jim that white men came and took away all of the men of the tribe. Jungle Jim knows the tribe’s customs and they have heard that Jim is a friend to the jungle and the jungle tribes. Leta agrees to show them the way to the Ocongo grazing grounds. On the way they run into a sandstorm and one of the best giant spiders ever.
What Jim doesn’t know if that Cameron is actually the leader of the white men that are trying to capture the Ocongos and harvest the drug. The professor is a prisoner that is being used to extract the Ocongo glands.
“Jungle Jim: Fury of the Congo” was released in 1951 and was directed by William Berke. It is the sixth of sixteen Jungle Jim movies produced by Columbia Pictures. It is a jungle Adventure film starring Johnny Weissmuller.
In this movie Jim gets to battle a Leopard and that extremely cool giant spider. Where it came from I don’t know but it came out of nowhere and was the best part of the film. He also gets to withstand a couple sandstorms, quicksand, and a bunch of nasty white men. You also get to see him swing on a few vines. In addition there is an Ocongo stampede that does away with a couple white guys. Jungle Jim films may be racist but for the most part they managed to get it that the white men are usually the bad guys and are all out for greed. Some things never change.
There are also a lot of interesting views of Vasquez Rocks in the Sierra Pelona Mountains of California. Other parts of the film were shot in Corriganville. Vasquez Rocks may have become famous due to the Star Trek television show episode “The Arena” there but the place has been used both before and since in dozens of movies and television shows.
Jim’s sidekick was Tamba the Chimp. The film was narrated by James Seay. Ocongos are basically ponies with stripes painted on them. They look nothing like Bongos, Okapis or Antelopes but they do resemble a zebra where someone took an eraser to most of its stripes.