Universal’s Cheela, the Ape Woman series comes to a close with this third and final chapter, not getting close to the number of outings The Wolf Man had achieved, but what’s sad about this trilogy is the recasting of plays Paula Dupree/Cheela who played the Ape Woman and the reason behind it, though to be…
Category: Film
Movies
Jungle Woman (1944) – Review
In this second of the Cheela, the Ape Woman series, Universal Pictures decided that rather than trying to recapture the success of The Wolf Man they would, instead, attempt to mimic the success of Val Lewton’s Cat People, unfortunately, this sequel fails on almost every level and being a rip-off of a much better film…
The Climax (1944) – Review
A Universal film taking place in an opera house and starring Boris Karloff as a deranged killer must have, at the outset, seemed like great ingredients for an excellent horror movie with its obvious elements being lifted from The Phantom of the Opera, but what we have here is actually more melodrama than horror. Thus…
Captive Wild Woman (1943) – Review
If turning a man into a wolf could bring big box office returns then a movie about a gorilla being turned into a woman must have seemed like the logical next step, at least that is what I assume was in the minds of the execs over at Universal Pictures when they released their first…
The Mad Ghoul (1943) – Review
Decades before George Romero would turn the zombie film into a horror genre unto itself, Hollywood was still trying to figure out how to utilize this particular shuffling dead menace. The 1932 Bela Lugosi film White Zombie was the closest representation at the time but with Universal Pictures’ The Mad Ghoul we get a mindless…