Jungle Captive (1945) – Review

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 fair, the whole series was hindered by the fact that the character never quite managed to rise to the level of being interesting.

From the very beginning, it is clear that the filmmakers behind Jungle Captive were in desperate need of a coherent script and after 1944’s Jungle Woman I’m pretty sure they had a clue as where to go with this series of movies. The plot of this entry follows the absurd story of a deranged biochemist, Mr. Stendahl (Otto Kruger) who has this terrifying assistant, named Moloch the Brute (Rondo Hatton), steal the body of Paula Dupree The Ape Woman (Vicky Lane) from the city morgue. This results in the death of the morgue attendant and this sets Detective Harrigan (Jerome Cowan) from homicide to investigate the matter of the missing body and the murder. But what is the reason behind this body-snatching? Turns out that Stendahl has developed a way to bring the dead back to life via electricity and blood transfusions, unfortunately, he decides his pretty assistant Ann Forrester (Amelita Ward) would make a great blood donor and he brings her to his secluded laboratory located out of town. Any protestations she has about this treatment are explained away in the “name of science” and then stopped completely by the hands of Moloch.

“Let me take your hat and coat, and your blood if you don’t mind.”

As is required by any film in this genre, we have a protagonist who must save his one true love, and in this film, that comes in the form of Ann’s co-worker and fiancé Don Young (Phil Brown), who not only has to deal with a missing fiancé but being a suspect in Harrigan’s murder investigation. This due to a medical smock from Stendahl’s lab being found at the scene of the crime.  Unfortunately, Don is not much of hero and he spends much of the film’s conclusion tied to a chair and it’s the revived Paula who must save the day. It goes without saying that by this third film the writers were completely out of ideas, relying on simple clichés and some of the laziest pieces of writing ever brought to screen, and Otto Kruger’s mad scientist while entertaining to watch makes little to no sense. Stendahl trots out the usual tripe about the need for sacrifices “In the name of science”  but how he expects to announce his findings to the scientific community without immediately landing in jail for murder is beyond me.

“Do you think they’ll deliver the Nobel Prize to Alcatraz?”

Stendahl also doesn’t have only one murder on his hands as poor Dr. Fletcher from Captive Jungle Woman gets murdered by Moloch when the brute breaks into steal the doctor’s notes on Paula Dupree, then there is the fact that the blood and glandular transfusion on top of a proposed brain transplant will certainly be fatal to poor Ann. As for the revived Ape Woman, not much can be said of the performance by Vicky Lane as the role mostly requires her to stare vacantly off into space or wander around the woods like a bathing-beauty zombie.  But that’s when she’s not trapped under Jack Pierce’s Ape Woman make-up, and when your title character is pretty much a blank slate throughout your film the end result is not going to be good.

Note: The role of Paula Dupree, the Ape Woman was originated by Acquanetta but when Universal discovered that she was an African American passing herself as white they dropped her contract and she was replaced by blonde beauty Vicky Lane. Not a shining moment in Hollywood history.

The real star of this movie is actor Rondo Hatton, who suffered from the disorder acromegaly that results in excess growth of certain parts of the human body and gave him distorted features, which allowed Hollywood to bill him as “The monster without make-up.” While that does seem cruel and callous this was the 1940s and this terrible condition did give the actor a decent career and his appearance not only inspired many villains throughout cinema history, such as the killer in Disney’s The Rocketeer, but most famously he was the inspiration for The Creeper in the Scooby-Doo episode “Jeepers, it’s the Creeper.” As for his performance in Jungle Captive, Hatton was able to layer in a little bit of sympathy, his attraction to poor Ann Forester resulted in his dying his in an attempt to save her, but it was his pragmatic use of violence in the name of science that was his stand out characteristic.

This makes him the star of the film in my book.

Stray Observations:

• Stendahl was able to successfully restore life to a rabbit that had been dead for twelve hours, using electricity and a blood transfusion to revive it, but in all these “mad science” movies nobody seems concerned about the amount of brain damage that would result after due to the lack of oxygen over that much time.
• Stendahl justifies the stealing of Paula Dupree’s body because experimenting on her isn’t experimenting with humans, her being an ape woman, but Ann’s blood is required for the experiment and she is decidedly human. I’m starting to think Stendahl isn’t all that ethical.
• That Paula would be submissive after being whipped by Stendahl doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’d have expected her to yank the whip out of his hand and then wring his bloody neck with it.
• Stendahl is a biochemist and not a doctor but he plans on performing brain surgery only using Dr. Walters’s notes and a book off his own shelf, which I’m surprised wasn’t titled “Brain Surgery for Dummies.”
• Despite the fact that Paula has the strength of a gorilla and a very animalistic nature, Stendahl puts no security measures in place to keep her from wandering around. He may be a great biochemist but he’s shit at running mad science properly.

“I’m not a mad doctor, in fact, I don’t even have a PhD in mad chemistry.”

Directed by Harold Young, Universal’s Jungle Captive is one of many forgettable horror entries from the studios, which isn’t that strange as the previous two films in the series weren’t all that great, but Otto Kruger was the king of playing these types of erudite and charming villains and Rondo Hatton as the brutish Moloch gave more dimension to his character than both of the film’s protagonists, unfortunately, it had a nonsensical script that didn’t give our Ape Woman much to do, she kills one dog and one mad scientist and that’s about it, which dooms this effort to the trash heap of cinema. Jungle Captive isn’t entertaining in the “So bad it’s good” fashion and it certainly isn’t good enough to stand on its own merits.

Paula getting her last shot at revenge.

With Rondo Hatton running around committing murder, a mad scientist taking notes so he can perform impromptu brain surgery and an ape woman resurrected and let loose on the world, this should have been a fun movie, unfortunately, with boring protagonists and a plot that had more holes than a shipment of Swiss Cheese, Jungle Captive is a case study in how not to make a monster movie. Add in how poorly Acquanetta was treated by the studio and you have a feature film that is not only forgettable but is best forgotten.