1944 Directed by Reginald Le Borg
Paula, the ape woman, has survived the ending of CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN and is running around a creepy old sanitarium run by the kindly Dr. Fletcher, reverting to her true gorilla form every once in a while to kill somebody.
Acquanetta Evelyn Ankers J. Carrol Naish Samuel S. Hinds Lois Collier Milburn Stone Douglass Dumbrille Richard David Nana Bryant Pierre Watkin Christian Rub Alec Craig Edward M. Hyans Jr. Tom Keene John Carradine Vince Barnett Wilson Benge Diane Carroll Edward Clark Heinie Conklin Ray Corrigan Fern Emmett Nolan Leary Charles Marsh Beatrice Roberts Ray Walker
You can take the girl out of the jungle but not the jungle out of the girl. Or maybe you can take the girl out of the gorilla but not the gorilla out of the girl? Somewhere in there lives a pithy moral.
Jungle Woman is comprised of about 20-25% recap of Captive Jungle Woman, flashbacks within flashbacks as the story unfolds in the trial aftermath of a shadowy murder.
Acquanetta returns, this time able to suddenly speak. She’s been resurrected by a doctor “devoted to glandular disturbances,“ who had witnessed her heroic rescue at the end of the first picture to find he was able to bring her back. And make her human again.
Ah but Acquanetta, our jungle…
Dr. Carl Fletcher (J. Carrol Naish) is on trial for the murder of Paula (Acquanetta) when several people are brought into testify including Beth Mason (Evelyn Ankers). Soon we are told how Paula ended up coming to the home of Dr. Fletcher and why things spun out of control.
JUNGLE WOMAN is the first of two sequels to CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN and in many parts of the horror community it is called the worst Universal horror film ever made. I personally wouldn't call it the absolute worst but there's no question that it's a total waste of a film and one that really makes you sit back and wonder what the studio was thinking when it got the green light.…
Reginald Le Borg’s horror in which a crazy scientist (J. Carrol Naish) medicines Paula the ape-woman (Acquanetta) and brings her back to his laboratory for trials. With Evelyn Ankers.
The story concerns Paula the ape woman (Acquanetta) who is living and well, and making her way around a spooky old sanatorium run by the gentle Dr. Fletcher (J. Carrol Naish), also degenerating to her actual gorilla form every often in a while to murder somebody.
Acquanetta gives an okay performance in her role as Paula, the woman who has a dark side towards her, but doesn’t show a great deal of determination in trying to cause trouble, while J. Carrol Naish is decent as Fletcher, the doctor who is in…
JUNGLE WOMAN appears to have been made to convince non-believers that CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN wasn’t a fluke. Universal was perfectly happy to grind out B-movie quickies that held its audience in contempt.
First of all, the first 16-minutes consists of excessive footage from CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN ... including a number of the Clyde Beatty inserts! So, in some cases, we have reused footage of stock footage. This wouldn’t have been so terrible if the total running time wasn’t only 61-minutes!
Next, we have some truly atrocious performances. Evelyn Ankers and Milburn Stone are back (now married), but they have nothing to do aside from introducing the reused footage. J. Carrol Naish is the doctor who has…
Weird sequel where the returning characters are shoehorned in for 90 seconds and the "monster" only appears as a corpse.
Jungle Woman was the second in a trilogy of ape woman films begun with Captive Wild Woman and subsequently concluded in Jungle Captive. The first two of these starred the exotically beautiful Acquanetta as a woman who had the ability to transform into an ape when aroused (she was replaced by Vicky Lane in the third film). The series was a belated attempt by Universal to add another famous monster to their ongoing line-up, which already included the Frankenstein, Dracula, Mummy, Invisible Man, and Wolf Man series, all of which had started to team-up and meet one another in films around this point.
However, the Jungle Woman series never became as popular as the others or would meet any of…
A sequel that recycles a lot of footage from the original film, which itself featured a ton of footage from another film. Overall, a real mess. And, unfortunately, a real bore.
It annoys me that by the mid 40s, Universal was content with churning out their B pictures without any care whatsoever. This movie squanders Acquanetta and Evelyn Ankers, managing to make a 60 minute runtime feel like 4 hours. While I appreciate that these films were made on a ridiculously low budget it seems embarrassing that one of the largest studios would churn out something that looks derivative of the works from poverty row.
Jungle Woman is a boring slog. It doubles down on inane babble, perpetuates an ultra conservative view of women and includes scenes of horrific violence towards animals.
What a piece of shit.
The animal trainer stuff from Captive Wild Woman is hard to watch, but there's enough wacky shit going on elsewhere that I had a net positive time with it. This sequel recycles a ton of that bad footage and replaces the good parts with bland '40s genre tropes. I could watch crap like this all day, but that doesn't mean it's good.
First off, I have to admit I was unaware this was actually the second instalment in Universal's "Captive Wild Woman" trilogy.
I will now have to watch part 1 and 3 too, even if I have a gut feeling this film spent a good third of its one hour playtime recapping the first film.
Anyway, there is not an awful lot to say about this film.
It's a film about a were-ape, and takes elements from "The Wolfman" while having strong similarities to "Cat People" and "The Leopard Man".
However, it is at no point even remotely as good as those films.
It's a largely forgettable film, it never sinks or lifts off, it just floats.
Well this sure took awhile to get going. There is a lot of flashback stock footage from the first movie "Captive Wild Woman".
Even once it does get going, the rest of the movie feels like a retread of the first film, with its beast woman falling for a guy and becoming jealous... only without any of the lion taming scenes from "Clyde Beatty and his incredible brass bollocks"!
