Captive Wild Woman

As much as I love the Universal horror films, I have seen quite a few duds from them. House of Dracula is pretty uneventful, and melodramas like She-Wolf Of London and Night Key that are disguised as horror films are always a damn disappointment, even if they have Boris Karloff in them. This is a dud as well. It features John Carradine as Dr. Sigmund Walters, your typical mad scientist type who is in love with a girl who is way too pretty for him (played by Evelyn Ankers of the original Wolf Man). Insane with jealousy, Dr. Walters kidnaps a gorilla that belongs to Ankers’ boyfriend, circus trainer Fred Mason (Milburn Stone). So he transfers the blood of a woman into the body of a gorilla which makes the gorilla turn into a woman, played by Acquanetta.As you can see, the science in this film is flawless. Acquanetta the gorilla falls in love with the trainer but when she sees he’s got a girlfriend, he reverts into her savage self again. Which is bad luck, since the boyfriend was counting on the gorilla lady to hypnotize the lions and tigers. You know what? This god-damn movie‘s plot is ridiculously complicated, to the point where I stopped giving a crap less than halfway through. Not that there is nothing worthy about it, after all, Evelyn Ankers and Acquanetta are both very attractive women, and John Carradine over-acts as always, it’s all very entertaining.One thing that I did like a lot were the animal training sequences. Seeing the lions and tigers getting angry at each other and doing the circus tricks was filmed in a very documentary-like style and it stands out above the rest of the movie. Sadly the story is pretty lame and, as you know, too complicated for it’s own good. To say that this is a horror movie is to say that Spinal Tap is a concert film, it’s just not the truth. Skip it.