The Bride and the Beast / The White Gorilla
The good folks at VCI do all fans of classic gorilla suit acting a big favor with the release of this great double feature. THE BRIDE AND THE BEAST(1958) was directed by Adrian Weiss and more importantly, written by cult icon Edward D. Wood, Jr. It starts off with Dan and Laura on their way to Dan's house after getting hitched, with a typical Wood thunderstorm about to break. For some reason, Laura has never been to Dan's place so she is a little shocked to learn that Dan keeps his pet gorilla Spanky in his cellar. Dan's a big game hunter and found Spanky when he was a little gorilla . From the beginning Laura is strangely attracted to Spanky and the gorilla seems to feel likewise. Spanky also really likes Laura's angora sweater. Unfortunately for Spanky, things go tragically when he escapes his cage and goes to the bedroom where Dan and Laura have separate beds. Laura comes to Spanky in a trance and Spanky rips off her night gown. But Dan the asshole wakes up and gets his night stand .45 out, pumping Spanky full of lead. He doesn't even get out of bed. Dan thinks it's over and done but Laura continues to have dreams and other troubling feelings that eventually cause the couple to seek help. After realizing that Laura's dreams are comprised entirely of safari stock footage, the shrink recommends the obvious, a past life regression session. Around this time in America there was a bit of past life regression mania due to the highly publicized Bridey Murphy case. Past lives had been the subject of numerous horror flicks, among them THE SHE CREATURE, I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF and THE UNDEAD. So it turns out Laura was basically a gorilla queen at some point, which as the shrink points out, may explain her attraction to angora. Obviously. Dan's not buying it and decides to proceed with their Congo honeymoon which is just a horrible fucking idea. Once in Africa, the plot is padded out with Dan and Taro, his Indian bearer, being hired to track two escaped Indian tigers that are running around killing guys. The ship the tigers were on crashed and the tigers somehow made it to gorilla country, or perhaps the producer had some tiger stock footage and ran with it. Against impossible odds, Laura is reunited with her gorilla family and Dan is left to wonder why.
As a cool bonus, the film comes with commentary by Charlotte Austin (Laura), Slick Slavin, who has one line as an Indian army officer, and horror film experts Tom Weaver and Bob Burns. Burns is a gorilla suit actor from way back and is filled with info on the small group of guys like Steve Calvert(Spanky) who played gorillas in Hollywood. If you're interested in this stuff, then you'll enjoy it. Austin is a great sport about he whole thing and Slavin is one as well.
The commentary gets a little off track at times but is still pretty cool and an increasingly rare item for films this old.
As a back up feature, we get THE WHITE GORILLA from 1945. Barely an hour long, it's not the psycho-sexual drama that THE BRIDE AND THE BEAST was but it has some cool stuff. It pretty much consist of stock footage, narration, and a vague new plot involving a trading post and a missing expedition. As the lone survivor of the missing group, Ray "Crash " Corrigan stumbles into the post and tells his story of having seen the fabled white gorilla. The white gorilla is an outcast due to his color and he is pissed of about it. He man- handles Corrigan and gets into a fight with a black gorilla. A lot of the picture involves Corrigan witnessing the events of the stock footage which comes from a silent serial called PERILS OF THE JUNGLE. Corrigan observes the footage from behind bushes or while up in a tree and relates what's happening to the viewer. The white and black gorilla footage was shot for the feature and mostly involves gorillas slapping around Corrigan and a member of the expedition. The serial footage is what you'd expect from a silent jungle picture but has some cool altars, idols and other jungle trappings. Corrigan plays one of the gorillas when he's not playing Steve, as he was a top gorilla actor at the time. He even has the uncanny ability as Steve to narrate events he couldn't have seen such as the black gorilla's thoughts about his white rival. It ends with a woman from the post going out and settling the score for Steve as he has had his ass kicked twice by the white gorilla, and just isn't up to it.
The commentary track on this one features Tom Weaver and Bob Burns and goes into some great stuff about the gorilla actors and the life of Crash Corrigan. Both these guys really know this stuff and it's pretty entertaining if you have an interest in this sort of thing.