In a performance consisting mostly of grunts and one word sentences, blonde bombshell Gale Sherwood finds her Jungle hunk when diamond hunter Leif Erickson (no relation to the famous explorer) locates her after his plane crashes in the middle of her kingdom. He learns that his ruthless employer (Douglas Dumbrille) killed her American parents in front of her when she was a child, leaving her in the jungle to be raised by the natives. Erickson fights to have Dumbrille charged for the ancient crime, and gets help from Dumbrille's floozy wife (Veda Ann Borg) who is obviously in lust with Erickson.This leads to the potential of cat-fights between Borg and Sherwood and lots of acting in getting the guilty party the justice he deserves. Silly, melodramatic and cheaply made, this is still an enjoyable campy experience, perfect for 1940's Saturday matinée audiences needing an escape after the end of the war, and today, it is still good for a few laughs. Borg gets the best lines, Dumbrille is as sinister as ever, and Frank Jenks provides some corny comedy.
... View MoreThis dull, low-budget, black & white Poverty Row potboiler set in untamed Hollywood studio replicas of the Dark Continent pits a happy-go-lucky aviator against a murderous millionaire diamond mine owner. The contrived and predictable plot concerns a double-murder in the past and the sensational subject matter of a white woman who serves as a princess for an African tribe. You know that you are in trouble when the footage of a water buffalo tangling with a python wrapped around its neck is more exciting than any of the shenanigans in the story. The performances are pretty solid with Leif Erickson relishing the role of the hero while dismissing the idea that he could be a hero. Douglass Dumbrille makes a first-rate villain, and his crisp dialogue delivery and body language make him appear quite sinister.Penniless pilot Steve Blake (Leif Erickson of "Invaders from Mars") and his co-pilot Hoppy Owens (Frank Jenks of "Christmas in Connecticut") hear about a flying job that pays $25-hundred dollars. Mine owner Mark Harper (Douglass Dumbrille of "World for Ransom") hires them to find a village and a tribe that has been a thorn in his side. Blake smells something fishy in Harper's request. Harper explained that he doesn't want to start a war with the local tribes. Instead, he wants to make peace with them. Nevertheless, Blake suspects Harper's motives particularly because a man of Harper's prominence could whistle up government troops. When Blake and Hoppy arrive at Harper's house, they notice that armed guards patrol the estate. No sooner has the red-blooded Blake shown up than he encounters an old flame, Connie (Veda Ann Borg of "Mildred Pierce") that once he ran around with five years ago. Connie is married now to Mark Harper. She hates her new life, cooped up in an estate in the middle of nowhere with nowhere for her to go and spend money. Harper is a jealous man and he doesn't trust Connie. Our heroes fly out the next morning, but they develop engine trouble and have to set down. No sooner are they back on the ground than they are surrounded by spear wielding warriors with bones in their noses and suspicion in their eyes. The biggest surprise in store for our heroes in the blonde goddess named Meelah who leads the small native tribe. Gale Sherwood plays the eponymous heroine. She was saved from murderous whites by a tribesman. Since her rescue, she has grown up in the jungle, somewhat like Tarzan. During the three weeks that Blake and Hoppy spend with Meelah, Blake teaches Meelah and Tonga (Ernest Whitman of "Congo Maisie") some rudimentary English, enough to facilitate interpersonal communication. Eventually, Tonga and Meelah show Blake a locket with Meelah's deceased mother and father and a diary that contains background information about the Comstock family. Joe Comstock (John Dehner of "The Left Handed Gun") owned the mine and needed an engineer. He hired Harper and Harper hired Berger (Matt Willis of "The Mysterious Doctor") as his right-hand man. Comstock, his wife Mary (Cay Forrester of "Queen of the Amazons"), and their young daughter were camping out in the wild on an expedition to the mine. Harper orders Berger to kill both parents in cold blood. When Blake and Hoppy return three weeks later, Harper is doubly suspicious. Indeed, he gets the drop of Blake when Meelah breaks into Harper's house. Meelah jealously tries to stab Connie. Blake helps Meelah escape by disarming one of Harper's guards. Harper surprises them and disarms Blake. Harper has Berger give Blake and a thorough beating with the fists to persuade him to reveal the whereabouts of the native village. Hoppy cannot stand to watch as Blake is pummeled by the sadistic Berger. Hoppy points out on the map where the village is located. Harper turns our heroes over to one of his trusted guards, Stony (Art Foster of "The Verdict"), and they lock them up in a jail cell underneath Harper's house. Harper and Berger launch an expedition to attack Meelah's village. Meanwhile, Connie and Harper has patched up their relationship. Nevertheless, Connie decides to help Blake escape. She slips them a knife and shoves Stone against the jail bars. Our heroes escape, crank up the plane and fly out to warn Meelah. Initially, Meelah wants nothing to do with Blake after she catches lover boy in Connie's arms. Paul Bache penned the original story and screenplay and must have been inspired by the legendary Edgar Rice Burroughs character Tarzan because the heroine and her parents strive to survive in the jungle. "Revenge of the Zombies" director Steve Seeley depicts the confrontational elements of the story in flashbacks among scenes set in a barrister's office. This is about as sophisticated as this lackluster yarn gets and feminist scholars will come away with nothing worthy of documentation from this harmless little frolic. The barrister's office is across the street from the police station. Blake rushes in at lunch and confronts the barrister and tells his tale of woe. He claims that he is ready to kill Harper if Harper is turned loose. The Alpha DVD is pretty rugged, with excerpts from dialogue missing.
... View More(Some Spoilers) Hokey but watchable Trazan-like jungle movie with the very sexy and beautiful Gale Shergood, who was only 18 at the time, playing the blond jungle princess Meelah. Meelah's life was saved while she was just an infant by native chieftain Tonga played by the very talented black actor Ernest Whitman. It's Whitman who shocked audiences, as well as the star of the movie Ray Milland, two years earlier in playing the part of the hopelessly alcoholic black man who talked to himself, in the unforgettable Bellevue Hospital drunk-tank ward scene, in the 1945 Academy Award winning film "The Lost Weekend".The man who murdered Meelah's parents Bob & Mary Comstock, John Dehnen & Cay Forrester, Mark Harper, Douglas Dumbrille, had taken over the diamond mine that he was a partner with the Comstocks. Harper is still worried that if their bodies are ever found with his and his #1 henchman Berger, Matt Willis, .38 slugs in them he'd be arrested and tried for their murders! The problem for Harper is that Tonga and his native warriors buried the Comstock's bodies deep in the African jungle where he'll have a hard, if not impossible, time to find them.This brings the hero of the movie freelance pilot Steve Blake, Leif Ericson, onto the picture together with his wisecracking sidekick Happy Owens, Frank Jenks. The two who were hired by Harper to fly out in the uncharted Kawali Range in deepest and darkest Africa and find, without them really knowing it, the burial place where the Comestocks are. It's then that Harper would have his goons sent there and destroy the evidence, the Comstock's bodies, of him having murdered them. Crash landing in the jungle both Steve & Happy are captured by Tonga's natives who after showing them that he and Happy are really the good guys, not Harper's goons, in the movie end up winning him and his men over. It was Harper who was at war with Tonga for the last twenty years in him trying to find the Comstock's bodies that would in fact prove that he not Tonga's warriors murdered the couple!It's when Steve gets to see Meelah, and she him, sparks starts to fly and it's love at first sight. Not only is Meelah a knockout of a babe but is the only living witness, at age one, to identify Harper and Berger as her parents murderers! It's then that Steve becomes determined to get Meelah, as well as have the exhumed Comstock's bodies, back to civilization and, by Meelah implicating and testifying against him, have Harper brought to Justice! That's if Harper with his life hanging in the balance just sits back and allows Steve to do that!Besides the very sexy teenage Gale Sherwood as Meelah there's also the very voluptuous looking 32 year old Veda Ann Borg in the movie as both Harper's wife and Steve's ex-girlfriend Connie Harper. Connie is bored to tears living in the jungle away from the glitz and party life, in New York Paris and London, that she's been used to and wants Steve to take her with him when he checks out, after taking care of business, of the "Dark Continent". This leads to a conflict between not just Connie and her abusive husband Mark but Meelah as well over Steve's, how lucky can the guy get, affections.***SPOILERS*** In the end things work out just right, Hollywood style, for everyone involved with the best thing to happen is that Harper ends up getting all that's coming to him not from Steve, who planned to do the job himself, but from the long arm of the law that he was attempting to escape from.
... View MoreLow budget jungle adventure. A brief 62 minute escape and quite predictable. Leif Erickson and his transport co-pilot buddy Frank Jenks crash land in the jungle in hopes of surveying a diamond mine. While working for the mine owner Douglass Dumbrille, the two fliers encounter a savage jungle tribe. To their astonishment a blonde white woman (Gale Sherwood)rules as a goddess being raised since infancy by the tribe. It turns out that the "blonde savage" is the daughter of the mine owner's murdered partner. So it is destination stateside to see if justice prevails; or will someone get away with murder. Other players: John Dehner, James Logan, Ernest Whitman and the alluring Veda Ann Borg.
... View More