(1951)
Overall: MEH
The Wolf Man except in the jungle, Bride of the Gorilla sees director Curt Siodmak trying to recapture his previous success with the Universal classic, going as far as to cast Lon Chaney Jr. though only in a supporting role. Raymond Burr steps in to play the doomed individual that gets cursed/drugged by a native woman so that he can turn into a primate beast, but he is a less sympathetic character than Larry Talbot which gives Siodmak's script another differentiating quality besides the exotic setting. A B-movie that was allegedly shot in ten days, the love triangle plus Burr's transformation from a gruff plantation manager who kills his boss in order to snag his wife into a guy in a monkey suit has enough melodrama to keep the pacing from dragging. Still, the film makes a detrimental misstep in that it fails to show said monkey throughout almost its entire running time. The most that we get are a couple of shots of Burr's hands going all black and hairy, plus one or two moments where we see his ape reflection in the mirror. This is a bogus error for a cheap monster flick that did not have the budget for some ghastly make-up to throw on its star, but the serious presentation of a silly premise almost gets by otherwise.
(1953)
Dir - Curt Siodmak/Herbert L. Strock
Overall: MEH
The first in a series of science fiction films from screenwriter Ivan Tors, (who initially pitched it along with actor Richard Carlson as a television series), The Magnetic Monster is one of the more talky B-movies of an era that was ripe with far too many of them. A low-budget production from Tors' own company, it recycles a few minutes of special effects footage from the 1934 German film Gold, which provides the only visual flourishes to white people having endless conversations about a magnetic substance that continues to grow in size and ergo threaten humanity with its deadly radioactive content. There are a couple of familiar faces on board besides Carlson, with Invasion of the Body Snatchers' King Donovan as his Office of Scientific Investigation partner and sour-puss character actor Kathleen Freeman as his secretary, but they can only do so much with such uninteresting material. The "all talk, no action" presentation is the reason for its lackadaisical pacing which discusses the danger that is facing everyone instead of showing it enough for the viewers to give a shit. The concept itself is too boring and inaccessible, (magnetism, how terrifying), to even work with a bigger budget and punchier script, but the cast and crew try their best at least.
(1956)
Overall: WOOF
Though it was distributed by Universal as part of its B-unit of monster movies, Curucu, Beast of the Amazon has more of the hallmarks of Poverty Row junk heaps and is a far cry from the studio's better works in the genre. As the title would suggest, it was shot on location in the Amazon River in Brazil and actually gives some native actors dialog instead of delegating the speaking roles to Caucasians in brown face. The Scooby-Doo plot twist may further disappoint fans who were expecting an Amazon creature of immense power and destruction, but the monster of the title looks cheap and ridiculous anyway so it is probably a good thing that it barely shows up. On that note though, this leaves a talky and ergo disappointingly dull script to play itself out where forgettable, chisel-jawed hero John Bromfield and sci-fi queen Beverly Garland have boring conversations and no chemistry with each other throughout the jungle landscape. Writer/director Curt Siodmak's few efforts from behind the lens were never that impressive to begin with, but one would think that the guy who wrote The Wolf Man could at least deliver something better than this.
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