SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Lawbolisted Powerful

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

hwg1957-102-265704 'Jungle Man' or 'Drums Of Africa' is a low budget adventure set somewhere in Africa with a busy plot taking in a search for a lost city (a misplaced Angkor Wat!), a search for a cure for a tropical disease, a tribe on the warpath (though that plot line never develops) and a pack of lions invading a village, not to mention a vague love triangle. All flavoured with stock footage of cute or cantankerous animals. All that you want in a jungle picture. Except excitement.Buster Crabbe shows off his manly chest, Sheila Darcy shows off her womanly legs and Vince Barnett shows off his fine beard. Buster gets a chance also to show his swimming skills. Charles Middleton is rather sweet in a good performance as Rev. James, though to see him and Buster Crabbe sit down together in amity and not war with each other in interstellar space in a Flash Gordon serial was rather strange.Not that good but there are nice shots of elephants and hippos if you like that sort of thing.

bensonmum2 If you're a fan of random stock footage of animals from the early 20th Century, this is the movie for you. At least half of the film is taken up with clips of animals that are so poorly shot, it's often difficult to see what you're looking at. Animals that in nature are continents apart are presented as if they live in the same African jungle. I swear that some of the animals even appear to be in zoos or other unnatural settings. Piece these clips together, throw in a nonsensical story about the search for a lost city by some bored rich dudes, and add an even more nonsensical plot line where Buster Crabbe is searching for a cure to a deadly disease by slaving over a Bunsen burner in the jungle - you've got Jungle Man. By the time our heroes come down with the illness, I had long ceased to care about any of it. I was rooting for their deaths as it might mean the movie would end faster. It's all a total bore. The one hour run-time feels more like an eternity. If you can't tell, I didn't care much for Jungle Man.The lone highlight for me was seeing Buster Crabbe and Charles Middleton together on screen. I'm not much a fan of the old Flash Gordon serial, but I realize it's historical significance. Seeing Flash and Ming together here was pretty cool.

Red-Barracuda This is the third jungle adventure I have seen from director Harry Fraser. The other two were The White Gorilla and The Savage Girl. This one, Drums of Africa, is at best marginally better than those other two. Harry sure knew how to knock out shoddy product in this genre. Like the other two films, this one is full of stock footage of wild animals. Although I don't really mind this as this footage is always kind of quite good fun to watch. In fact some of the scenes with the lions and tigers were actually pretty good, especially where some guy wrestles with them. Impressive stuff. My main gripe about the movie would most probably be its rubbish story line. There's a thread about a lost city, a fatal disease and a multiple lion attack. Nothing wrong with having a few things going on, but with the exception of the lion attack, the other story elements are dealt with very half-heartedly. The lost city turns out to be, you guessed it, more stock footage; this time hilariously it's shots of Angkor Wat which is of course in Asia. It just goes to show the things that they could get away with back in the 40's. Also, on that subject, I could never quite understand why there was a tiger in the middle of the African jungle. I think they just included it because they had it. The deadly killer disease is the other plot thrust of the story. And it's this that explains the presence of Buster Crabbe's doctor character in the middle of the jungle. He's there to find an antidote and help the natives. But this too is pretty lacklustre, and it really is hard to care very much about this plot element at all.Drums of Africa is a pretty poor jungle adventure overall. It's not completely devoid of entertainment though.

Michael_Elliott Drums of Africa (1941) * 1/2 (out of 4) A group of people head out into the jungles of Africa in search of the "City of the Dead" but think jungles, the wild life and natives cause several problems. Buster Crabbe leads the cast and adds a little excitement to this film but overall it drags for the most part. There's a lot of stock footage of various jungle animals and this stuff is fun to watch but the actual "story" of the film is a dull and boring mess. Not to mention that the whole set up never really pays off.The film is on various public domain labels under the title Jungle Man.