CommentsXp
Best movie ever!
Dynamixor
The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
Geraldine
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
John W Chance
Here's a good concept wasted. It's a mixture of Ed Wood's bizarre writing talents and a text book example of bad movie making.On their honeymoon at his mountain home, Dan Fuller's wife, Laura, (played by Charlotte Austin) encounter his gorilla, Spanky, which he keeps in the basement-- Dan is apparently a big game hunter. In one of the several high points of the film, she shows an almost animal attraction for the gorilla, and vice versa. Later that night in the bridal chamber, the gorilla sneaks in and they again have another smoldering staring session, climaxed by Spanky pulling off her nightgown. (Is Ed Wood trying to tell us something?) Naturally, the husband shoots and kills the gorilla.Dan then has a psychiatrist conduct hypnotic regression sessions on Laura, as she had been previously talking to him about the possibility of having had past lives. We then discover that in her past life, she had been a gorilla! Of course, the 'hypnotic regression' theme was obviously drawn from the number one best selling book of 1956, 'The Search for Bridey Murphy,' in which a doctor regressed an American housewife who spoke in an Irish brogue and recounted in great detail her previous life as Bridey Murphy in Cork County, Ireland in the 18th century. We also can't help catching a little spin here on 'King Kong' (1933), for in this case the girl has a thing for the gorilla too! Dan then decides to take Laura with him to 'Africa' on safari for new animals. Here the film takes a sharp turn into obvious bad movie making with a Must To Avoid in capital letters: the dual personality theme is abruptly dropped and forgotten for the next 30 minutes or so. Instead we are subjected to pointless sequences of a tiger running through the jungle, fighting what appears to be a crocodile, and finally attacking Dan, who had been cluelessly stalking towards the camera seemingly oblivious to Laura's screams or the roars of the tiger, in non tension building shots.Finally, in the last five or six minutes of the film, Wood's ambivalent identity theme returns, as does a gorilla, who sweeps a sexually hungry looking Laura off her feet and takes her to the Bronson caves where she becomes queen of the gorillas. The end.As others have noted, Charlotte Austin's sexual stares are the high point of the film, and the low point is the needless and extended middle section that could have been totally dropped. If only the tightly done and well scripted first fifteen minutes could have continued with the development of Laura's sexual 'awakening!' We keep waiting to see her turn into a gorilla, as was done by Raymond Burr in the much better 'Bride of the Gorilla' (1951), but it never happens; we get the tedious tiger segments instead. A good concept has been disappointingly wasted here.Charlotte Austin's sexual stares linger in the mind, but not the rest of the film. I'll have to give it a two and half.
gftbiloxi
Laura Carson (Charlotte Austin) has just married big game hunter Dan Fuller (Lance Fuller.) On her wedding night she finds herself strangely attracted to Spanky, a gorilla gone bad that Dan keeps locked up in a basement cage. Before you can say "Ed Wood wrote this," there are gun shots, nightmares, hypnotism, and Dan's unhappy discover that bride Laura may be the reincarnation of a gorilla queen! Can you dig it? Now and then a bad movie becomes unintentionally hilarious, but most of the time bad movies are simply bad. BRIDE AND THE BEAST actually teeters between the two, and this is largely due to the two leads: even in the face of producer-director Adrian Weiss' obvious lack of talent, Austin and Fuller prove unexpectedly competent, and they actually manage to hold the worst of the dialogue at bay. What this means, however, is that BRIDE never self-destructs in the ludicrous way of such films as PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE--and in consequence it isn't so much unintentionally hilarious as it is unintentionally amusing in a mild sort of way.The film is full of absurdities. Dan Fuller's basement, where the ill-fated gorilla Spanky is caged, has a refrigerator, but illumination is provided by torch. Servant Taro (Johnny Roth, in what seems to be his only film role) is very obviously a white man in bad "native" make-up; he runs around saying "Bwana" a lot. There is a lot of canned wild animal footage, shots of Africa that look suspiciously like shots of South America, and men in bad gorilla costumes. And Ed Wood being Ed Wood, he just can't resist writing references to angora sweaters into the script.The print is mediocre, but it is worth pointing out that it was probably never very good to begin with, and the DVD release comes with several bonuses of no interest. Fans of cult films, and especially die hard fans of Ed Wood, will enjoy it--and for their sake I give it three stars. But just about every one else should give it a miss.GFT, Amazon Reviewer
Paulo R. C. Barros
"The Bride and the Beast" (1958 - 73 minutes), photographed originally in black & white, is a supernatural drama of terror and scientific fiction produced and directed by Adrian Weiss. The script is of the fantastic Edward D. Wood Jr, the known Ed Wood, director, writer, producer and actor, also called "the worst movie maker of all time" for carrying through cheap films of dubious quality and with amateur actors. The incredible thing is that, after his death, all his work had become "cult", turning him into one of the most acclaimed accomplishing of the sort. The film tells the history of Dan Fuller, a young and famous hunter and his pretty bride, Laura, that is strangely seduced by a gorilla. Dan keeps in captivity, in the basement of his house, an enormous gorilla that he brought from Africa. In the night of his honeymoon, the dangerous beast becomes very aggressive, escapes from its cage and goes up to the room to meet the young woman. Something very strange happens between the beauty and the beast and Dan has to kill the gorilla. From there, Laura starts to have terrible nightmares, making her husband calls a psychiatrist. When the doctor hypnotize Laura, he discovers that she was a gorilla in one of hers last life's. Dan has set appointments to a new safari in Africa and takes his wife with him. Nearest the wild animals, the couple will live moments of great tension when Laura is kidnapped by one gorilla. A classic trash movie.
counterrevolutionary
This awful flick offers little scope for screenwriter Ed Wood's unique, uh, "talents," being mostly made up of boring stock footage. There's hardly even a plot, which may be a mercy considering what Ed Wood's plots tend to be like.The whole "queen of the gorillas" thing is introduced early in the film, and then just dropped until about seven minutes from the end, as our protagonists head off to Africa to capture some giraffes and rhinos (Howard Hawks so ripped this off for HATARI!) and hunt panthers and tigers.Yes, tigers. Much of the stock footage they had featured a pair of tigers, so either Adrian Weiss or Ed Wood came up with the notion that a ship carrying a pair of tigers had wrecked on the African coast.Uh, yeah.
