THE JUNGLE CAPTIVE (1945)

The Jungle Captive was an unwanted second sequel shambling in the footsteps of Captive Wild Woman (1943) and Jungle Woman (1944), both of whom are reviewed here to no-one’s credit. By this third story, what is left is merely the most functional and boring of B-movie programmers. Even the stupifyingly unemotive Acquanetta wasn’t available to once again play Paula Dupree (alias ‘The Ape Woman’), replaced by Vicky Lane, an attractive Irish actress who later released albums as a jazz singer. She may as well have been vamping since she figures only in the last half of the movie and even then is a cypher until a climactic brief flurry of vengeful furry wrath.

Director Harold Young, whom we saw earlier tackling the equally low-wattage The Frozen Ghost, marks time shooting Dwight V. Babcock and M. Coates Webster’s supremely dull script in which the only creditable aspect is the continuity of Dupree’s fuzz-faced form being stolen from her exact resting place in Jungle Woman, that of a morgue tray.

This time, Dupree is on the receiving end of pioneering treatment by biochemist Mr Stendahl who has already managed to bring back a rabbit from death on the operating table. However, Stendahl is a miscast Otto Kruger, too much the relaxed avuncular scientist for the megalomaniac required here - he was better employed as the heroic Jeffrey Garth in Universal’s slightly better sequel Dracula’s Daughter back in 1936. 

Meanwhile there is the lovey-dovey pairing of his assistants, Don and Ann (Phil Brown and Amelita Ward) who plan to marry, once they deal with the slight detour to their plans of Stendahl wanting to put her brain into Dupree’s body. One the subject of casting problems, according to the book Universal Horrors, Ward was a replacement during filming for Bristol-born Australian Betty Bryant who was stalked during production by the unhealthily obsessed doctor brought in to treat her.

Nothing so eventful occurs on-screen though, despite a marginal flicker on interest in seeing another role for poor Acromegaly-afflicted Rondo Hatton. At least he has dialogue in the movie after his silent menace duty in the Sherlock Holmes entry Pearl of Death (1944). Sadly, his lines as Stendahl’s brutish henchman Moloch are as dull as anyone else’s and delivered in a gruff, rasping tone that must have been another tragic side-effect of his condition.

As befits many of the unimaginative B-pictures of this ilk, we have dogged cop Harrigan (Jerome Cowan), a crafty interrogator who circles his suspects until managing to show up just in time for gunplay at the climax. Stendahl shoots Moloch but is then strangled by his werewolf-like subject (a fleeting burst of animation reminiscent of how Frankenstein’s Monster was only aroused at the close of those sequels), it only remains for Harrigan to blow Dupree away too, thus sparing audiences any further primitive entertainment.