The White Gorilla
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, 1945, 62 m, NR
Directed by Harry L. Fraser. Stars Ray Corrigan, Lorraine Miller, George J. Lewis, et al.

The White Gorilla gives us two jungle flicks for the price of one. The first features stuntman (and frequent primate player) Ray “Crash” Corrigan as Steve Collins, an intrepid African explorer hell-bent on hunting down and wasting the ivory ape that savagely mauled him sometime before the opening credits. As he tends to his wounds, Collins relates the picture’s second yarn to us through some sweaty reminiscences that take on the shape of a grainy silent projected at the wrong speed. It’s all pretty boring stuff, but I managed to squirrel away a few images before nodding off: a wigged-out voodoo priestess, a towering statue of Cyclops with arms that can be swung up and down by a crank, and an enigmatic white boy who holds some sort of spell over the jungle’s beasties. What’s maddening is that not a single frame of this “back story” has anything to do with the titular simian. Actually, the flashbacks are culled from a 1927 ten-part serial named Perils of the Jungle, which starred Frank Merrill (from the long-lost Tarzan the Mighty) and was written by The White Gorilla scribe Harry L. Fraser. Compared to the scenes that make up the present day action in the underfinanced The White Gorilla, the production values for the Perils of the Jungle clips look downright lavish, and there are stunts involving packs of bloodthirsty lions and rampaging elephants that must’ve been dangerous as all get-out to shoot. (This truncated edition of Perils may be your only opportunity to view it; there’s allegedly a color-tinted 16mm print locked way at UCLA, but as of this writing there’s no plan to distribute it.) As incompatible as these two flicker shows are, Fraser and company try to link them up by slotting new reaction shots of Corrigan into the older footage. So, lucky us, we get to spend an awful lot of time watching “Crash” take in the action as he crouches behind this tree or that bush, which is pretty much all he had to do as the love-struck ape in White Pongo. Obviously, Collins is helpless to come to the rescue of his jungle buddies as they fall into one horrible scrape after another because their scenes were shot almost twenty years earlier! Now, I know the use of grimy stock footage is damn near compulsory for B-grade jungle fare like this, but before now I’ve never seen it account for more than half of a film’s running time. Worse, some shots are recycled two times or better. There’s also an overabundance of jungle noises on the soundtrack lest you forget where this wretched bore takes place.   

I don’t know whose bright idea it was to cast Corrigan in the lead role here, but he’s about as compelling as watching two tsetse flies make whoopee. And the wooden narration he’s given to help make sense out of the hopelessly patchwork plot is made even more mind-numbing by his bland, monotone delivery. It’s easy to see here why Corrigan spent most of his acting career sweating beneath a monkey mask, though those of you who enjoy watching him ape apes will be happy to learn that in this movie he gets to don the same lousy costume he wore in White Pongo. Oh, the horror, the horror! The White Gorilla also gives us two Ray Corrigan performances for the price of one! 

Directed by Fraser, who gave us equally forgettable tripe such as Jungle Menace with Frank Buck in 1937 and Jungle Man with Buster Crabbe in 1941, The White Gorilla is nothing more than a gauche Z-grade quickie designed for the sole purpose of making money. But since the film has fallen into public domain (it doesn’t surprise me that nobody cared enough to renew the copyright), nary a penny you spend on any one of the countless VHS or DVD versions floating around will go to these con-artists’ estates. At long last the public gets to stick it to these avaricious so-and-sos.  

So why was Collins molested by the albino galoot anyway? Intolerance, gentle reader. You see, the other apes ostracized poor whitey because of the color of his fur, and that’s what turned him into such an ill-tempered prick. (Call it white gorilla’s burden.) And how does any of this story relate to the one lifted from Perils of the Jungle? Hey, if the filmmakers themselves couldn’t figure it out, how in the name of Corrigan’s cornhole do you expect me to?  

June 19, 2007 

© Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.