Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (William Beaudine, 1952)

The natives of Kola-Kola Island, including Chief Rakos and his daughter Nona (Charlita) find crooner Duke Mitchell and his partner comedian Sammy Petrillo (playing themselves), who fell out of a plane they were taking to perform for troops in Guam. Duke and Nona hit it off, while Sammy finds himself having to deal with the unwanted attentions of Nona's heavyset sister Saloma. Nona acts as lab assistant to Dr. Zabor (Bela Lugosi), a scientist engaged in evolutionary experiments. Zabor is himself in love with Nona, and doesn't take kindly to Duke's obvious interest in her. Like Saloma, Zabor's lab chimpanzee Ramona takes a shine to Sammy, and locks him in with her in her cage. Pepe Bordo, the local policeman, offers to use his wireless set to contact one of the other islands and arrange to get Duke and Sammy off the island, but Nona is saddened by the thought of losing Duke. Later, Duke, Sammy, and Zabor attend dinner with Chief Rakos and his daughters. Duke and Nona sneak away to discuss wedding plans, unaware Zabor's manservant Chula is spying on them. Chula reports this to Dr. Zabor, who then uses a serum to turn Ramona into a smaller monkey (not to mention a different kind), and somehow concludes that now he can turn a man into a gorilla. Chula grabs Duke, and brings him to Dr. Zabor, who sure enough turns him into the Brooklyn Gorilla of the title.

This movie hurts. Quite badly, in fact. Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo blatantly lifted their whole act from Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who justifiably sued them. Duke, however, doesn't have a third of Dino's suavity or musical talent (he sounds like he's in physical pain at times during his songs), while Sammy is like an even more annoying version of Jerry Lewis, if such a thing is possible. (I maintain Jerry is at his finest in a rare mostly-serious role as talk show host Jerry Langford in Scorsese's The King of Comedy.) Literally every line out of his mouth is a bad joke, and even worse he laughs at many of them himself, the sign of a true douchebag in my opinion. He also frequently refers to Duke as "Dukie," which is a truly unfortunate homophone. Bela Lugosi is as fun to watch as ever, though it's depressing to think he was at that stage of his career when he was deep in the throes of drug addiction and taking pretty much any role that was offered him. In the only halfway amusing gag in the movie, upon first meeting Duke and Sammy the latter recognizes Zabor as "that guy who go around biting people's necks!" Charlita (born Clara DeFreitas in Lowell, Massachusetts) is a dull love interest, although she does look nice in a sarong. Sammy constantly running away from Saloma and making jokes about her weight (something Nona, her sister, never objects to) is pretty offensive, and that's coming from a large man who nevertheless laughs uproariously at MST3K's savaging of Joe Don Baker. Duke tries to inform Sammy of his transformation via charades(!!!), but is unable to do so until he sings one of his (s)hit songs, "'Deed I Do." Because apparently he can sing but not talk as a gorilla. The ending serves up one of the hoariest "fuck you" cliches in the history of cinema. Director William Beaudine has been nicknamed "One-Shot" because he allegedly seldom retook scenes with flubbed lines or special effects failures. Actually, this is a disproved claim made by Michael Medved, the cinematic and political moron who propagated the laughable idea that Lugosi's friend and collaborator Ed Wood was the worst filmmaker of all time. (Incidentally, Martin Landau watched Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla as research for his Academy Award-winning portrayal of Lugosi in Tim Burton's biopic of Wood. Like me, he considered Bela the film's sole redeeming quality.) Bela appeared in a good few of Beaudine's films, though the only one of their other works together I've seen is Voodoo Man, which isn't a particularly good film but still beats the hell out of this one. Late in his career, Beaudine produced the horror Westerns Billy the Kid vs. Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, which have a certain notoriety all their own. Sammy went on to star in sexploitation icon Doris Wishman's Keyholes Are For Peeping, while Duke directed and starred in Gone with the Pope, where he played an ex-gangster who hatches a plan to kidnap the Pope and demand a dollar apiece in ransom from every Catholic in the world. Full of bad writing and worse comedy and music, this is very much a film for Lugosi completists only.