Nabonga (1944)

Let's be realistic.

Lack of good storyline.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

NABONGA is a jungle adventure cheapie churned out in the 1940s. It was made in 1944 so perhaps wartime audiences were a little more forgiving of time-wasting, non-serious material like this. Watching it these days it's a real chore to sit through, and that comes from somebody who loves old Tarzan movies, serials, and the like.The film sees a bunch of has-been characters flying into a jungle set and finding themselves menaced by the usual guy in a gorilla suit. There's some dated romance stuff and a strapping hero played by genre mainstay Buster Crabbe. I love Crabbe in his other roles but he gets very little to do here other than look dashing, which is no difficulty for him. The jungle girl aspect of the plot is never used very effectively, and the gorilla makes noises and hangs around in the background a lot. It's not exactly what I would team a crowd-pleaser.

I love jungle adventure films, me. From those crazy Tarzan films from a billion years ago, to the care-free and heart-warming Italian Cannibal films of the late seventies, you just can't go wrong with sending Whitey into some foliage (with some guides, obviously), and watching them get eaten by the locals, swallowed up by quicksand, or fall foul of some grumpy animal. Nabonga, however, doesn't have much in the way of action, has plenty of stock footage (seemingly from some turn of the century documentary), a man in a gorilla suit, and not much else. I mean, the hero of the piece loses two punch-ups! What hope do we have? It involves some guy going on the lam with his kid and some money who crashes in the jungle, only for him to die and the kid to grow and become friends with a gorilla, who protects her. Some guy comes looking for the cash, and some other people want the cash too.Alright, it's not that bad, really. The stock footage is almost as prominent in the amazing Zombie Creeping Flesh, and give me a guy in a gorilla suit over Andy Serkis any day, but there's still too much mooching around for it to be anything more than average. It's good that the kid lost in the jungle had a dress that grew as she grew though…who knows what other lost technology resides in the great green unknown?

Well, I bought this gem for a fiver out of the blue. I thought: "Buster Crabbe is in it, so it can't be all bad!" Then I watched it in the German dubbing, and had to laugh quite a few times, but at spots neither the original movie makers nor the dubbing crew would have intended to be for laughter. The German dubbing sounds like from a bad porn movie. Really. The lines of the native people are just ridiculous, and the voice of the girls sounds like the voice of a 60 year old woman. Its crap! They even attached new music to it. Somekind of psychedelic syntho-pop, but a really bad one. So I switched over to the original soundtrack, and so I could finally enjoy this movie. Buster Crabbe is like usual awesome in action scenes, but his character play too is definitely better than in any Flash Gordon. I recommend this movie (in English!!!!) for anyone who is interested in fantastic movies from before the fifties. But its not King Kong tho! Therefore: 5 out of 10

"Nabonga" is not merely a 1944 "B" movie of interest only to those far too interested in the history of "B" movies - though it is that. I was expecting a cardboard jungle "epic", but a superior one in that it has Buster Crabbe, Barton MacLane, Crash Corrigan and his gorilla suit and the luscious Julie London in her first motion picture. What a surprise to find Crabbe portraying not another version of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers or other perfect hero but a man driven to vindicate his father's reputation even if it should mean lying, cheating, theft from the girl to whom he is obviously attracted as well as trapping her beloved gorilla. Our hero is at least part anti-hero; not unheard of in a motion picture certainly but odd in a wartime Buster Crabbe vehicle. The moral uncertainty of Crabbe's character makes "Nabonga" different from its ilk. Apart from that interesting plot quirk, "Nabonga" is enjoyable on its own terms as a "white goddess" potboiler. There is an interesting relationship between Crabbe's character and Tobu, a black man who is treated as an equal not a servant and for whom the hero is willing to risk his life. "Nabonga" is an odd slice of 1940s cinema, ending with an exhortation to buy "war stamps and bonds at this theatre".