The Bride and the Beast (1958)

The greatest movie ever!

One of the best films i have seen

Brilliant and touching

Absolutely Fantastic

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.

Rugged big game hunter Dan Fuller (a solid and likable performance by Lance Fuller) discovers much to his dismay that his lovely new bride Laura (a nicely sexy portrayal by fetching brunette Charlotte Austin) has a most troubling and peculiar affinity for gorillas. Dan is forced to shoot his pet ape Spanky (Steve Calvert in a funky suit) dead after the big brute breaks free from his basement cage and goes after Laura. Dan takes Laura with him on a safari to Africa. The expedition not only runs afoul of two lethal tigers, but also a couple of hulking gorillas who abduct Laura. Director Adrian Weiss milks plenty of compellingly aberrant thrills from the typically outlandish script by the notorious Ed Wood, Jr.: Weiss treats the weird and perverse premise with admirable seriousness, relates the gloriously wacky story at a steady pace, and concludes things on a bravely downbeat note. Naturally, Wood's script features the inevitable reference to angora sweaters and incorporates a pretty far-fetched reincarnation theme into the already heady mix (Laura was a gorilla in a previous life!). Kudos are in order for the surprisingly sound and sincere acting by sterling leads Fuller and Austin; they receive sturdy support from Johnny Roth as loyal native houseboy Taro and William Justine as helpful psychiatrist Dr. Carl Reiner. The scenes with the savage tigers attacking people are staged with rousing aplomb. Roland Price's sharp black and white cinematography and Les Baxter's sweeping orchestral score are both up to par. A pleasingly offbeat and unusual little oddity.

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

"The Bride and the Beast" starts off well with lots of potential that this could be a pretty good movie. The plot revolves around a man, his newlywed wife, and her strange connection with gorillas. Then the couple goes to Africa and the movie unravels. Forget all about the first part of the movie. Put it on the shelf for a while because you won't need to remember it again until you get to the end. You next get lots of terrible stock footage of African animals and the plot takes a side road as the husband hunts down two tigers. It's almost as though it turned into a Safari movie and a boring one at that. As you watch the different animals, the background scenery changes dramatically from shot to shot. The scenes, especially of the animals are shot in all different kinds of terrain. Very poorly done. At this point there is barely a string connecting the beginning of the movie to the middle. This goes on for quite a while. Nearing the end of the movie, they drop the safari and hunting and go back to the man, woman, gorilla plot to end the movie. It's too bad because this one had a chance if they just stuck with the original plot throughout the film. The Bride and the Beast" is disjointed and boring, not recommended.