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Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla
[Alpha Video]
1952; b&w
Directed by William Beaudine
Starring: Bela Lugosi, Duke Mitchell, Sammy Petrillo, Charlita, Muriel Landres, Mickey Simpson & Steve Calvert
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To paraphrase Yvonne DeCarlo in The Devil's Rain, "Sanity, why hast thou forsaken me?!" Seriously, I have no idea what thoughts (or apparent lack of them) were running through my head when I volunteered to review Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla. In my never-ending quest to see the worst movie ever made I've scraped the bottom of quite a few barrels and this is surely one of those scrapings. Lugosi had his share of clunkers in his career and this is among the worst projects he ever attached his name to - if not the absolute worst. (In fact, it makes his Ed Wood era Oscar-worthy by comparison.) Two "entertainers," Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo play themselves and their third-rate Martin-Lewis act is nothing if not nauseating. Nonetheless Jerry Lewis actually sued Petrillo (and won) for being too similar to him. As for the "plot", on the way to do a show for the troops in Guam, the duo mistakenly fall out of an airplane ("lucky we had these parachutes") and wind up stranded on a South Pacific island. After they get rescued by the local tribesmen (and Duke begins a relationship with the chief's daughter), they're introduced to a man who might be able to help get them off the island before the next boat comes in a few months, also known as "the only white man on the island". This character, of course, is Lugosi. He's a not-completely-mad doctor performing experiments in evolution. He's also got a big-time hard-on for the chief's daughter, who just so happens to be college educated and serves as his assistant. She, however, is involved with the "suaver" of the two newbies to this Pacific paradise, AKA, the guy who's supposed to be like Dean Martin. (His abysmal singing in this film marks, quite possibly, the worst musical numbers ever committed to celluloid.) Fueled by a mean streak of jealousy, Lugosi arranges for his giant manservant to knock out Duke and get him back to his lab. Once in the cell, Duke gets injected with something that reverses his evolutionary process, making him regress to a giant gorilla. Thus, your Brooklyn gorilla. Sammy figures out it's Duke when the gorilla starts to sing (!), after a futile attempt at charades. Naturally, panic ensues but, surprisingly, no hilarity. Once Sammy brings gorilla Duke to the village and proves he's who he really is Lugosi emerges from the jungle with a rifle trained on the singing simian. I'll spare you any more and just spoil the whole thing: it's a dream. The boys are safely in a Hawaiian themed club in North Jersey the whole time. All in all, BLMABG felt more like a poorly written ripoff of a Gilligan's Island episode than anything else. And I'll take ANYTHING ELSE over this.
—the Kommandant
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