Jungle Woman (1944)

Jungle Woman: Directed by Reginald Le Borg. With Evelyn Ankers, J. Carrol Naish, Samuel S. Hinds, Lois Collier. Paula the ape woman (Acquanetta) is alive and well, and running around a creepy old sanitarium run by the kindly Dr. Fletcher (J. Carrol Naish), also reverting to her true gorilla form every once in a while to kill somebody.

“No need to waste time on this sequel mess. Apparently, Universal needed to meet product demand for wartime audiences. So they took a hunk of 1943u0026#39;s Captive Wild Woman and cobbled together some surrounding footage to make something of a story. The result comes across like Val Lewton on a really bad day. The supposedly scary scenes are done in Lewtonesque shadow, but come across as more clumsily cost-cutting than artful. Too bad so many distinguished players (Hinds, Dumbrille, Naish) are wasted in what must have been an embarrassment. I just hope Ankers u0026amp; Carradine got compensated for the reuse of their earlier footage. But I doubt it given studio dominance of the period. No need to go on. Suffice that this is about the nadir of human-into-animals that were so popular at the time. As Lewton knew, horror needs more than shadow; it needs concept, dread, and mood, elements in short supply here.”