The Bride and the Beast - 1958

"Gorilla? I captured him as a baby. He was alright until he grew up."

This film has enough stock footage in it of Africa that if the melodrama of the story was deleted, you'd still have an interesting, though short, travelogue in which fearsome animals roam about, eat, run, and attack each other.

But there's melodrama in The Bride and the Beast, and sometimes it's odd and fascinating but then becomes tedious and a bit ludricous otherwise. A newly married couple (Charlotte Austin as Laura and Lance Fuller as Dan) arrive at their Southern California home and the new husband tells the new wife he had the servants "take the night off" so that they could be alone, but noises come up out of the basement. Turns out there's a gorilla locked up in the lower part of the house, named Spanky, who is very displeased with spending his time contained within what looks like a fifty-foot square cage. The new bride insists on seeing the creature, and when the animal reaches through the bars and grabs her, she is able to immediately calm him down by looking straight into his face and saying "you don't want to hurt me." Turns out, she's right, she has an immediate command over the creature.

When the newlyweds go to sleep later, the gorilla in the basement bends the bars of his cage, sneaks out, and goes upstairs to look for the new girl. She's been unable to sleep and is standing in the unusually large bedroom when Spanky steals into the room and gets back to what he was doing earlier, stroking her clothing and hair, hypnotized. The sleeping husband wakes up, gets a revolver from a side table, and interrupts the situation, simultaneously the gorilla relieves Laura of her nightgown (we can't see her because she is behind the gorilla) and the husband empties the gun into him. Spanky dies.

Why is the gorilla so concerned with Laura's clothing and hair? Why is Laura always wearing angora sweaters? Being as the script for this film is written by the famous anti-auteur and pro-angora Ed Wood, Jr., the gorilla appears to be an autobiographical stand-in for Wood himself, and the fascination of the gorilla for the girl is... well, that's where the film dives deep into hypnosis, past-life regression, and the startling conclusion that Laura is the Queen of the Gorillas. How did she happen to be reincarnated into the body of an American girl? Is this an inter-species goof by the design of, well, what? The situation isn't explained. There is a montage of statements inundating the story as Laura travels, eyes closed, telling us her experience, passing through long sections of stock footage of Africa, passing backward through her many previous lives.

Now we've got a puzzle on our hands: is Laura a nut or simply caught up in an inherited job position no one could reasonably expect to have thrust upon them because "Spanky" the gorilla has recognized their true status?

Though not directed by Ed Wood, Jr., (rather, by Adrian Weiss), The Bride and the Beast it saturated in Wood's personality and obsessions, which means a great deal of the tale is wide-open for unintended humor. Actual film dynamics are professionally done and quite a lot of the stock footage, visually obvious because of the sudden shifts in lighting and film grain, are striking and even astounding at times, and would be a highlight in a more dignified venue, like Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.

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Original Page July 18, 2026