Monster of the Day #3450

Updated on January 22, 2024 By Ken Begg 9 Comments

It’s a good start, but I don’t know, it’s needs a little something….

So Amazon Prime offered up Untamed Mistress on Friday, a ’50s (sort of) nudie flick–it presumably played what was then considered the adult theater circuit. It’s one of the weirdly profuse microgenre of women mating with apes movies; this, Bride of the Gorilla, Mistress of the Apes, Tanya’s Island, etc. It starts with a guy dying for about 20 minutes as he explicates several discrete flashbacks. Laden with stock footage as all jungle films are, this should by all right be as boring as Jungle Hell, but somehow isn’t. It certainly isn’t good, but it’s strangely watchable. Plus it has like four to six different gorilla suits in it, so that was great.

The film was made by Ron Ormond, whose story is pretty fascinating. Ormond with his wife made several skeavy exploitation films back in the day. Then the couple miraculously survived a plane crash and instead became extremely hardcore Baptists, making thereafter several films with their fundamentalist preacher. Indicator did a great box set of many of their films from both periods called From Hollywood to Heaven, which you can still buy on Amazon. Meanwhile, Untamed Mistress is on Prime, and several of the Baptist movies are on YouTube, for those that are curious.

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  • Watch Christmas Mail, Superman 4, and Untamed Mistress in that order was an excellent illustration of the difference between a Good Bad Movie and a Bad One.

    Of the three, I think Christmas Mail was the “better” picture, with a plot you could follow and acting all on the same level. You could see how it might have been a decent picture, if not a good one. Yet there was no care there. It was completely devoid of passion. It’s flat soda pop.

    With Superman 4, you have a bunch of competent, capable actors in the service of people who didn’t care and didn’t have the money to fake caring. It goes beyond dull into actively painful to watched. These people deserved better, damn it. and so did the audience.

    Untamed Mistress has no plot, has no competent acting, is very dull, and should have been a chore to watch. It makes The Bride and the Beast look high class. It doesn’t help that Untamed Mistress sneaks a better movie into a part of it’s run time.

    And yet there is something about it that compels. Despite all the flaws, you keep watching until the end and don’t walk away wondering why you’d put yourself through the experience.

    How did they do it? I don’t know. It’s probably because of the three Untamed Mistress is the shortest flick.

    And how about those final minutes? Was I alone sitting there wondering on how the heroes would get out of their predicament right up to the final moments? Yikes.

    I don’t ever want to see any of these films again. Life is too short. But Untamed Mistress, for all it’s faults, didn’t hurt as bad as you’d have expected. And that’s all the praise I got for it.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    The diver is probably thinking, “Mondays, am I right?”

  • I was watching at my parents’ house and even my mom, who is not into junk or genre film and usually is in bed at 9 got hypnotized into watching most of the first hour. We were laughing pretty hard. When she left she asked “Where does [Ken] find these things?” and I think she was a bit perplexed that the answer was “Amazon Prime”.

    BTW, according to Ormond’s son, writing on IMDB (under user reviews), this did *not* play the adult circuit, but regionally in regular southern Drive-ins. Apparently, at the time in the South boobs didn’t count as long as they were on Black women (the implications of which are pretty dire). He said they would ballyhoo it as they came into each town, with a pickup truck with a pretty girl and a guy in a gorilla suit and that it made a mint for them.

  • KeithB

    OT:
    We watched “The Great Mouse Detective” for my birthday last night.
    I am sure Vincent Price had a great time doing the role of Ratigan. (Did he sing in any other films?)
    The songs – by Henry Mancini(!) – were pretty blah.

  • 🐻 bgbear_rnh

    The Ormond’s kinda cheated. The real African documentary footage could get by the censors easily, but the later topless women were, hopefully, well paid Americans.

  • 🐻 bgbear_rnh

    Dreams of the Fisherman

  • Price sang Over the Rainbow for the credit sequence of Dr. Phibes Rises again. It was at one point taken off for I believe copyright reasons. Dunno if it was ever put back on.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I’ve heard that Price said Ratigan was his favorite role of all. I’m not sure how true it is.

  • Ken_Begg

    Cullen is right, Untamed Mistress hits that extremely weird note where you’re vaguely aware you’re bored but sort of distanced from it and its kind of painless. All the gorilla suits sure helped. Thanks for the background info, Jane! I’m surprised even “native” nudity flew in a drive-in the ’50s, but racism is a strange thing.