Bride & The Beast/White Gorilla (VCI Double Feature)
Picture:
C+/C Sound: C Extras: C+ Films: C+
What is
the deal with the once huge popularity of gorillas and especially stuntmen in
gorilla suits? If it was not bad enough
they were in every other bad Horror/Sci-Fi and Action B-movie and even serial
in the 1940s and 1950s, DC Comics had a publisher who would include one on as
many covers as possible even though most of the storylines had nothing to do
with them. VCI has issued a movie double
feature on DVD so much with this in mind that they are dubbing it a “Positively
No Refunds Double Feature” on the cover.
Here comes The Bride & The
Beast and The White Gorilla!
Both are
more than amusing enough to see at least once and have wacky distinctions to
boot. The Bride & The Beast (1958) has the distinction of being
written by no less than Ed Wood, though he remarkably did not direct it. He left that to producer Adrian Weiss. A married couple seems happy, but when Laura
(Charlotte Austin) starts obsessing about his pet gorilla, something very
strange is going on.
The White Gorilla (1945) is a goofy film that takes
footage from the silent 1927 serial Perils
Of The Jungle and adds narration and only 20 new minutes of footage. Running 63 minutes, it feels like a one of
those later serial chapters that cheat, but maybe worse. Sure, you get the white and black gorilla
battle, but you will especially laugh at silent footage at sound speed, since
they did not try to compensate for the difference in frame rates for silent
versus sound film footage. At least
you’ll laugh.
Bride & The Beast is he in anamorphically enhanced
1.78 X 1 black and white (though it was 1.66 X 1 on the package and likely in
real life, there are no sidebars) while The
White Gorilla is as 1.33 X 1 as the 1927 footage. Both have the expected poor audio that show
their age with backgrounds hiss, though the sound is at least not too hot. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is still audible
and amusing. Extras include audio
commentaries on both films. Tom Weaver
hosts one audio commentary with Charlotte Austin, Bob Burns and Slick Slavin
aka Trustin Howard on Beast, then the other with Burns alone. Bonus video of surviving footage from Perils Of The Jungle for White Gorilla, and both have Tom Weaver
text, advertising and photo galleries, bios of the casts and trailers.
The most
informative of all is the commentary on Gorilla, where Burns talks about his
career, the state of wearing such outfits today and even his work as a co-star
on the live-action 1975 hit Filmation series The Ghost Busters, now coming out on DVD itself. Perhaps DVD is ready to issue all the ape
suit programs, so we’d better brace for it.
At least these are good so far.
- Nicholas Sheffo
