Colibel
Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.
Boobirt
Stylish but barely mediocre overall
Maidexpl
Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast
Nicole
I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.
R C
Anybody who thinks Bela Lugosi's poverty row horrors represent the absolute pits of 40s film-making has yet to see The White Gorilla, a piece of stinking crud of the cut-and-paste school of exploitation that even makes Jerry Warren's Creature of the Walking Dead start to look good. You may even begin to regret unkind words you've had for cut-and-paste 80s ninja pap peddler Godfrey Ho.Any giggles at how bad this movie is will soon subside into yawns and groans as the sixty soul-scarring minutes of animal stock footage and recycled silent movie scenes take their toll on the viewer's dignity. The only reason it gets a rating of 3 from me, as opposed to a 1 or 2, is the occasional appearance of the guy in the white gorilla suit with the unusually large posterior."With every bone in my body aching, I limped away," the protagonist says at one point. You will likely feel much the same after sitting through all of The White Gorilla, a barnstorming candidate for IMDb's Bottom 100 list if ever there was one.
pevryn77
OK, you know how Star Wars re-released the original 3 movies with new cg effects, sound, color, etc? They were presenting a 20 year old movie to a fresh audience. That is exactly what The White Gorilla is; everyone on here has commented on how they used footage from this old silent film... COME ON!! They didn't just *use* the silent film, it *is* that old silent film! (with a few minor additions, the gorilla scenes and the narration). I haven't sat down and timed it out, but it's gotta be 75% old movie at the very least... probably more like 80-90%. I can't imagine what they DIDN'T show from Perils of the Jungle in this film. As far as the terrible commentary goes.. did anyone notice when he just stops narrating in mid-sentence? It's at the start of the scene where he (or someone) rescues the jungle-boy from the lions by lowering a vine, he says something like, "I started wondering again about the little jungle boy I'd seen earlier; little did I know-"...presumably little-did-he-know he was walking right up on him, but it just cuts off mid-sentence and he doesn't say a word until the next scene. Believe me, it's not intentional, like to add suspense or something. It's very unnatural, you can tell he kept talking. I've managed my way through about half this movie so far, can't wait to see how it ends! :P
Gary Imhoff
Harry L. Fraser, the writer and one of the producers of this movie, was also the writer of Perils of the Jungle, the 1927 serial from which he took the archive footage. The serial did have good animal scenes, so it's hard to fault Fraser for finding a way to recycle what would otherwise be badly outdated and unusable silent footage. The problem, as every other commentator has noted, is the impossibility of integrating the two films smoothly, and the terrible plot -- if there is a plot -- of the new footage.Frank Merrill, the hero of the 1927 serial, did play Tarzan in two later movies, Tarzan the Mighty and Tarzan the Tiger, but he was playing a different and unrelated character in Perils of the Jungle.Crash Corrigan, the hero of the new wrap-around movie, made a specialty of playing gorillas, and he often played other roles in the movies in which he donned the gorilla suit, but I believe this may be the only movie in which his human character directly confronts his animal character.
wrbtu
Just when you start to think this film isn't as bad as it sounds, it gets as bad as it sounds. It doesn't bother me that there's more stock footage than there is new footage, but it does bother me that they used the same stock footage clips two, three, & four times each! The narrator is integrated into the storyline verbally, but of course can't be integrated into the storyline physically, because the stock footage which comprises the main storyline is based on a 20 year old (at the time) silent movie! To get around this minor problem, the narrator takes the role of a voyeur. He's constantly hiding in the bushes, "observing" others (who of course can't see him because his footage won't be shot for another 20 years or so after they finished filming their part). The narrator rambles on constantly about why he didn't take a shot at the lions who were trying to eat humans, or why he didn't do this or do that. That would be OK, too, but after a while it just makes the narrator (who's the supposed "hero" of the film) seem like a wimp. The real hero of the film is a fellow named "Bennett" (actually Tarzan in the silent serial). There's lots of loose ends that are never tied up (like exactly what happened to Bennett, the Voodoo Priestess, & the little Jungle Boy). There's several fights between the Bad Black Gorilla & the Bad White Gorilla that are never resolved. They fight, then the narration goes elsewhere, then the two gorillas bump into each other again, act surprised, & start fighting again. When you mix all this nonsense together, you come out with one Good Campy Fun movie that must have had an influence on Ed Wood. The "African" wildlife scenes (from the silent serial) are actually pretty good, although non-African animals (like tigers & orangutans) are mixed in just to keep the viewer guessing at which continent this film actually takes place. I guess my favorite scene is the one in which Bennett has to save a damsel in distress from a newly discovered animal: a meat eating hippo! A word of caution to parents: although this film is certainly good fun for the kids, too, the Something Weird Video version contains several shorts after the feature, which contain full nudity, which is not stated on the video box.