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Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Good movie but grossly overrated

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Mercifully, this signifies the end of the "Ape Woman" movies by "Universal" studios.This is truly a poor movie, technically and from a narrative point of view. The already low budget has been reduced further - if such a thing is possible!

1944's "The Jungle Captive" concluded Universal's Paula Dupree trilogy, a cut above the second, "Jungle Woman," neither as good as "Captive Wild Woman." Of the three, only "Jungle Woman" was not included in the SON OF SHOCK television package issued in the late 50s; "The Jungle Captive" made two appearances on Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater- Apr 15 1967 (following 1957's "I Was a Teenage Frankenstein") and Sept 25 1976 (following 1969's "The Blood Rose"). Unencumbered by the stock animal footage that cluttered up the others, this is a more straightforward mad scientist endeavor, with Otto Kruger as pathologist Stendahl, whose assistant, billed in the ads as 'Moloch the Brute,' is played by Rondo Hatton, still a year away from his famous Creeper series (both produced by Ben Pivar). With Acquanetta having departed Universal, the role of Paula Dupree now went to unknown actress Vicky Lane, who had an even shorter career than her predecessor, having completed just one featured role before this, which ended up her final film. At least The Ape Woman (now mute again, unlike in "Jungle Woman") gets to walk around in full bestial Jack Pierce makeup, if only briefly (the lovely Vicky also gets a more skimpy wardrobe than Acquanetta, who only wore hers for the posters). No other characters from the first two entries return, though the doctors played by John Carradine and J. Carrol Naish both get a mention.

This final installment in the short-lived Universal series about Paula Dupree, the Ape Woman, has some fairly creepy moments, and a good monster. Unfortunately, the Ape Woman doesn't have much to do here, unlike her two earlier appearances. She spends most of her time in the secluded laboratory of Stendhal, the mad doctor who hopes to achieve some kind of scientific goal by reviving the deceased creature.Rondo Hatton turns in his most multi-faceted performance as Moloch, the assistant to Stendhal. Unlike most of his other movie roles, where he just stalks around and kills people, here he acts friendly toward the beleaguered heroine, even smiles and makes a joke at one point, and is about as normal and likable as he would ever be shown in his Forties horror pictures. He becomes a sort of human King Kong, whose sympathy for the captive girl finally causes him to turn on his master to save her from further cruel experiments. It shows possibilities unhinted at in his other roles and is quite unexpected.Jerome Cowan is good as a breezy police detective investigating the various murders and disappearances, but Otto Kruger is so menacing as the crazy scientist that he all but steals the picture. His low key portrayal of the cold blooded experimenter is actually quite unnerving in its realism. He refuses to play the part in an eye-rolling, hammy clichéd way, and is thus frighteningly believable.Not a great movie by any means, but worth seeing for fans of low budget Forties horror movies.

As in the first movie in this series, Captive Wild Woman, we're introduced to an apparently kind man who is apparently pursuing beneficial medical research. As in that movie, we just as quickly find out he is a mad genius, with little regard for human life.The movie quickly picks up where the second on the series left off, where Paula, the Ape Woman was in a morgue. Mr. Stendahl (the end credits in the copy I viewed named him Dr. Stendahl, but he is usually called Mister) has developed a process for bringing back life to the dead through blood transfusions and electricity. Supposedly, he wants to bring back life to Paula because she's a step up from the rabbits he had been using, but avoids the ethical problems of using a human subject. Since he doesn't care, however, if people die (his servant Moloch kills a man while stealing Paula), it's unclear why he doesn't simply revive a dead human body, or kill a human, and then revive them.After he brings Paula back to life, she is still in her ape-woman form. Unlike in the second film Jungle Woman, where she could change back and forth between ape-woman and woman, in this film (as in the 1st) she requires human blood and hormones to appear as a woman. To become more human, she would require a transplanted cerebrum from a human, again as in the first. In order to learn how to turn Paula into a human, Stendahl had to have Moloch steal the files of Dr. Walters (from the 1st film) from the office of Dr. Fletcher (from the 2nd film). Apart from these references to the earlier films, no one from those films returns to this one; the only recurring character is Paula herself, and she is played by a different actress. There does not seem to be any footage used from the previous films, except perhaps a short close-up of Paula's hand transforming while she is strapped to a table. There was a shot like that in the first film, but they may have just re-created it.Stendahl's reasoning for wanting to turn Paula into a human after reviving her is just as questionable as his reasoning for wanting to revive her. He thinks turning her into a woman would prove he could bring a human back to life. It would seem to me that it would only prove he could turn an ape-woman into a human, or at any rate, something like a human.People seem divided as to whether the second or third film is the worst of the three, and I'm not sure myself. They're all decent, at least, but there is no question the first was the best of them.