Watch Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla For Free

hyped garbage

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Wretched "comedy" starring blatant Martin & Lewis rip-offs Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo. I don't even like the real Martin & Lewis, so you can imagine how much a couple of imitators must grate on my nerves. The only reason I even subjected myself to this is that it's one of the few Bela Lugosi movies I've never seen. Now I wish I could unsee it. Sammy Petrillo is the worst! Loud, talentless, incessantly trying for any laughs, desperately grabbing for them like a drowning man looking for a lifeline. He never lets up. I was sick of him by the end of his first scene. I'm shocked the cast and crew didn't assault him. As for Bela, he looks gaunt and sickly. His presence here is just depressing. Best part about the movie is eye candy Charlita. I don't ever want to see this again. I'm not surprised this is the only film Duke & Sammy made. I'm also not surprised Jerry Lewis did his best to keep Petrillo from working. Normally, I would think that's not a good look for Jerry but in this case I think he did humanity a favor.

Unfortunately, it's not a campy movie, instead it's plain bad. And here I thought nothing could get stupider than Jerry Lewis; that is, until I got a load of Petrillo. Good thing the wife moved throwable things away from my chair. That way, my TV survived his whiny idiocy. Between him and the equally skinny Duke Mitchell, I kept hoping somebody would feed them. Actually, for a cheap-jack production, it's pretty well mounted. Looks like every potted palm in Hollywood was used for the jungle scenes. Even better, none fell over. And get a load of half-clad Charlita who almost makes the mess worth it. (I think I'm on my way to the South Seas.) Then too, the acting's not that bad, despite the central idiot. Note too that Lugosi has little more to do than stand around with an occasional line. An easy payday for an old trouper. Of course, the real star is Ramona, who's a lot more entertaining than the rest. I hope they paid her double in bananas or whatever. Anyway, I'm flummoxed by the ending, especially by what happens to Petrillo. It comes out of the blue and is totally out of sync with the movie's remainder, dream or no. But what the heck. Too bad the producers didn't scrap the 10-cent Martin and Lewis. Then the movie would have been just bad, instead of annoyingly bad.

Written by Tim Ryan and directed by Beaudine, this is a charmless old-fashioned lowbrow comedy, where a princess who went to college gives a necklace to a lousy singer; but for the two cretins (Petrillo slightly less annoying than the singer), the movie might of worked better, but not much better, as there's not much to laugh or at least smile at, with the main idea being not to rip off, but to spoof a rising duo, implying those were a couple of monkeys, the kind of 5th rate comedy which belonged to the lousiest TV slot; instead, remember Tim Ryan, Lugosi and Beaudine for their better work elsewhere. As it is, it offers an occasion to remember and think about Tim Ryan, a B comedies scriptwriter, about Lugosi, who resembles Plummer, about Beaudine, who has done so many movies ….Lugosi gets the opportunity to explain the growth force in the evolutionary differentiation; his aim is to kick beings into evolving or devolving. He's an insane scientist (here, a biologist) who owns a castle on the island and loves the princess. He looked like Plummer, and has a nice scene when, at his castle, he sits, in the evening, drinking to quench his jealousy; perhaps surprisingly, in this comedy Lugosi takes a more chilly approach (in fact, the script offers him but one moment of raving, that of the scientific explanation of pushing evolution upstairs or downstairs), he seems more earthly. (Otherwise, Karloff, Chaney, Lee have been themselves in movies this dire.) A certain Charlita plays the princess, and she was better than her pair, the cretin entertainer, on screen.The featured duo was disgraceful and trite (with the joke being that they are the ascending comedians' monkeys, but also that, in the original duo, the 1st was a gorilla, and the 2nd a chimpanzee, which is unfair to those actors).

It is hard not to like this amusing little comedy chiller. Lugosi is in great form, given his age and health problems. There are some humorous exchanges of dialogue, in particular when Bela is explaining the finer points of his evolution experimentation to the Martin and Lewis wannabees Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo. The boys clown around a bit with very weak material, their jokes really only likely to amuse any kids in the audience. Ramona is one very talented chimpanzee and turns in a good performance larking about with Petrillo. I saw this film on the lower half of a double feature in a London suburban flea-pit around 1959. Released over here by New Realm Pictures Ltd. and re-titled " Monster meets the Gorilla ". The film benefits from the casting of the very pretty actress Charlita, and this was probably her finest hour, being that she is on screen in most of the scenes, where she is given plenty of dialogue and an opportunity to display her natural charms. Her other film credits were mostly fleeting cameos, or dance interludes. She often played waitresses, and she appeared in a few TV series entries.