Captive Wild Woman - 1943

Next up in our Universal list was this...movie.

John Carradine is a doctor who is planning to use the ape from Whipple's Circus to experiment on. He plans on using the "glands" of his nurse (and apparently part of her brain) to make the ape more human. Surprisingly the change is instantaneous, and enter Paula! She has a mystical power over the lions and tigers at the circus, so she helps Fred with his act. One day she gets angry and turns back into an ape.

Ok, so the lions and tigers were a bit much. They credited Clyde Beatty for the animal sequences, and you could tell the footage was from somewhere else. And for this movie being an hour, it felt long. They spent so much time harassing those animals, I was rooting for them to eat someone. They would also shoot blanks at them to keep them in line. It was frustrating. 

At the end, it looked like a bunch of the cats escaped. Fred was more interested in popping back into the ring and dealing with one lion. And they never resolved that, so there's probably big cats all over the place now. Also, see how the poster shows the ape kidnapping a girl? LIES! She kidnaps Fred! And then - THEN! while she was trudging off with Fred thrown over her shoulder, they shot her in the butt, and she died. The End! It was so abrupt. Did the one woman tell the others how Paula and Cheela were the same? Did they believe her? Did anyone want to question why the doctor had an elevator behind his wall? So many unanswered questions, but of well. Let's do a strange outro about messing with nature. So confusing and weird.