Jungle Woman 1944 Story by Henry Sucher, screenplay by Bernard L Schubert, Henry Sucher and Edward Dein, directed by Reginald LeBorg. The sequel to Captive Wild Women cobbled together new footage and flashbacks from the first movie. It's the third film in the 5th volume of the Universal Horror Collection. Each film gets it's own Blu-ray disc. There's a commentary by Gregory William Mank and a still gallery by way of extras. Acquanetta returns as Cheela the Ape Woman despite being shot in the last film. Acquanetta doesn't return for the third film in the trilogy.
The story starts shortly after the first movie ends. A Doctor Fletcher is at an inquest into the death a young woman. He tells how he got to the state he's in. He'd been at the circus the night of the big storm from the first movie and seen the gorilla shot. Somehow he acquires the caress, finding a faint heartbeat, he revives the creature. Fletcher learns more about the experiments that mad scientist John Carradine was up to, he then buys all of John's equipment and sets the lab up in his sanitarium.
Cheela turns back into a young woman called Paula, this time she can speak. Fletcher's daughter Joan and her fiance Bob come for a visit. Paula get jealous and tries to drown Joan. The big guy in the lobby card above is Willie, he disappears that day. A dog and some chicken are killed, crushed, and Willie's suspected. We know he didn't do it and a bit later Willie would be found dead in the woods.
That's Paula and Bob with another doctor. This doctor thinks she's a bit mentally unstable, he also notices that she's very strong. Doctor Fletch discovers that the fingerprints from Paula and Cheela are the same. Bob and Paula return to the sanitarium. Bob tells Paula that he's going to marry Joan. Paula runs off. Fletcher gets attacked by Paula and he gives her a fatal dose of sedative. The movie ends with a shot of Paula being pulled out of the coroner's freezer and everyone seeing she's reverted to a partial gorilla state.
I didn't think it was as entertaining as the first in the series. The commentary by Gregory Mank had a good bit of info to take in. Turns out Acquanetta was really a black woman called Mildred Davenport who was passing as white. . She made a few more movies and dropped out of Hollywood. Mank covers a good bit of her life post-Hollywood. The commentary is more entertaining than the movie. It's certainly one of the poorer films in the series.
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