UNTAMED MISTRESS (1955) **

Ron Ormond’s cut and paste jungle adventure, Untamed Mistress is sort of in the same vein as his Mesa of Lost Women.  That is to say, it’s pretty much a fucking mess.  Hey, at least there’s some nudity in the third act, which is more than I can say for Mesa. 

Two brothers on safari tend to their dying hunting guide.  He tells them a long story about how he used to be a big-time prince and traded it all in for the love of his life, a jungle girl who ran off to be one with the gorillas.  One of the brothers just so happens to be romancing a sexy jungle girl who may also succumb to the same fate.

The first act is full of flashbacks and footage from another movie.  The second act has a bunch of scenes of the heroes interacting with stock footage.  Things come to life in the third act though when the monkey business involving the guy in the gorilla suit comes into play, but until then, it’s rough going throughout most of the picture.

Some of Ormond’s attempts to blend the stock footage with the newly shot scenes works well enough.  The color palette matches more often than not, and the animal shots don’t look too grainy.  It’s when Ormond tries to mesh the actors in with the native dancing do things really become laughable.  (It’s obvious the dancers are part of some sort of exhibition as there are clearly hundreds of people watching from bleachers.) 

This stretch of the movie not only contains some completely gratuitous stock footage of native nudity, it also features some completely gratuitous new footage of native nudity, which I’m sure was the main attraction back in ‘55.  It’s a lot more T & A than many films from the era have, but it takes a long time to get there, and it’s not exactly worth the wait.  Still, I have a soft spot for movies in which guys in gorilla suits carry off gorgeous women into the jungle, so I can’t be too hard on it.

The lead actors are dull, but Jacqueline Fontaine periodically puts a little spark into the picture as Velda, the saucy jungle girl.  She gets one particularly good scene where she does an impromptu tribal dance.  In moments like this, you swear the film is about to come to life.  Most of the time though, it’s just a random assortment of scenes of guys looking at and talking about scenes from other movies.