Steve (Leif Erickson) is a pilot who gets hired to come to Africa and map out an uncharted jungle area so his crooked employer Harper (Douglass Dumbrille) can find a mysterious tribe. Problems arise when Harper learns Steve is the ex-lover of his trophy wife (Veda Ann Borg). When Steve’s plane crashes in the jungle, he and his pal Hoppy (Frank Jenks) are taken prisoner by the tribe who force them to face their leader, the beautiful blonde bombshell Meelah (Gale Sherwood). Naturally, Meelah and Steve fall in love, and he helps her get revenge on the man who murdered her parents years ago. (SPOILER FOR ANYONE WHO HAS NEVER SEEN A JUNGLE MOVIE FROM THE ‘40S: It’s Harper.)
Blonde Savage starts out with a terrific hook. Steve enters a lawyer’s office and announces he needs someone to defend him on murder charges. The only thing is: The murder hasn’t been committed yet. If the police let Harper go free, Steve will gun him down in cold blood. Then, we go into a flashback that takes up the bulk of the movie that explains Steve’s hatred towards Harper. It’s a neat little device that helps separate the movie from the glut of similarly themed genre pictures of the era. Honestly it was probably only there to pad out the running time to feature length.
Heck, even though the film is only an hour long, it still has a tendency to drag here and there. The print is jumpy too, which can be annoying, but I enjoyed it for what it was: A (slightly) better than average jungle picture. As such, it won’t win over any new fans, and it doesn’t have as much stock footage as you might expect. That said, if you’re old enough to remember the days when crap like this played on TV non-stop (like me), you may get a kick out of it.
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