An Exercise In Nonsense

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

White Pongo isn't an A movie. It isn't even a B movie. It falls more into the range of a D-level movie, made on a shoe string by a minor film company. It fails in just about every way a film can. It's not just that it's cheap and openly racist; it's just plain boring!The film follows an expedition to capture a rare white gorilla believed to be the missing link. (Why would the missing link have to be white?) In the process, the adventurers run into hostile natives, criminals, and the worst gorilla suit known to man. (I know this was made before the time of Jane Goodall, but couldn't they have come up with something vaguely realistic?)The film's racism is very obvious, to the point that it verges on satire. The lead black character is named Mumbo-Jumbo for crying out loud. The Africans are shown as savages who are automatically hostile to white people for no reason-never mind the fact that during the colonial era, they would have had every reason to distrust Europeans.However, what's most damning is the boredom factor. Even though the movie is roughly seventy minutes long, it is filled with scenes of people just cruising down the river with canoes, with no accompanying action or dialogue. It's filler of the worst kind.

(Some Spoilers) Escaping from his native captors Gunderson makes it to Sir Harry base-camp in the middle to gorilla territory deep in the Congo River Basin with a fantastic story that may well prove that Darwinism is a fact not a theory.It turns out that some five years ago Gunderson was a member of the Professor Fredrick Dierdorp expedition that vanished in the African jungle. As Sir Harry learns form the delirious and soon to be deceased Gunderson the expedition found a white gorilla who's, after being given a number of aptitude and IQ tests, intelligence rivals that of a human being! The trouble is that the gorilla, called Pongo, broke out of his cage and has been on the loose, terrorizing the local natives in the area, ever since!Seeing that this is likely to be the greatest discovery in anthropological history Sir Harry musters up an expedition, that includes his beautiful daughter Pam, to find and capture alive the fugitive wild monkey and thus prove that Darwin was right.***SPOILERS*** What Sir Harry doesn't realize is that his German guide Hans Kroegart has other ideas. Hans plans to have Sir Harry unwittingly take him, as a member of his expedition, deep into the uncharted Congo in order to find a hidden gold mine that he's been looking for some ten years. It's after reaching his goal Hans plans to murder Sir Harry & Co. just like he did some five years earlier to Dr. Fredrick Dierdorf team! It was also the ill fated Dierdorf expedition that Hans lead, as it's guide, into the very same area!With the exception of the excellent acting of Ray Carrigan-the guy in the monkey suite as the white gorilla-everything else about the film was nothing to write home about. We also had a meaningless love triangle in the movie involving Pam with expedition member Bishop and Carswell. That ironically lead the white gorilla, who had the hots for Pam, to let his guard down by coming out in the open and end up getting captured by the expedition team. Something that Sir Harry, in all his failed attempts to capture the big monkey, never expected to happen.

Well, let's face it: a movie from the 1940's about a white gorilla (who's actually yellow on the packaging, but let's not obsess over details here) isn't likely to be Oscar material, and the Razzies didn't exist yet so that's out too, but if you're going into this with an open mind and appreciating of suckdom, then you can sure find worse ways to lose 70 minutes of your life.White Pongo is in the jungle, and the hunters all are trying to find him, since he's the missing link between man and ape, or something to that effect. Among the expedition are your obligatory hottie, your obligatory guy with a hidden agenda, and your obligatory hero undercover, who ultimately stops the obligatory guy with a hidden agenda and ends the film liplocked with the obligatory hottie. After you sit through 15-20 minutes of complete filler such as boats going down rivers, stock footage of real Africa (as opposed to "Hollywood Africa" that takes up most of the film) and what is apparently the only jungle noise that the sound technicians could come up with (some sort of monkey chirping that you'll be hearing in your sleep after listening to it for the duration of the film), White Pongo ultimately kills the obligatory guy with a hidden agenda, then saves the obligatory hottie who has been kidnapped by an unnamed evil gorilla by having the worst five minutes of gorilla brawling ever put to cellulite. However, this is made more fun by the audio track on the Alpha Video DVD being at least a full minute behind the video for a good six or seven minutes of the latter part of the film, so at some points it seems like the gorillas are girlie-screaming and running through a pile of crunchy jungle on two feet. Anyway, WP wins the battle, and his reward is being caged up and brought back to America by the obligatory hero undercover. Hey, who said life was always fair, right? To be honest, there actually was at least an attempt at a coherent storyline in this film, so I can appreciate that end of it. Beyond that, though, White Pongo is just another wonderfully awful film for all of us who can enjoy the worst Hollywood could give us in those days gone by.

This is the kind of film that kids will enjoy and does not contain a lot of violence. The setting looked good with a lot of jungle greenery and men in gorilla suits. There is actually a plot to this thing. I would have rather had the plot revolve around looking for and trying to capture a rare white gorilla than looking for a white ape that they suppose to be the 'missing link',,,but I guess the 'link' bit adds something(??). Check out the filmography of Wrixen and Fraser, the native safari guide named, believe it or not..Mumbo Jumbo, they were accomplished actors and played in many notable films. White Pongo is not bad but not good either. There is decent character development and a slight surprise near the end. Ape gets girl, ape looses girl, guy gets girl. Happy ending. Good clean fun.