!!SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW GIVES AWAY A MID-STORY TWIST!!

Because of a lack of DVD or blu-ray releases, Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, directed by Curt Siodmak, has fallen between the cracks and currently lives in a sort of limbo, glimpsed only in copies recorded from television broadcasts, some in colour, some in black and white. And to be fair, that’s exactly where it belongs. Siodmak had once been a prolific writer for Universal (The Invisible Man Returns (1940), Black Friday (1940), The Invisible Woman (1940), The Wolf Man (1941), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), Son of Dracula (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944)), Monogram (The Ape (1940)) and RKO (I Walked with a Zombie (1943)) but by the early 50s had taken up direction with a string of films that invariably disappointed.

None of them were quite as stultifying as Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, a dreadful film that’s not only dull as the proverbial ditch water but which cheats its audience to boot. It only runs 76 minutes but Siodmak is still forced to fall back on those old standbys of ultra low budget genre films – an infestation of stock footage and energetic but essentially time-filling dance sequences. It’s the kind of film that the fast forward button was made for.

Plantation owner Rock Dean (John Bromfield) arrives to investigate why his workers have all fled and learns that they are terrified of Curucu, a bird-like monster that has killed several workers and their families. Dean, along with his guide Tupanico (Tom Payne) and Dr Andrea Romar (Beverly Garland), who is researching the drug used by the local tribe to shrink heads which she plans to use to reduce the size of cancerous tumours, heads upriver in search of the monster. In a terrible and misjudged twist, it turns out that there is no monster after all – it’s Tupanico, dressed up in a cumbersome and unconvincing suit, trying to scare his people away from the plantations and back to their more traditional lifestyles. Dean and Romar battle their way through the jungle in search of a nearby mission, encountering just about every dangerous animal you can think of along the way.

The cast is uniformly terrible. Broomfield is a charisma vacuum, and his character is one of the most unpleasant in and 50s B-movie, a sex-mad lecher more concerned with getting Garland’s doctor into bed than with the issues at hand. And Garland’s character starts as a strong and intelligent woman before quickly degenerating into a screaming simpleton cowering from whatever bit of stock footage or stuffed animal Siodmak could throw at her. Her performance is exactly what the dreadful role deserves. Elsewhere Harvey Chalk – whose only other credits is in Siodmak’s Love Slaves of the Amazon (1957) – as Father Flaviano makes for one of the creepiest and most patronising priests you’ll ever encounter.

Siodmak himself seems to have little confidence in his own lethargic screenplay and his direction is the dictionary definition of uninspired, relying to heavily on boring two- and three-shots for all the interior scenes. The film was shot on location in Brazil and he and his director of photography Rudolph Icey get a few decent travelogue shots but scupper what little good work they do with some awful back projection work – the water buffalo scene in particular has to be seen to be disbelieved. And watch out for the hilarious scene where a man plucks a poisoned dart out of thin air, holds it for a beat, and then falls down dead…

The script is peppered with the usual racist and misogynistic tropes that haunted many a 1950s genre film but it’s terribly blatant here. “Of course I’m afraid of some things,” admits Romar at one point. “I’m a woman!” And to add insult to injury, there’s that terrible mid-point twist that effectively cancels out what few horror credentials the film had. The “monster’s” true nature is revealed after just 50 minutes, leaving us with 26 minutes of a film we no longer care anything about – if we ever did. At one point, the loathsome Rock opines that “in the jungle, anything can happen.” Such a shame then that so little did… The aforementioned Love Slaves of the Amazon, an equally uninspired lost-world-run-by-women fantasy was, according to Siodmak, shot on 10,000 feet of unused film left over from Curucu that he wasn’t able to export.