Poor Bela…

By 1952, the one-time Dracula and sometime screen partner of Boris Karloff was a very long way from his glory days at Universal. Addicted to the drugs he’d been given for the sciatica he’d developed following injuries received during his military service and having only just returned home from the UK where he’d done a six-month run in a touring production of Dracula and made the alleged comedy Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1951), he announced a fondness for comedy (he’d previously played Dracula for the second and final time in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)). Which gave Jack Broder at Realart an idea. He’d been reissuing many of the Universal monster films and decided that teaming Lugosi with a new young comedy duo might be a good idea. It probably seemed like a worthy idea at the time – but sadly, the duo in question was the extraordinarily unfunny Duke Mitchell (real name Dominic Miceli) and Sammy Petrillo…

Despite Lugosi’s name appearing in the title, Petrillo and Mitchell (optimistically introduced by a compere as “those two fireballs of fun”) are the real stars of the show, playing versions of themselves, who find themselves on the remote island of Kola Kola after they fell out of the aircraft (yes, they really are that idiotic) carrying them “to do a show for the boys on Guam.” Having survived on a diet of berries and raw fish, they’re eventually rescued by members of a local tribe, particularly Nona (Charlita) the daughter of Chief Rakos (Al Kikume). Duke and Nona fall for each other while Sammy is pursued by Nona’s plus-sized sister Saloma (Muriel Landers). They sing a few songs, do some awful comedy routines and are introduced to Dr Zabor (Lugosi), “the only white man on the island… a scientist working on an experiment in evolution.” Zabor (“ain’t this the fellow that goes around with the hand and the faces, biting people on the neck and wearing capes?” wonders Sammy) offers to help the boys escape the island but inevitably has his own agenda using a serum to reverse evolution, turning Ramona the chimp into a small monkey and transforming Duke into the eponymous gorilla. In between all this, there’s much messing about with witch doctors, lab chimps and yet more dire vaudeville business before it sputters to a desultory “it was all a dream” ending.

Sammy Petrillo, just 18 when the film was made, had been told by a barber that, with the haircut he’d just given him, he looked just like Jerry Lewis, and he decided to capitalise on that admittedly fairly close physical similarity and boost his fledgeling career as a film and stage comic. Jerry Lewis was annoying and unfunny enough, but a second-rate tribute act proved to be intolerable, teamed with singer Mitchell who vaguely, in a low light and you squint, has a passing resemblance to Lewis’ comedy partner Dean Martin. Broder had plans to launch them as a new force in film comedy but was presumably disavowed of that idea when he saw just how terrible they were – has there ever been a worse comedy duo in film?

Petrillo is thoroughly shameless, mimicking Lewis’ trademark voices, look and mannerisms perfectly. It is a good impression, but you haven’t been a fan of Lewis’ seeing someone else doing the same schtick is hardly unlikely to endear him to you. Though his film career with Mitchell faltered, they found plenty of work in nightclubs until an irate Lewis started threatening to boycott clubs and TV shows that booked them. Petrillo went on to appear in (s)exploitation films by the likes of Dick Randall (Shangri-La (1961)), Joseph Green (The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962) and Doris Wishman (Keyholes Are for Peeping (1972)) before mentoring young comics like Richard Pryor and Dennis Miller. Mitchell, despite having a voice that grates, enjoyed a career as a crooner in Palm Springs, California.

Lugosi – or perhaps it was director William “One Shot” Beaudine (so nicknamed for his ability to turn out low budget films at an extraordinary rate) – decided that Zabor should be played perfectly straight in contrast to the slapstick clowning of his co-stars and to his credit, he brings a modicum of dignity to the sort of stereotypical mad scientist role that he should have been able to play in his sleep by now. Whether it’s a setup-up from the lamentable Mother Riley Meets the Vampire is debatable but it was the last film that he would make before entering the orbit of Edward D. Wood Jr – the following year he would appear as the narrator in Glen or Glenda before making Bride of the Monster (1955), temporarily leaving Wood for Reginald LeBorg’s The Black Sleep (1956) and finally dying after shooting some random footage for Wood that he then built Plan 9 from Outer Space (1958) around.

For all the sneering at Wood, Lugosi’s films for the so-called “worst director of all time” are far more interesting than Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. No, they’re not any good by any established critical standard, but a re-viewing of any of them, particularly Plan 9, is a more appealing prospect than sitting through this tired collection of tired gags, sexist humour and seen-it-all-before mad science ever again. Some of that vaudeville humour must surely have felt old hat even at the time, and the plot, written by Tim Ryan with additional dialogue from “Ukie” Sherin and Edmond G. Seward, is constantly looking over its shoulder to the Monogram mad scientist films of the previous decade, one of which, The Ape Man, which Lugosi and Beaudine made in 1943, is almost as bad as this disaster. Decades later, Martin Landau suffered through this awful rubbish three times while preparing to play Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994) and managed to sum up the film far more succinctly than has been managed here, calling it “so bad that it made Ed Wood’s films look like Gone with the Wind…”