There are some films where you spend much of their running time scratching your head, wondering what on earth possessed those behind it to make them. We’re used to this from the lower budgeted films that frequently have to dream up outrageous plots to distract from the fact that there’s very little money (and sometimes even less talent) involved, but when you encounter a mainstream Hollywood studio film as odd as Gordon Douglas’ Skullduggery it somehow seems even more surreal. Presumably, producer Saul David at Universal had taken note of the success of Twentieth Century-Fox’s Planet of the Apes (1968), based on the 1963 novel La Planète des singes/Monkey Planet by French writer Pierre Boulle, and decided that films featuring ape-like creatures based on the work of gallic authors were the next big thing. So, he snapped up the rights to an even earlier French novel, 1952’s Les Animaux denatures/You Shall Know Them by “Vercors” (a penname for Jean Bruller) and set Nelson Gidding to adapting it.

What he came up with is a genuine oddity. Paleoanthropologist Sybil Graeme (Susan Clark) arrives in in Papua New Guinea in search of fossil evidence of a creature she believes to be the missing link. She throws in her lot with adventurers Douglas Temple (Burt Reynolds) and Otto Kreps (Roger C. Carmel) who are in country searching for the phosphorous that they’ve heard is used in all American television sets and which they hope to mine to make a fortune. They blag their way not her expedition that also includes among its number Father Dillingham (Chips Rafferty) and Doctor Spofford (Edward Fox) and the obligatory gang of local bearers. Douglas plans to scatter bones he’s had the foresight to bring with him to keep the expedition busy while he searches for the phosphorous. But things take an unexpected turn when they stumble across a tribe of hominids that Douglas dubs Tropis, and which may the very missing link that Sybil was searching for evidence of.

That should have been enough for anyone really – a Boy’s Own style jungle romp that culminates in the discovery of a lost tribe, but Skullduggery isn’t letting you off that easy. In the first of two jolting changes of tone, Sybil’s sponsor, industrialist Vancruysen (Paul Hubschmid), turns up, Douglas promptly sets the Tropis to work as unpaid labour (slaves to you and I) at his phosphorous mine and the debate begins about whether the Tropis are humans or animals. This culminates in Kreps having drunken sex with one of the Tropis, Topazia (Pat Suzuki), and getting her pregnant. Elsewhere the local indigenous tribe are caught barbequing the Tropis for dinner and Topazia suffers a miscarriage. Tonal shift number two heaves into view as the action relocates to a courtroom after Douglas claims to have killed the baby to force a legal settlement on the status of the Tropis.

At best, Skullduggery is a heavy-handed satire with a smattering of silly comic interludes. At worst it’s a disaster, a rambling, poorly made (the continuity is all over the place) and often tasteless piece so ill-conceived that it makes you wonder what the suits who greenlit it were so obviously under the influence of. What on earth made anyone think that this was a good idea? Astonishingly, Otto Preminger was set to be the original director, but he very sensibly turned it down in favour of other things and it briefly passed into the hands Richard Wilson – who didn’t even last a day, David dismissing him virtually as soon as production began. David brought in Douglas (of Them! (1954) who had worked with David on spy spoof In Like Flint (1967)) who seems to have never got to grips with the eccentric story. His direction is bland and no amount of split-screen and rapid-cut stills when the Tropis arrive add much excitement to the proceedings.

Gidding’s script has to take the lion’s share of the blame for film’s plodding nature (an opinion not shared with Reynolds, who liked the script but disliked the way it turned out). It takes an awful long time to get to the meat of the story, a full 40 minutes passing before the Tropis turn up, 40 minutes spent traipsing through the jungle, never the most exciting of things and here it’s every bit as dull as you’d fear. The make-up effects for the Tropis, actually a troupe of Japanese mime artists apart from singer/actor Suzuki, are very poor indeed and those tonal shifts, especially the one from jokey jungle romp to less-than-subtle hints of bestiality, are jolting. Robert Moreno is the only one to come out of tis with dignity intact, his photography of the Papuan, Jamaican and Samoan locations often very lovely indeed. But it’s small recompense for the lousy pacing and the head-scratchingly stupid script.

If David really was hoping to give Universal their version of Planet of the Apes, he was in for a rude awakening. He’d actually produced it for ABC Pictures, intending it to be their first major release, but David insulted one of the company heads when he refused to take a meeting with him and the film was immediately placed on hold before Universal stepped in to complete it, though only if the entire shoot was relocated to Jamaica. It was a disaster from beginning to end and it fared just as badly at the box office. In fact, its performance was so poor that the other four films that David had in preparation at Universal – A Stretch on the River, Marie Beginning, Dove Creek Rodeo and The Tuck – were immediately cancelled. David (who appears in Skullduggery as Berl Tanen) had produced Fantastic Voyage in 1966 and seemed keen on science fiction, but his future was less bright after Skullduggery. He produced Logan’s Run in 1976, was fired from the TV spin-off and ended his days producing the post-apocalyptic The Ravagers in 1979. Neitehr of those later efforts were particularly good films, but they stand head and shoulders over the appalling mess that is Skullduggery.