Animal trainer Fred Mason (Milburn Stone) return to the US with lions, tigers, for the circus. He also brings a female gorilla that’s fond of him. While he was away, his girlfriend, Beth Colman (Evelyn Ankers) has taken her sick sister, Dorothy (Martha Vickers) to renowned doctor Dr. Sigmund Walters (John Carradine), who is actually a mad scientist, who kidnaps the gorilla and changes her into a human, who he names Paula Dupree (Acquanetta). She has a strange power over the big cats, and begins working with Fred on his act. However, jealousy turns Paula into a were-ape.
The Jungle Woman was the last attempt by Universal in the ‘40s to add to their monster collection. It didn’t work, and although there were three ape-woman films, they were all short B-movies, and mostly forgotten in the following years. This first film looks pretty good; a Universal low budget feature was miles ahead of Poverty Row features in basic film-making skill. This one was greatly aided by reusing scenes from The Big Cage, a 1933 adventure circus movie. There’s a lot of high quality animal footage, with lions and tigers that would never have been able to be filmed on Captive Wild Woman’s budget.
But that may also have harmed the movie. If your #1 goal is to shove in whatever you can from a previous movie, the new material gets less attention. The animal stuff is amazing (and apparently lead to the death of a tiger), but it’s also irrelevant. Acquanetta is the real draw, and I wanted more time with her and the horror aspect. There’s a lot more that could have been done with her, given more time. But then maybe there wasn’t. Captive Wild Woman is clearly a take off of Cat People, but with an ape, but the Production Code Administration stepped in requiring changes so that it wouldn’t offend religious doctrine (no souls for animals) and to avoid a tone of bestiality. It’s kind of hard to tell a story about female sexuality using an animal metaphor when you specifically can’t use the animal metaphor.
John Carradine, in his first major role, makes for a charismatic and silky villain, and anything with him or Acquanetta is gold. Mason and Ankers are not so shiny. For Mason, it’s his role: He’s an animal trainer. That’s it. There’s nothing else there. Ankers can be very effective, but when she doesn’t care, it sometimes shows up on screen, and she clearly doesn’t care about this film.
It was followed by two sequels, Jungle Woman (1944) and Jungle Captive (1945).