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The Wild Women of Wongo
1959 - - 73 Mins.
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| Director: James L. Wolcott | | | Written By: Cedric Rutherford | | Starring: Jean Hawkshaw, Joyce Nizzari, Johnny Walsh, Adrienne Bourbeau, Ed Fury, Pat Crowley |
| Review by: James O'Ehley |
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So, you come around here often?
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THE WILD WOMEN OF WONGO is one of the most bizarre movies I have seen in a long time – and I mean that in a bad way.
Get this: somewhere in prehistoric times, two tribes inhabit the same island. They are (I’m not making this up) the Wongo and the Goona. The Wongo has sexy women, but butt-ugly guys – fat, balding types. The Goona on the other hand has real beefcake guys, but the women are dogs: too fat, too tall, you name it.
Strangely enough these two tribes have been living together on this remote island for ages without ever having come in contact with the other. That is, until a tribe of ape men (about whom they didn’t know either) threaten their idyllic lifestyle. The son of the Goona chief is sent to warn the Wongo (named Engor!) about the ape men’s impending attack, but being a regular hunky Christopher Atkins of The Blue Lagoon-fame type, the Wongo women swoon over Engor just a tad too much and the jealous Wongo men decide to kill him. Engor however escapes thanks to the Wongo chief’s daughter (named Omoo!).
As punishment the Wongo women are sent into the jungle alone where they must hang around until one of them are eaten by the Dragon God, one of the many alligators that hang around the swamp, the movie after all being filmed in Florida! There is a long drawn out underwater fight between Omoo and a rubber alligator. One night, the ape men attack the Wongo women, and in the process the ape men are torn apart by an alligator. Deciding in a bit of circuitous logic that the “blood sacrifice” has been honoured, the women return to Wongo – only to find that the men have deserted the village after an attack by the ape men.
The Wongo women then decide on what they probably should have done in the first place: head off to the Goona village and pair off with their hunky male specimens. No, you get no prizes for guessing that the ugly Wongo men eventually finally get hitched with the ugly Goona women. As we all know: hot people get paired off with other hot people, somebody like Woody Allen dating Mia Farrow is just PLAIN WRONG!
In-between the action we have a real live talking parrot making comments on the action – no, this isn’t some sort of acid flashback on my part. We also get to see an extended scene of some tribal dancing by the Wongo women, probably the real reason this movie was made in the first place.
The dialogue is atrocious and one’s jaw drops at the notion of what the film’s makers probably thought were funny (I think it was meant as a light-hearted comedy, but one can’t be too sure). I sort of felt sorry for the actors for having to mouth all the clunkers that made up the dialogue. I felt even worse for the poor actors who had to play the “ugly” Wongo men and, worse, the ugly Goona women.
WILD WOMEN OF WONGO is hilarious – but for none of the reasons that its makers intended. Poor production values (the Wongo high priestess has a rubber lizard bouncing on her arm the whole time!) plus terrible acting make this movie something that bad movie buffs really shouldn’t miss, but even they will find that this movie outstays its welcome in the last half an hour or so.
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