UNTAMED MISTRESS. Howco/Joseph Brenner Associates, 1956. Allan Nixon, Jacqueline Fontaine, John Martin and Cliff Taylor. Written, produced and directed by Ron Ormond.

   This is planned as the first in a series of reviews that will include Untamed Women and Love Slaves of the Amazon, but we shall see ….

   Meanwhile, if you’ve never heard of Ron Ormond, the auteur of Untamed Mistress, there are some very entertaining articles about him on the web. Suffice it to say here that he was a vaudeville magician turned huckster, who turned filmmaker when he hooked up with Lash LaRue after PRC folded, propagating the Lash mystique in eleven ultra-cheap westerns between 1948 and 1952. Ormond branched out into Sci-Fi with Mesa of Lost Women in 1953, then hit the Southern Drive-In Big-Time with the jungle-fantasy/soft-porn Untamed Mistress.

   There’s an interesting defense of this film on IMDb (written by Ormond’s son, I think) citing the fact that Mistress packed drive-ins throughout the South. As I got into the movie, it was easy to see why, but more on that later; the origins of Untamed Mistress constitute a story all their own.

   It seems Ormond got into some sort of partnership with Howco, and emerged with rights to a movie called The Black Panther, starring Sabu — most of the rights, anyway; he just couldn’t use any of the scenes with Sabu actually in them.

   So with about 20 minutes of jungle movie to make a feature from, Ormond next acquired some non-professional footage of someone’s trip to Africa. It didn’t really match the other film, and there was no thematic relationship between the two, but hey: one was a jungle movie and the other was shot in Africa, wasn’t it?

   It was enough for a filmmaker of Ormond’s unique talents. He got a few actors together (including Allan Nixon, whose real life was every bit as chaotic as this film, and a good deal more interesting) and cobbled together a story about two brothers (Nixon and John Martin) who mount a smallish expedition to solve the mystery of Velda (Jacqueline Fontaine) Martin’s intended bride, who may have a Gorilla for an ex-husband.

   And here we see one of the reasons for Untamed’s success: Ormond’s advertising all but promised savage sex, and for its time this was a pretty daring item, mainly because the filmed-in-Africa footage was mostly of topless women dancing about in tribal rituals. And yes, in the 1950s, in the South, you could get away with this if the women were black. In fact, for a scene depicting home life in the “Gorilla Colony” Ormond simply hired three African-American strippers and had them dance around in front of a few men in bad gorilla suits.

   Okay, so in terms of Plot, we’ve got about 20 minutes of story about a maharajah on safari who can’t find any game because all the local fauna are under the protection of a mysterious Jungle Lord called Sabu, who never actually comes into the movie at all. The scene shifts (uncomfortably) the Maharajah is attacked by a gorilla and rescued by Velda, the mysterious jungle girl who looks a lot like Jane Russell in The Outlaw. The scene shifts again, the maharajah, now old and dying, issues a warning about Velda being irresistibly drawn to the Apes, and passes on a cursed jewel and a shrunken head that flies — no kidding.

   Next we get another 20 minutes of the mini-expedition walking around and around the same trees in the woods behind somebody’s back yard, occasionally stopping to react to mismatched stock footage, the whole thing narrated voice-over by Nixon in a valiant but futile attempt to tie it all together. Eventually the stock footage segues into about 20 minutes of breast-bouncing before we get back to the story and find Velda has got herself carried off by gorillas while we were ogling the local talent. Our heroes charge off to the rescue and find a whole tribe of gorillas and their wiling brides.

   I have to say the ending of this surprised me. It isn’t particularly good, and it was probably the result of simply running out of film, but it did startle me out of a state of slack-jawed disbelief. For the rest, Untamed Mistress is a joy for lovers of Old-Fashioned Bad Movies, and fans of this dubious genre shouldn’t miss it.