Oh man, here we go with another jungle adventure. And since this one stars famed lion tamer Clyde Beatty, you can bet that at least half, if not more, of the movie's running time is going to be scenes of a dude with a whip and a chair messing around with lions. But before we get to that, let me ask a question: how can a jungle be lost? I mean, I can understand being lost in a jungle, or there being a lost something inside a jungle, but how do you lose a whole jungle? It seems to me that, even in the era of travel by dirigible, the losing of a jungle would go something like, "Hmm, where did that jungle go? Oh, there it is; that giant green patch that covers half of Africa." Anyway...

We open on, you guessed it, scenes of Clyde taming some lion and tigers while the junior Bowery Boys look on. In between scenes of lion taming, we get our plot: Claude's girlfriend wants to marry him before she sets sail in a clipper ship with her dad, but he's too busy taming lions to notice her advances, at least until the boat she's on gets shipwrecked. Now Clyde must spring into action to rescue her and bring back some more lions and tigers to tame, all while being oblivious to the fact that his assistant, Sharky, is trying to kill him. Once in the jungle, there's something about a lost city, but mostly, it's just scenes of people sitting around a campfire until Clyde shows up to crack a whip and tame the local wild man-eating lions.

This is better than most crappy jungle adventure movies, if for no other reason than most of the animals are actually present on set rather than represented by characters pointing at or walking in front of grainy stock footage. This lends an air of excitement and danger to the film that is absent from most other films of this type. Plus, when Clyde steps in to grapple with surly tigers and lions, he's really standing there with surly tigers and lions, and when those animals get fed up, they tend to let everyone know. Still, one old fashioned lion taming act might be thrilling in a movie. But Lost Jungle sees no reason to stop at one.

So if you like scenes of tigers balancing on top of rubber balls while bears do somersaults and a guy cracks a whip and wields a chair, then this is the movie for you. Because at just over an hour, I think about forty-five minutes of the movie is lion taming scenes. Fifteen minutes is people walking through a jungle set, and five minutes is Sharky staring menacingly. It's much more watchable than many other Poverty Row jungle adventures, but that's not saying a whole lot. But you might as well watch this one, because short of a good Tarzan movie, jungle adventure movies tend not to get any better. At least there's no lengthy elephant stampede, and they don't bring those wisecracking kids from the beginning along to Africa.

Labels: Set: Sci-Fi Classics