The Bride and the Beast (1958)

I was beginning to think that I had imagined this film's existence.  I felt sure that I had read about it somewhere, but couldn't recall the title. Attempts to identify it through plot descriptions got me nowhere in terms of online research.  Then, by chance, I was leafing through an old reference book I hadn't looked at in years (Alan Frank's The Horror Film Handbook) and there it was: a brief entry on The Bride and the Beast.  A truly obscure B movie with an extraordinary central idea, I'm surprised that it doesn't have more of a cult following, particularly as Ed Wood Jr, so beloved of bad film enthusiasts, was responsible for the script.  Wood was apparently inspired by the Bridey Murphy story which was in the headlines at the time (and was eventually the basis of a film), in which a US housewife, under hypnosis, regressed to 'previous life' as the eponymous nineteenth century Irish woman.

Wood, of course, put his own twist on the idea: in Bride and the Beast a newly wed wife is sexually assaulted by her husband's pet gorilla on her wedding night.  The husband shoots the beast, but his wife continues to suffer bizarre nightmares involving jungles and horny apes.  Under hypnosis, she finds that she is the reincarnation of a gorilla.  Not any gorilla, mind you, but the 'Queen of the Gorillas', (the film's working title).  Later, on an African safari, the wife gradually starts reverting to her bestial previous incarnation and eventually elopes with another gorilla and escapes into the jungle with him as her husband looks on, powerless to stop them.  (No, I'm not making this up).  Wood clearly found it impossible to bring his script up to feature length using only this story line, so he pads it out with a middle section consisting of an African safari made up mainly of stock footage and bad studio sets.  The use of stock footage undoubtedly explains why there are Bengal tigers rampaging around Africa - clearly producer-director Adrian Weiss's budget couldn't afford any stock footage containing lions: the tigers were obviously cheaper. (The trailer's emphasis on the 'never before seen' battle between a tiger and crocodiles prefigures the obsession with animal savagery shown by Italian Mondo movies). 

Weiss, nevertheless, apparently considered the film 'a minor classic'.  In a strange footnote, leading man Lance Fuller later suffered some kind of breakdown and was shot and seriously wounded by a police officer he attacked with a metal pipe, while claiming that he was Jesus Christ.  Perhaps he was, in a previous life.