Walking through your local grocery store can be so stress-inducing nowadays that you might need to call an ambulance (talk about a blue light special), but with high prices the way they are, it has caused mega anxiety when choosing what kind of brand you want. When you find yourself roaming up and down the aisles, enticed by the sweet advertisement of capitalism and hunger (BUY! CONSUME! SPEND!) the major question is this: are Doritoes the same as Cheesy Triangles? Can your thirst be quenched by Hilltop Cougar Holler instead of Mountain Dew? Will you be complacent by deep-fried SPAM or will you hold out to be ultimately satisfied by Acme’s Meaty Canned Mights? The answer to these resides in the eye (or smelly bowels) of the beholder. However, it was this kind of spiritual debate producer Jack Broder must have had while developing his delicious (or starving) idea: Can we get a duo club act who pay homage to (or flat out rip-off) Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, make a cheap knock-off of their films for less then $12,000, and trick them into thinking they saw a Martin and Lewis Jungle/monkey business adventure (because if they thunk while looking at the poster)? This was the exact journey Realart Pictures Inc. ventured on when their flick Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla starring Duke Mitchell (Dean wannabe) and Sammy Petrillo (obnoxious Lewis-ish) crashlanded at the box office in 1952. We can look down on Broder, but he cheated so well that the real Martin and Lewis sued the company for plagiarism (even ChatGPT couldn’t produce work this close to the original name brands)!
Playing in various clubs throughout the 40s and 50s, Mitchell and Petrillo were a hit with the crowds, even though some of their ads didn’t mention their names, just their images to trick Vegas audiences into seeing the OG masters. When their manager Maurice Duke got the idea to pitch the idea to a studio, most turned him down faster than a bag of Tiny Dolores cakes, but one studio Realart Pictures Inc. (infamous for re-packaging the Universal Pictures double bills at wholesale) thought the idea had potential… as long as it starred Bela Lugosi (as his Dracula film was bringing the studio some extra dough in the recent re-packages) and a man in a gorilla suit. However, besides having one of the worst titles of all time (take that The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies), Realart did the movie solid by taking the idea seriously. Not only did they do a good job at David Copperfielding the audience, but the film looks and feels like a well-made Dean and Lewis picture (if Petrillo walks like a Lewis, talks like a Lewis, and squawks like a Lewis, it’s probably a Lewis… sort-of…). To capture their success in a false bottle, Realart elicited the help of such talents as William Beaudine, Charlita, Tim Ryan, and Edmond Seward from The Bowery Boys serials, as well as Charles Van Enger and Philip Cahn from the Abbott and Costello team, which yielded the picture to have a professional industry look and feel, just like the Dean and Lewis variety. However this did not stop Dean and Lewis from litigating Realart to block the film, but when a financial deal could not be met, the film suffered upon release when most theatrical distributors passed on the film, knowing their audiences weren’t that stupid to fall for the Milli-Vanilli of comedy duos (so instead they booked a couple of teenage monster killer-thrillers for their intellectual minds).
The great (not-so-great) club act of Duke and Petrillo are, for some unknown reason, lost and asleep in the mighty jungles, but are rescued, groomed, and awoken by Nona, the daughter of Chief Rakos of the Zambuanga tribe. Duke and Petrillo (so scared he honks and whines just like a Lewis knock-off pull-string toy) want to fight them all off but calm down when Nona explains that she (somehow) attended an American college, learned to speak (good) English, and wants to help them get home, even if it involved becoming romantically involved with Duke (its good to be the queen). But they are not the only foreigners in the dense jungle. Dr. Zabor (played to perfection by Bela Lugosi during his Ed Wood era) is present, doing some interesting experiments on monkeys, and promises to help them get home if they help him. Unfortunately for our carbon-copied heroes, Dr. Zabor has the hots for Nona and soon the nutty professor changes his mind by making Duke face a hairy situation! Throw in a couple of goofy experimental potions, mix in some awful cultural stereotypes (even for back then), and zip it all together with a bad gorilla suit and the film is a pseudo-knock-off three-ring circus that will make your friend Irma do some jumping jacks while eating Shingles Stacked potato chips washed down with a cold bottle of Crocodile Helper!
Xeroxing your way at impo(stor)ssible seventy-four minutes, distributor Broader (who went on to distribute double bills like Women of the Prehistoric Planet and The Navy vs. the Night Monsters) got the last laugh (not from Petrillo) when the film was lost to the jungles of public domain and when aired on TV many of the intelligent (yeah, okay) audiences thought this was a lost Matin and Lewis film! You can find many terrible VHS copied versions streaming online and in DVD sets, but try to get your hands on the Sons of Kong set from Alpha Video. As you find yourself questioning your sanity on whether Petrillo is funnier than Lewis (they both belong on the hoods of fire trucks to warn the neighborhood) please remember what my grandma used to say: “Salt is salt no matter what the package, but Puffed Leopard Crunchers are always better than Cheetos!”
