White Pongo!

Now that I've finally at last seen it, I don't know why I lusted to see this movie for so many moons. It's got that evocative, or at least mysterious title I suppose.

White Pongo is a PRC movie about a gang of white hunters who want to track down a white "Pongo" (native word for ape) which they are convinced will prove to be the missing link. It's all hokum of course, but it gets the assembled set of psuedo-British vintage whitefolk on the trail. And a long trail it is too. They wander through the jungle at length. You know the action in a movie is too slow when you speed it up and it still seems reasonably normal. The folks in this movie just plain walk slowly.

They eventually find a plant that attracts "pongos" and they set up a trap, though that plan comes to smash when their guide proves to be a criminal and ties everyone up save for the obligatory white woman who is kidnapped. There's a love triangle in this somewhere and frankly there are too many characters, some just fall away with little to do. Eventually the White Pongo tracks after the girl and threatens her very briefly before fighting with another regular black ape. The hunters having escaped wound him and capture him bringing the movie to a close as they promise to take this missing link back to civilization. That's for another movie, not this one alas.

It's a mess really. The acting is okay, but the story is ragged. The ape suits aren't terrible by the standards of the day. Apparently this is a Ray Corrigan outing, and he's always reliable. There's a beastial quality to his ape suit that isn't found on all of them, an odd human ferocity. But alas the battle between the apes is pretty lackluster and frankly poorly shot. The biggest problem with this movie is pacing. It's just plain slow with lots of aimless wandering to eat time. There's not a bad movie here buried under all that stock footage.

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