Queen Of The Jungle!

Queen of the Jungle is a 1935 serial from Mascot which takes footage from an even earlier silent film and tries to bond some new scenes. It's not really a successful effort alas. As I watched this early serial unfold I was reminded of the television show Forged in Fire -- let me explain. On that show the contestants are required often to bond to different types of metal into a cohesive whole which will yield a working blade. All too often due to lapses in technique or lack of time or both the bond does hold and the metals spring apart. That seemed to happen in this movie.

We meet our hero and heroine as children when the young woman is swept away in balloon into the heart of unexplored Africa. Many years later the young man searches for her and finds her, the queen of a tribe of mostly friendly natives who worship her as well as many other fetishes. There are villains and heroes and much rambling through the jungle. The main goal though in the new sections film in 1935 Mascot serial is that it is slave to the somewhat dusty plot of the 1922 lost movie The Jungle Goddess used extensively to expand the yarn. It felt like they wanted to update the old movie and make proper for audiences adjusted for sound. But the differences between the set-bound 1935 scenes and the outdoor 1922 scenes were extensive and obvious. It didn't help either that the "Queen of the Jungle" spoke almost no English and instead the directors insisted on sort of gibberish that was later suggested to be Swahili but it didn't sound legit to me.

Ultimately, as in all these programmers, the heroes succeed and villains are put down, but the fun is always getting there. All too often the fun is absent in Queen of the Jungle. At least it does preserve in some fashion the lost 1922 film, which is one I'd really have preferred to see.

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