Director: Reginald Le Borg
Writers: Henry Sucher, Bernard Schubert
Stars: Evelyn Ankers, J. Carrol Naish, Samuel S. Hinds
Run Time: 1 Hour, 1 Minute
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77eyqqJ7zZw
Synopsis
We see the shadowy silhouette of a man and woman fighting, and the woman loses. We then get the headline “Dr. Fletcher Takes the stand at the Coroner’s Inquest.” There’s a trial, and Dr. Fletcher walks us through what happened in an extended flashback of 1943’s “Captive Wild Woman.”
Fletcher watches Fred Mason (in reused footage from the previous film) go into the lion cage and get attacked by lions. We also see Paula, who had reverted to her ape form, come in and pull Mason out of the lion cage. We see the policeman shoot the ape and kill her.
In new footage, we see that Fletcher then took the “dead” ape’s body and found that she wasn’t dead, so he nursed her back to life. Mason comes to see Cheela some time later, and he tells Fletcher the whole story. We get more flashbacks as he explains how Paula could influence the animals and became his assistant.
Dr. Fletcher then purchases Dr. Walter’s sanitarium and begins studying his works. At some point, the ape escapes, and Fletcher and assistant Willy go looking for her. Willy finds a strange woman hiding in the bushes.
Fletcher has no idea who the girl is, but he notices that she behaves peculiarly. He learns that she’s exceptionally strong. Willy has a crush on her, and the nurses tell him to stay away from Paula. They start calling her Paula, but no one really knows that’s what they called her in the previous film; that’s just a coincidence.
Joan, Fletcher’s daughter, and her fiancée, Bob, come to visit the doctor, and Paula likes Bob a little too much. Paula scares Joan; could Joan have really seen a big ape outside? Fletcher warns Bob not to encourage Paula, as she’s unstable. Meanwhile, Willy is still creepily stalking Paula. She says, “Go away, don’t follow me!” Something kills Willy off-screen. Could it have been Paula?
Joan and Bob go out in a canoe, and “someone” swims out to the boat. The assailant capsizes the canoe and tries to drown Joan, but Joan escapes with just a scare. They soon discover that Willy is missing and come to the conclusion that he attacked Joan. Joan catches Paula in Bob’s bedroom, and she gets the entirely wrong idea about what’s going on.
The groundskeeper talks to Fletcher about a bunch of chickens and a guard dog that were killed the previous night. They still think it’s Willy. Paula accuses Fletcher of hurting her, and she finds him snooping through her stuff. Paula attacks Fletcher, and he defends himself. Bob walks in just as Fletcher hits her; he also gets the wrong idea.
Fletcher gets fingerprints from the chicken coop’s padlock and some other things, but they aren’t human fingerprints. Fletcher starts to figure out what’s going on with Paula. George the groundskeeper finds Willy, and his body had been crushed to death… a while ago.
Bob and Paula argue on the way back to the sanatorium, and she refuses to go in. Joan tells him what’s been going on, and then Paula follows her home. They all chase each other around the woods for a while, until we see the shadowy silhouette from the beginning of the film as Paula jumps and attacks Dr. Fletcher, and he injects her with something to make her pass out.
Back in the courtroom, Fletcher admits he accidentally gave her an overdose, and she died. They go into the morgue to examine the body and find a gorilla in the drawer, not Paula! The case is dropped, since there is no human body, and Fletcher is free to go.
Commentary
The film is 61 minutes long, and 17 minutes of that are flashbacks and voiceovers explaining what happened in the previous film. There are some new scenes interspersed in the flashbacks, but it’s still not anything new until about seventeen minutes in. It’s clear they needed filler or were otherwise doing this one “on the cheap.”
They are careful not to show us Paula killing or attacking everyone, but we’re given no clues, hints, or suggestions that it really could be anyone else. There are many miscommunications and people interrupting each other at just the wrong moment. It’s very melodramatic.
Evelyn Ankers and Milburn Stone get top billing for this film, but they mostly only appear in the flashback sequences from the other film, plus one added dialogue scene that is pretty short. Once we get to Dr. Fletcher’s story, they aren’t involved at all.