In order to prove this point regarding motion picture wretchedness, Retromedia delivers up a double feature of films so foul that starving, hard-up hyenas still wouldn't scavenge them for life giving scraps. While they avoid a great deal of the minstrel show stupidity that comes with most jungle jokes (there is barely a bugged eye witch doctor or a minority based malapropism to be found), these excuses for entertainment know nothing of the more civilized aspects of the exotic exploration film, like narrative, character or style. Each one stinks of b-picture parameters, made to satisfy a theater owner looking for a derivative diversion to fill out his weekly bookings. While White Huntress makes the mistake of substituting dialogue for adventure, nothing can save Jungle Siren – not even the fetching feminine whiles of a bawdy burlesque queen (and we aren't talking about Buster Crabbe).

The DVD:
Retromedia gives us two films on a single flip disc, a pair of rotten jungle jokes so silly and stupid they make Tarzan look like William F. Buckley. It is better to look at each one individually, since they both give off their own particularly pungent brand of awfulness aroma. Let's start with:

WHITE HUNTRESS (a.k.a. Golden Ivory, 1957) *1/2
A couple of stiff lower crust Brit brothers – Jim and Paul Dobson – who make their meager living as great white hunters (thank God there were no truth in advertising laws in the turn of the century veldt) discover that an explorer friend of theirs has stumbled upon the legendary elephant's graveyard. Realizing there's a gold mine in ivory (?) just sitting around, bloating in the sun, the siblings saddle up and get hired on as guides for the Puritan pukes known as The Meechams. This clan of cold cucumber sandwich eaters includes father Thomas and dreamy daughter Ruth. Also along for the ride are the Johnsons - kinfolk of the Meechams looking to catch a courtesy ride on their way to claim their own 40 acres and a muledeer. Naturally, the Dobsons want to direct their charges toward the bush booty. But the single-minded settlers just want to get to their destination and start tilling. Along the way, they pick up a cold-blooded killer (the subject of the shoot out? Diamonds, naturally) and a lot of personal hygiene issues. But when the planned tusk treasure hunt gets substantially sidetracked, Paul goes potty and sells out everyone to the suspicious Masai tribe, natives just looking for an excuse to go primeval on all newcomers. It will take some clever self-sacrifice to save everyone from this dopey Dobson's choice.

If Oscar Wilde had decided against writing comedies of manners and misunderstandings, and instead crafted African action movies, the result may be something as sedentary as White Huntress. The advertising would have us believe that this was a rollicking tale of one Amazonian honey taking on a jungle packed with problems, both wild and womanly. Our supposed heroine is shown decked out in a barely covering surveyor's suit, shorts frayed and raised high above the thigh, top torn and exposing more cleavage than a female rapper at an awards show. A knife is bravely raised in one hand, a mean, menacing snake is being held at bay in the other. The look on our fierce femme's face is a mixture of terror and brutality, a deadly determination to end this serpent's slimy ways no matter what. Too bad the truth is tamer than a well-beaten workhorse. Our actual Caucasian ass-kicker, appropriately named Ruth (the Biblical connotations alone are enough to give a critic pause) is really a meek, mildly proper British lady who does actually kill a deadly boa – only, she does it while SLEEPING, and basically lets the creature crawl all over her for about five minutes before brandishing a blade and giving the beast a permanent Excedrin headache.

If White Golden Ivory Huntress was really about Ruth and the rest of the Meechams trials and tribulations, it might have been an interesting fish out of ashen waters drama. After all, several sensational stories have been fashioned out of the noble explorers in the new frontier formula. But director George P. Breakston (a former child star turned filmmaker, always a tenuous combination) and writer Dermot Quinn (apparently delivering his first of only two career screenplays here) are too busy focusing on those miserable men, the failed Dobson dudes, to offer up much fun. While Jim serves God, Queen and Country rather well – heck, he barely breaks a sweat even in the most humid of swamp settings – his brother Paul is the literal definition of a poor slob. He is so greedy that avarice leaks from his pores in pit stain puddles up and down his adventurer garb. He has a consistent seven o'clock shadow, his beard being too bristling and damp to be considered a mere five pm-er. And the man drinks like a school of fresh water flounders. When he's not pounding down the stolen spirits, he is filching medicinal alcohol from the first aid kit. All he can think about is the elephant's final resting place, and the wealth of tusk money to be found there.

So instead of a battle between settlers and the native Masai tribe (since the movie was actually filmed in Kenya, there is a non-backlot authenticity to everything onscreen), we get lots and lots, and LOTS AND LOTS of pointless conversations, broken up by occasional stillborn shootouts. Paul and Jim argue over ethics. Jim and Ruth do several, conversational celibate slow burns. Paul and the Meechams argue over the logistics of river travel and cow plague. Pug ugly Aunt Catherine bitches at everyone in her 'never known the touch of a man (or woman)' old maid mania. By the end, when Paul has turned traitor and sold his friends down the leech-infested river, we are hoping for someone to die – if only to shut them up! In the grand scheme of the drawing room farce, stock footage and random animal noises are not par for the course. Add in incessant discourse, very little local color (the native footage is fascinating, if far too abrupt) and a real lack of any sexual chemistry or heat, and this is one trip to the bush that's about as exciting as watching overly articulate prairies grow.

JUNGLE SIREN (1942) ½*
Capt. Gary Hart and Sgt. Mike Jenkins are a couple of US military men who are, for some reason, helping out the French Resistance in Africa (apparently, there is a lot of forgive and forget in the Dark Continent). Their mission is simple: head out into the middle of the most hot, humid and sticky savannah ever pinpointed on a map, and build an airport; the two of them. Since they are fighting the good fight for Uncle Sam and all the ships at sea, they gladly take on the challenge. Little do they know that a couple of Nazty spies – George and Anna Lukas – are bribing the local tribal chieftains with beads and other Aryan trinkets to keep the area pro-Swastika. There's bound to be some native as well as national unrest when these Allie and Axis worlds collide. Good thing the tropical version of a busy body, Kuhlaya, the Jungle Siren, is around to meddle in everyone's affairs. If she's not shooting arrows into enemies, she's taking a provocative bath in the local croc pit. Naturally, her "ample" skills draw the attention of Capt. Hart, and with the help of a soused up old Doc named Harrigan, they will take on the Third Reich, as well as the boundaries of Hayes Code limited love, in their hovel away from home.

With the square-jawed, pre-Clutch Cargo acting action of Buster Crabbe, and breastfully bountiful ex-Minsky's stripper Ann Corio as our animal skinned white savage, you'd expect the screen to sizzle with wild, erotic love. Well, Jungle Siren does steam, but it's more in the "pile of dogsh*t" realm than the sultry skin on skin province. While Ms. Corio gets a couple of natty moments (the camera loves to film her from a torso hugging medium shot) and the Crabbe man is victim to a self-referential beefcake jibe, the closest we get to any African afternoon delight is watching stock footage of monkeys frolicking. Trying to tie a war-related storyline, which was the practice at the time, to a free-wheeling pith helmet potboiler is horribly unsuccessful here, basically because director Sam Newfield (creator of decades of cinematic dung) and his cracker jacked cast can't deliver enough tropical forest excitement. Jungle Siren is so dull, three-toed sloths, noted for their lethargy, reject the film as slow and uninvolving. It makes about as much sense as Hitler's obsession with the occult, and is a billion times more baneful.

Part of the problem with this film is that it feels like a serial with all the action amputated from it. Whenever Crabbe as Hart and the paunchy Paul Bryar as Jenkins get together, they are more like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby channeling Abbot and Costello than steely men of fiery fisticuffs. Indeed, the silly siren saves more lives, and kicks more Bwana butt, than these two military mooks. But Newfield takes it one step further. He THREATENS to have chase scenes and big sprawling battles. Natives get more than agitated here: they are whipped into a fatalistic frenzy by Chief Salangi, a brown-skinned behemoth who speaks like he studied the fine art of head shrinking at the Harvard Medical School. Without a single explanation as to why this jungle leader would sound like a member of the Algonquin Round Table (at least Crabbe and Bryar have a "we're from Brooklyn" buzzword phrase every time they give with the "dee"s and "doe"s) and Nazi's who are too busy talking on their Ham radios than plotting the downfall of Western civilization, we are simply left to scratch our sweaty scalps. And then, when it's all over, Crabbe and a couple of natives get the airport done in a single jump cut. No elaborate construction or engineering, just a machete and a mindset and suddenly, it's a runway.

The titillation factor is also rather routine. It has to be said that Ms. Corio has quite the rack, and when she's clad in a clingy animal pelt bikini, you can clearly hear 1942 pulses racing. But unlike exploitation titles from the 50s and 60s, there is nary a nipple shown or a personal pelt exposed. It's all bump and very little grind. When Buster has more boob exposing moments – literally and figuratively – than our lead lass, you know you need to reconfigure your ribaldry. Trading on the exotics instead of the erotics is standard old Hollywood bait and switch, but it doesn't help Jungle Siren be any more successful. Indeed, it only cements how dated and out of touch it really is. While it doesn't stoop to the racially insensitive portrayals of some of its cinematic brethren, this is still one myopic motion picture. Too bad the narrow-mindedness exists in both the film and the filmmaking.

Together, this double feature is like living in a quagmire filled with biting flies, and not having a mosquito net or a pump sprayer of Flitz handy. The level of irritation is so severe, and the breadth of the boredom so great, that you'll actually have a simultaneous experience of feeling chaffed and comatose at the same time. Watching single celled paramecium procreate would be more fun than sitting through these films, and would probably tell us a great deal more about Africa as well. We learn nothing about the multifaceted continent, its tribal culture, or its rich history of corrupt colonialism. All we get are ersatz adventures, bones through the nose (or hair) nonsense, and a great deal of perspiration stains. There must be better examples of the jungle genre out there, films that actually combine a knowledge of the region with a reliance on its primitive mysteries to really sell the suspense. But none of that is present in these pieces of public domain drudgery. Unless you consider Ann Corio's bosom a curio, or the three minutes of Masai footage worth your time, you'll want to avoid this drab duo of clannish crap. It was films like these that probably kept the continent in third world status for the majority of the 20th century.

The Video:
In a word – appalling. In another word – atrocious. These prints are so poor, so devoid of any real cinematic value, that to consider them releasable indicates a level of disservice on the part of Retromedia to film and DVD fans alike. White Huntress has the better picture of the two, but that's a lot like saying old cat crap smells better than fresh feline feces, since Jungle Siren is a washed out, faded catastrophe. Neither movie has any clear contrasts, the black and white is mere shadows of ashen gray, and damage and defects mess up almost each and every frame. Retromedia apologizes for the poor image in its opening menu warning, but it's not enough to keep the disappointment at bay. If for some reason you were a fan of these films, and hoped they were getting the loving digital respect they deserve, you'd be dead ass wrong. Both transfers are terrible.

The Audio:
Guess what? As bad as the visual elements are, the Dolby Digital Mono aural attributes are actually WORSE! Jungle Siren is nearly indecipherable, the entire soundtrack resembling the aftermath of a trip through a sonic shredder. Voices crack up and get lost in the din, and the ambient noises recall the death throws of rabid animals, not the natural order of the jungle. White Huntress sounds somewhat better, but most of the dialogue is muted and muddy, making the varying accents that much more difficult to hear. Neither film is filled with music, but Huntress does occasionally employ a bombastic classic score that tries to make the movie epic, instead of the ipecac it is.

The Extras:
The sole bonus feature is a nine minute short about pygmies building a bridge. There is more entertainment and enjoyment in watching these primitive engineers than in both of the other films combined AND multiplied.

Final Thoughts:
Anyone hoping for a little throwback excitement with these so called jungle classics will be sadly, and shamefully, mistaken. White Huntress is one long perspired trudge through way too much proper British balderdash, while Jungle Siren substitutes cheese for heat and comes up equally blank. This is one of the most passable DVDs ever to be reviewed by this critic. As a matter of fact, it is so feeble, so lacking in anything remotely recommendable that skipping it would be to pay too much attention to its existence. The better rating would be something along the lines of DVD Talk Collectors Edition, only in the putrid polar opposite. Maybe a DVD Talk Landfill Fodder grade...or how about DVD Talk Hall of Rejects. Whatever the case may be, steer clear of this dire double bill. The only relationship is has to the real Africa is its similarity to the tzetze fly: after a few moments of exposure, you too will be cursed with a sleeping sickness from whence you may never recover.

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