Tuesday, September 11, 2007
The Film Crew: The Wild Women of Wongo
Review by Sombrero Grande
The third release in the Film Crew DVD series unleashes The Wild Women of Wongo, a film that's easily in the running for "worst movie of all time" alongside such formidable travesties as Plan 9 From Outer Space and Manos:The Hands of Fate. Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett do their best to pepper the feature with gag-filled commentary, but the movie remains positively brutal to watch.
The first sign that this is going to be a bumpy ride indeed comes in the initial moments of the film where Mother Nature herself starts the plot rolling with an off-screen narration. She explains that sometimes she and Father Time make mistakes and you're going to have to watch one of them play out. How (or why) the duo did this is a mind puzzle no one should attempt to figure out, but the two of them created two separate villages and selectively populated each with certain types of primitive humans. In one, "Wongo," Mother Nature and Father Time created beautiful women but paired them with "brutal" men, and in the other, "Goona," created hunky guys mixed with unfortunately proportioned ladies.
From this jumping off point the film continues to make little to no sense whatsoever. The women find out about the handsome men of Goona, are temporarily banished from Wongo, then return, then leave again and try to ensnare the Goona guys who don't seem nearly interested enough in them. The men of Goona don't really look all that different from the men of Wongo (except for the Wongo men's spray-painted gray hair), nor do they look too contrasting to the "ape-men" who show up in a go-nowhere subplot.
Toss in lots of spastic dancing, unconvincing fighting, horrible framing, and a healthy dose of stock footage and you've got a bona fide cinematic turkey on your hands. But what really propels The Wild Women of Wongo into "worst movie of all time" territory is the fact that apparently someone thought that the film was too short and attempted to pad it out by inserting random shots of a parrot between nearly every other shot in the movie.
The riffs that the Film Crew provide are great and frequently hilarious, but the movie itself just grates on the viewer, making it a real ordeal to endure the whole way through.
There are two extras on the DVD, both of which are easily more amusing than the "skits" that bookend and break-up the feature presentation. The first is entitled, "Make the Film Crew Dance," and is based on the bizarre, obligatory dance sequence found in the feature; the second, "The Film Crew Says 'Goodbye' Wongo-Style," mocks the odd ending of the film. Both extras are amusing at first then run on a bit too long to ultimately stay fresh.
Beware; The Wild Women of Wongo is not recommended for bad-movie lightweights. Even with the expert wisecracking of the Film Crew throughout, this DVD comes as a hesitant recommendation due to the unrelenting brutality of its cinematic suckiness. You've been warned.
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