Film Year: 1958
Genre: Porno without the nudity or sex (that's seriously the closest I can get)
Director: James L. Wolcott
Starring: Jean Hawkshaw, Mary Ann Webb, Cande Gerrard, Adrienne Bourbeau
The Movie
Mother nature plays a practical joke on mankind by placing an island where beautiful women of the Wongo village marry men are thuggish brutes while a village on the opposite island called Goona hosts handsome men who marry women who are hideous hags. A man of Goona travel to Wongo to seek assistance in fighting off ape-men, but he find himselve smitten with the Wongo women. The men of Wongo reject Goona's offer and chase him off, but the women of Wongo come to his aid. The Wongo men sentence the women into the jungle until their god, a crocodile, claims one of them as a sacrifice, but the woman find themselves on a journey to Goona to meet more men that are to their liking.
And the moral of the story is pretty people belong with pretty people and ugly people belong with ugly people. And remember beauty is only skin deep, AND how hideous you are determines who you are on the inside as well!
This movie is such a strange little find. It's a weird 1950's anomaly that's seemingly made by people who have no experience making a film but really want to tell this pointless story for some reason. The movie is poorly made, poorly acted, has almost no production value, and mostly sells itself on seeing women in leather bikinis. But its strange sense of morality elevates it to a different level of awful film-making, where the movie basically tells us that beautiful people are good, smart, and resourceful while unattractive people are awful, mean, and dimwitted. It's certainly...different than the normal lesson, that's for sure. The winking at the end implies that it may have been a comedy or a parody of some sort, but it's not really that funny. Maybe this whole thing was some strange meta experiment, by mocking bad movies by being a bad movie?
Wongo is a movie that really defies description. It needs to be seen/endured to be believed. It's probably the worst movie of The Film Crew's brief catalog, and considering how bad Hollywood After Dark is that's saying something. Hollywood After Dark at least resembled an actual movie, while Wild Women of Wongo feels like exploitation dreck without the exploitation.
This movie is such a strange little find. It's a weird 1950's anomaly that's seemingly made by people who have no experience making a film but really want to tell this pointless story for some reason. The movie is poorly made, poorly acted, has almost no production value, and mostly sells itself on seeing women in leather bikinis. But its strange sense of morality elevates it to a different level of awful film-making, where the movie basically tells us that beautiful people are good, smart, and resourceful while unattractive people are awful, mean, and dimwitted. It's certainly...different than the normal lesson, that's for sure. The winking at the end implies that it may have been a comedy or a parody of some sort, but it's not really that funny. Maybe this whole thing was some strange meta experiment, by mocking bad movies by being a bad movie?
Wongo is a movie that really defies description. It needs to be seen/endured to be believed. It's probably the worst movie of The Film Crew's brief catalog, and considering how bad Hollywood After Dark is that's saying something. Hollywood After Dark at least resembled an actual movie, while Wild Women of Wongo feels like exploitation dreck without the exploitation.
The Riff
The Film Crew have their work cut out for them this time, with such a bizarre film that has no idea what it's doing. Wongo seems to be about sex without ever actually admitting it to itself or portraying any, so naturally Mike, Kevin, and Bill latch onto this aspect and don't let go. Sometime they push the allusions of the film just a bit further and make it blunt. These weird feelings the women have for these handsome strangers is more or less portrayed as 50's "squishiness" while guys bring out the film's inner pervert and unleash the fact that these girls are just really horny and it's a feeling they're not familiar with. This entry of The Film Crew isn't all that dissimilar to MST's Horrors of Spider Island where they squeeze a sexual subtext for all it's worth. The difference is that Wongo plays up innocence more and isn't as in-your-face with is sex-minded nature as Spider Island was, which makes dirtying it up a bit more fun.
The host segments are a bit casual this time around. I don't think they're bad, they just exist and don't really service this show as a whole. We see the Crew complain about a non-stop air conditioner as they freeze nearly to death and Kevin tries to find Wongo on a map of fantasy locations during the Lunch Break. The best segment is the final one which has Mike, Kevin, and Bill asking a computer who their ideal mates are.
Wild Women of Wongo is the best remembered Film Crew episode, and probably with good reason. It's the only one that went above and beyond the standard that their few recorded episodes set. It has a memorably bad movie and riffing that excels in mocking it. While the host segments could stand to be better, this stands as the must see of this tiny little riffing series that never took off.
Classic
The DVD
Like all Film Crew releases, Wild Women of Wongo was filmed in 2005 but shelved until 2007 when Shout Factory purchased and released them to DVD. Picture was fair, with the host segments presented in the show's normal non-animorphic widescreen format, while the film itself was in full screen. Audio was solid, though the film itself is a bit drained. There are two bonus parodies of the film. The first mocks the Priestess of the film who shouts "DANCE!" forcing Mike, Kevin, and Bill to break out into a dance. The second is a parody of the winking ending, where Bill forgets how to wink.
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