DEVIL GODDESS (1955)

 

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

DEVIL GODDESS is the last of the films spawned by the JUNGLE JIM franchise. I say "spawned" because as the JUNGLE JIM series was winding down, producer Sam Katzman's license to use the comic-strip character expired. Rather than renewing the license for the last of these cheapjack jungle-flicks, Katzman simply had actor Johnny Weissmuller play action-hero Johnny Weissmuller, who was in every other way identical to Katzman's Jungle Jim. 

I don't for a moment imagine that anyone making these toss-off cheapies had any sentiment about what they were doing, but GODDESS does have, if only by accident, a couple of "send-off" moments. The first is that its director and writer, Spencer G. Bennett and George Plympton, were two of the best raconteurs of adventure-serials, a form of cinematic entertainment which was doomed, like all of the B-films featuring continuing characters, by the spread of television. The second is that the plot involves characters searching for lost treasures of King Solomon, which is a fortuitous callback to the prose book that essentially jump started the African jungle-adventure, Rider Haggard's KING SOLOMON'S MINES.

All that said, everything in GODDESS is routine at best. Jungle Johnny meets a pretty young woman (Angela Stevens) who ropes him into helping her explorer-father looking for yet another explorer, one Dixon, who is the one seeking the treasures of Solomon. The seekers believe that Dixon has gone missing in the forbidden territory of the Korundi tribe, who sacrifice maidens to their volcano, which doubles as a "fire goddess" (and also the title's "devil goddess," I guess). However, some forgettable White treasure hunters intrude on the Korundis to get at the treasure. This ends up putting Jungle Johnny in between the tribesmen and the hunters, which leads to the film's only half decent fight-scene, when Jungle Johnny slides down the side of a mountain while fighting two tribesmen.

When Jungle Johnny makes it into the volcano where Dixon makes his home, the hero learns that Dixon now thinks that he is some sort of godly immortal, even though he has to use flash-powder tossed on a fire to "disappear." Despite being addled, he's also saved at least two sacrificial maidens from death because he's a Nice White Guy at heart. It takes almost no time for Dixon to remember who he really is, though, just in time for the bad treasure-hunters to be defeated and for all the good people to escape the exploding volcano. Oh, and the last shot of the Jungle Johnny-cum-Jim series is that of Kimba the Comedy Relief Chimp wearing the jewels of the long dead Solomon. Great art it's certainly not, but at least they didn't finish up the series with another of the ape's stupid back-flips.