OVERLOOKED MOVIE: THE WILD WOMEN OF WONGO (1958)

From the title alone, you know you are in trouble watching this film.  That knowledge is intensified during the credits when you note that the flick has a dialogue coach.  And then the film starts...

The narrator is Mother Nature.  Hoo-boy!  She tells the audience of the time -- ten thousand years ago -- when she and Father Time tried a failed experiment in Wongo:  they made all the women beautiful and all the men ugly while to the south they made tribe where all the men were beautiful and the women...were not.

We open with a native landing his canoe on the beach and taking a walk through the jungle.  (You know it's a jungle because of the shots of lizards, tropical birds, and a puny alligator; the film was shot at various tourist spots in Florida.)  The man is walking along some well-trimmed jungle grass; you're not supposed to notice that the grass is next to a dirt road with tire tracks.  One of the wild women pokes her head out from the wall of the Coral Castle in Homestead, Florida.  She has a rubber lizd Williamsard tied to her left arms.  We are to believe the lizard is real because it bobs its head when she wiggles he wrist.  And then...

O Sweet Mother of  Mercy!  I can't go on!  You will have to see if you have the stamina to watch it for yourself.

The movie stars Jean Hawkshaw, an whose only credit on IMDb was this movie.  Surprisingly, six of the other wild women have this flick as their only credit also.  One wild woman, Adrienne Bourbeau (no, not Adrienne Barbeau), has three credits, and only one (Joyce Nizzari, whose character didn't even have a name) went on to any sort of actor career.  (This was Nizarri's first film.  She had been "discovered" at age fifteen by Bunny Yeager, a photographer known for her tasteful (?) nude photographs.)  Of the male cast, the less said the better; only one of them (Ed Fury) went on to star in some Italian beefcake films.

Here's the coolest thing about The Wild Women of Wongo.  The director was James L. Wolcott.  (He was also the uncredited executive producer.)  Wolcott directed only one other movie in his career, 1969's clip show The Best of Laurel and Hardy.  So why is this so cool?  Because Wolcott was a close friend of Tennessee Williams and Williams actually directed most of the movie!  He had asked Wolcott if he could direct some of the movie and Wolcott said sure, why not?  Williams evidently did it for the jollies.

It also interesting to note that some of the stock music used in this film was so bad that it was reused a year later by Ed Wood on Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Brace yourselves, children!  Here comes The Wild Women of Wongo!

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