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Alligators and Crocodiles in Movies |
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The Wild Women of Wongo (1958) |
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Spoiler Alert !
Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
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I find it hard to resist a movie with the words "wild women" in the title, or any movie about a feral matriarchal society, so I did not resist this one. It's a very cheesy low-budget jungle adventure movie in which a group of attractive women run around in the jungle with spears and very little clothing. What's not to like about that? An opening voice-over by "Mother Nature" tells us that she and "Father Time" created everything we know, but they made some mistakes, including a topsy turvy experiment 10,000 years ago when they made all the women of the village of Wongo beautiful and all the men ugly, but they made all the women of the neighboring village Guna ugly while all the men are all handsome. (The concept of beauty is subjective, (it's in the eye of the beholder) not objective as shown here, but the 1950s weren't exactly woke, by our standards.) There is also a third group of men who look like apes, who play the bad guys.
When the women of Wongo see one of the men from Guna, they all become love sick, because they've never seen handsome men before. They go to the dragon temple and when they return, all their men are all gone. The women think the men have been killed by marauding ape men, so they hike to Guna to find some new men. (They're not much of a matriarchal society after all, despite the title.) Once they get there, the ugly Guna women drive them away, but they find a group of young bachelors in the jungle, where they are living for a month as part of their tradition for becoming men. The women of Wongo find it easy to catch them all and take them back to Wongo. The men of Guna don't protest much, because they've never seen beautiful women before and they've been beguiled.
There are a lot of alligators in the movie, and alligators play a big part in the Wongo society and religion.
- The people worship the Great Dragon, which is portrayed as a small alligator held up on a pole. (The Great Dragon is actually a big alligator that comes to eat women who are left as a sacrifice.)
- At the temple of the Great Dragon, we see a priestess wearing dead baby alligators as jewelry. The women of Wongo do an alligator dance around the temple, led by a woman wearing a dress with large scales and a hat that looks like an alligator. (They spared no expense on costumes...)
- We see a skinny-dipping woman in danger from an alligator, so another woman jumps in the water and wrestles the alligator - for what seems an eternity. Eventually she lets it go. Maybe they both got bored.
- When a couple of the ape men try to kidnap a woman from Wongo, the Wongo wild women push them back with their spears into some water with an alligator in it. The alligator kills them and starts to eat them, but we don't get to see that part. |
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