The Worst Movie You’ll Ever Find: Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla

There are bad movies, strange movies, and then there are movies that make you wonder how anybody thought the idea was good in the first place. Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, released in 1952, sits comfortably in that last category. The title promises exactly the kind of glorious B-movie nonsense that should be impossible to resist, but unfortunately, the title is much better than the movie.

William Beaudine directed the film, which stars Bela Lugosi as mad scientist Dr. Zabor and nightclub comedians Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo. Mitchell and Petrillo had built their act around their resemblance to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, with Petrillo doing a Jerry Lewis imitation and Mitchell filling the Martin role. At the time, Martin and Lewis were one of the biggest comedy teams in America, so this wasn’t exactly an imitation that was going to go unnoticed.

The story wastes no time embracing the absurd. Mitchell and Petrillo are Brooklyn entertainers on their way to a USO show in Guam when they accidentally parachute out of a plane and wind up stranded on the Pacific island of Cola-Cola. They meet Nona, the daughter of a tribal chief, and eventually encounter Dr. Zabor, who is conducting experiments involving evolution. When Zabor discovers that Nona is falling for Duke, jealousy gets the better of him and his experimental serum turns Duke into a gorilla.

That sounds like a movie somebody might have dreamed up after three cups of coffee and a very limited budget, but the Martin and Lewis connection gives the picture a much better story off screen. Jerry Lewis was reportedly furious about the imitation, while Paramount producer Hal Wallis reportedly threatened legal action. According to producer Herman Cohen’s later account, Jack Broder even offered Wallis the film’s negative in an attempt to keep the picture from being released, but they couldn’t agree on a price and the movie escaped into theaters.

Mitchell and Petrillo reportedly paid a price for the publicity. Petrillo later claimed that the duo was blackballed from some television and nightclub bookings, while other accounts describe venues becoming reluctant to hire them because of Lewis’s influence. Their resemblance to Martin and Lewis had helped make them a novelty, but it also became a burden, and the two never made another feature together.

And then Bela Lugosi walked into this mess. You have to wonder what he thought when he discovered that he was going to co-star with a couple of wannabe Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin lounge performers in a movie involving a mad scientist, an island and a gorilla. You can almost hear the pitch meeting: take the Abbott and Costello Universal Monsters formula, grab knockoffs of the hottest comedy team in America, add a cheap B-movie gorilla suit and see what happens. Surely that was comedy gold, or maybe it was fool’s gold.

By 1952, Lugosi was already far removed from the glory days of Dracula. His career had declined considerably, and producer Herman Cohen later recalled that Lugosi was seriously ill and struggling with morphine addiction during production. Yet he reportedly remained professional and played Dr. Zabor with the sort of seriousness that makes the whole thing even stranger. Everyone around him seems to understand that they’re making a ridiculous comedy, while Lugosi looks as though he has shown up to make a legitimate horror picture and is determined to see it through.

And then there’s the gorilla. Apparently, the 1950s had a thing for men in gorilla suits, with Hollywood repeatedly finding excuses to put one on screen, and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla was happy to join the tradition. In this case, the gorilla isn’t even the most ridiculous thing happening, which is quite an accomplishment.

Beaudine deserves his own footnote because his career was almost as remarkable as the movie itself. He had been directing for decades and kept working long after many of his contemporaries had retired. In 1966, he capped his feature-film career with two gloriously campy horror-western mashups, Billy the Kid Versus Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter. When he finally retired, he was reportedly the oldest working professional in Hollywood.

The film eventually found a second life on television, where its combination of Lugosi, jungle adventure, comedy impersonations and a man in a gorilla suit made it exactly the sort of thing somebody might discover late at night and wonder how it ever got made. Quentin Tarantino has even praised it as an “entertaining, outrageous, [and] preposterous” late-night television staple.

That’s where the fun really is. Don’t pretend Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla is a lost classic, because it isn’t. The movie is awful, but the story surrounding it is terrific: two comedians trying to cash in on Martin and Lewis, Jerry Lewis reportedly furious, Hollywood trying to stop the picture, Bela Lugosi fighting through the twilight of his career, and William Beaudine carrying on until his movies became strange little pieces of cult history.

The title promises Bela Lugosi, a Brooklyn comedy team and a gorilla. It delivers exactly that, but somewhere along the way it forgot one important ingredient: a good movie.

It’s a trick, but no treat.