Writer: Cedric Rutherford
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org
A prehistoric island populated only by beautiful women and ugly men is discovered by people from an island with only beautiful men and ugly women.
An opening voice-over by Mother Nature tells us of an experiment she and Father Time performed 10,000 years ago. On the island of Wongo, they placed only beautiful women and ugly men. On the nearby island of Goona, only beautiful men and ugly women. The film that follows tells the story of what happened next.
Well, what happens next is very little. Basically, the women of Wongo see a man from Goona, become infatuated, and, through a variety of coincidences, everyone ends up with their ideal partner at the end—the women of Wongo with the men of Goona and the women of Goona with the men of Wongo. There is the threat of ape-men attacking, but while that’s used as an inciting incident, it’s never followed through to any conclusion. The story is about men and women coming together and, at the end, there’s a mass marriage where each man takes turns winking at the camera, except for the final couple that features the film’s main woman. Instead, she winks at the camera. THE END.
So I watched the version of this featured on Elvira’s Movie Macabre because I’ve seen it before, because it’s not that great, and because I could. I’d watched it just over ten years ago from the Sci-Fi box set and I’ll admit to being a little harsh on it back then. It’s a low-key cheesecake/beefcake picture with nice cinematography. Having watched nearly 300 other movies from these sets, something being fluffy and silly doesn’t offend my sensibilities anymore. Sure, the gender politics are pretty retrograde, but everything’s consensual and everyone involved seems to be having fun. That’s nothing to get angry over. Plus watching the version with Elvira’s interjections helped. The movie’s silly, but her occasional raspberries upped the energy level a lot.
I mention retrograde gender politics, but even that’s less than you’d imagine, especially with this kind of plot. What’s interesting is the movie’s definitions of ugly and attractive. Elvira pops in after the first appearance of a woman with, “Is that one of the pretty women, or the ugly women?” It’s a little mean-spirited, but it’s also a fair question: What are this movie’s standards and how do they reflect the audience’s expectations? Because when the “ugly” men appear, they’re all kind of buff, well-tanned, and, at worst, look like really fit hipsters. In fact, they don’t look dramatically different from the attractive men.
With the women there’s at least a difference between the so-called ugly ones and the women of Wongo, but it almost seems like the only real difference is a variety of body shapes. All the women of Wongo have the same pin-up figures. The women of Goona range from fat to thin, tall to short, and have obligatory make-up to add additional features. When it comes down to it, though, the movie seems to be saying there’s only one standard of beauty and it’s represented by the rigid sameness of the women of Wongo. One of the Goona women is tall and therefore ugly, but, really?
There’s the additional element of the movie suggesting punching your own weight because everyone ends up in love—not just the attractive people. The uglies pair off maybe even faster than the attractive people do and are visibly excited about their partners. So I guess I’m saying don’t let incels see this because it suggests their 80/20 rule is bullshit (if any part of that sentence confuses you, be happy in your ignorance and don’t Google it).
In the end, the movie is harmless fluff that, with the right mindset can even seem kind of sweet. It’s real dull, though. Even though it’s only 72 minutes, it still manages to drag. However, it’s pretty silly so it’s one of those qualified beer-and-pretzel recommendations. Don’t watch it alone and make sure you can goof on it.
Like I said above, I watched this more than ten years ago. The flick’s in the public domain so I uploaded a copy to the Internet Archive here. Since then, it’s been downloaded almost 29,000 times. I feel a little proud of that, like it’s evidence that people are using these movies I’ve been sharing.
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