Gorilla Ship (1932) - A wet, jealous B-movie with zero actual gorillas

Should you watch Gorilla Ship tonight? Only if you have a deep, almost unhealthy love for dusty 1930s B-movies where everyone talks like they have a mouthful of marbles. Fans of cheap maritime melodrama will find some fun here, but anyone hoping for an actual monkey on a boat is going to end up very angry. 🦍

Let's get the big disappointment out of the way first. There is no gorilla.

I sat through the whole seventy minutes waiting for a guy in a bad fur suit to jump out of a closet. Instead, the title just refers to the name of a boat, which feels like a dirty trick played by some producer ninety years ago.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Gorilla Ship (1932) through its definitive frames.

The story is incredibly simple. We get a husband, his wife, and his best friend on a yacht that eventually crashes.

Before the shipwreck even happens, the husband is already giving his friend some major side-eye. You can practically see the steam coming out of his ears every time his wife asks the friend to pass the salt.

Reed Howes plays the husband with this constant, constipated pout. He looks less like a jealous spouse and more like a kid who got the wrong toy for Christmas.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Gorilla Ship (1932) through its definitive frames.

And the storm? Oh boy.

You can clearly tell they are throwing buckets of water at the actors from just off-camera. At one point, a wave hits the deck, but only the left side of Wheeler Oakman’s shirt gets wet.

It makes the cheap sailing stuff in Sailor Maids look like a multi-million dollar documentary. Still, there is a weird charm to how seriously they take this tiny, wet set.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Gorilla Ship (1932) through its definitive frames.

Once they actually get wrecked, the movie slows down to a crawl. The jealousy stuff gets repeated about five times too many.

Things I wrote down while watching:

• The captain has a mustache that looks like it might fall off if he talks too loud.
• Why does the wife wear a full fancy dress to a shipwreck?
• One guy just stares at the ocean for a really long time. Like, is he okay?
• The sound design is mostly just loud static and screaming.

I did sort of like the ending, even if it felt incredibly rushed. It is like the writer, George Waggner, suddenly realized he only had three minutes of film left and needed to wrap up the love triangle immediately.

It is definitely not as classy as Son of the Gods, but it has that fast-paced, trashy energy that only early talkies have. It is short, it is silly, and then it just ends.

If you have nothing else to do on a rainy afternoon, you could do worse. Just do not expect King Kong on a yacht.