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6.4/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 6.4/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. So This Is Africa remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
Look, if you are the type of person who digs 1930s slapstick that completely falls off the rails, you might actually like So This Is Africa. If you prefer logic, character arcs, or movies where the plot doesn't just evaporate halfway through, stay far away.
It’s the kind of movie that feels like a bunch of jokes were stapled together in the dark. Wheeler and Woolsey are doing their usual fast-talking bit, but the film around them is like a fever dream that nobody bothered to edit.
The whole thing starts in a hotel room with some lions. They’re just... there. It’s set up like the lions are going to be a huge deal for this jungle expedition, and then they completely vanish. It’s like the producers ran out of budget or the lions got bored and went home.
I kept waiting for them to show up again, but no. They just poofed into thin air. Classic.
Once they hit Africa, the movie stops trying to be a comedy about filmmakers and starts being a weird, frantic chase. The naturalist is terrified of animals, which is a great start for a jungle movie, right? Then we get the Amazon tribe sequence. It is exactly as goofy and stagey as you’d expect from 1933.
The disguises—putting on dresses to hide from an army of women—is peak vaudeville nonsense. It’s not clever. It’s just loud.
Honestly, the best way to watch this is with a few friends and a very low bar for quality. It’s not a masterpiece, and it doesn't even try to be. It’s just a weird, disjointed artifact from a time when studios threw everything at the wall to see what stuck. Sometimes, nothing sticks at all. 🦁