Kongo (1932)

KONGO  (1932)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: William Cowan
    Walter Huston, Virginia Bruce, Conrad Nagel,
    Lupe Velez, C. Henry Gordon, Forrester Harvey
Walter Huston plays a white witch doctor who controls the natives with sugar cubes and magic tricks, while plotting revenge on the rubber plantation owner who stole his wife and crippled him. Lurid, pre-Code pulp, a batshit exercise in unrelieved sensationalism that would've horrified the moralists of the 1930s. (Not surprisingly, it suggests a lot more than it actually delivers.) Conrad Nagel battles drug addiction. Virginia Bruce goes from convent-bred innocence to sin and degradation. Lupe Velez tempts all the menfolk and shimmers in the heat (and how'd she get to this African jungle?) A remake of the 1928 Lon Chaney vehicle "West of Zanzibar".