As mentioned previously, in “Impossible Voyages” I’m watching and writing about a run of new (to me) science fiction films to be watched over last year, which has extended to this year (2026). You can read the rationale and ground rules here. In the meantime, we are advancing from 1951 to 1952 with this movie, #30 in this series.
So after the new era of high-brow science fiction films that I had entered into with the 1950s, including Destination Moon and The Day the Earth Stood Still, I find myself here, with this historical cinematic achievement. Out of every movie that I’ve viewed in this series this is the one that I felt like I had to be the most careful when I was googling about it, lest I find myself in some corners of the internet that I definitely do not want to visit.
Spoilers Ahead
Untamed Women (1952)
Directed by W. Merle Connell
The Story: Steve Holloway, a survivor from a downed bomber plane in World War II, relates his incredible story: he and a few other survivors from his crew found themselves on an island inhabited by a tribe of women descended from Druids. They dealt with giant dinosaur-like lizards and flesh-eating plants in an effort to survive, as well as the uncertainty of whether they could trust Sandra, the tribe’s leader. In the end, Sandra is killed in an attack by a horde of Neanderthal men. The men attempt to help the women in the attack, but the local mountain turns out to be a volcano which suddenly erupts, wiping out everybody except Steve, the sole survivor. His listeners find his story unbelievable, but he carries with him a medallion given to him by Sandra, which is recognisably of Druidic origin.
Starring: Mikel Conrad as Steve. Doris Merrick co-stars as Sandra. Richard Monahan, Mark Lowell and Morgan Jones play Benny, Ed and Andy (Steve’s fellow survivors from the crash). Midge Ware, Judy Brubaker, Carol Brewster and Autumn Rice play some of the women. Lyle Talbot, aka cinema’s first Commissioner Gordon and cinema’s first Lex Luthor, has a small role as a doctor, who for some reason is listed in the credits as a colonel.
Comments: Okay, let’s just get this out of the way: Untamed Women is a ridiculous movie, barely worth considering or remembering. And I certainly would not be talking about it except that I picked it for this series.
Genre-wise, Untamed Women is a hybrid between a war movie, a monster movie and a melodrama–which maybe sounds more interesting than it actually is. It’s not any sort of exploitation film or sex farce, despite the impressions that one might get from the title. It’s also not really a romance, in spite of the movie poster promising, “Savage beauties who feared no animal…yet before the touch of men!”
It was notably meagre production, it seems. The internet tells me it was filmed in only a week, with most or all of its monster footage lifted from 1940’s One Million BC, and it’s big volcanic spectacle at the end pulled off via stock footage, I’d wager that the scenes of the bomber crashing into the ocean were accomplished the same way. The stuff that actually was shot for this movie, starting with the footage of Steve and the crew on the plane before it crashes, looks cheap and unimpressive.
So too is the dynamic between our four survivors. Steve, Benny, Ed and Andy kind of have personalities, enough so that I could tell them apart most of the time. Steve is the leader–rugged and no-nonsense, but with a caring heart as well. Andy is a bit insecure and seems to like to study, and Ed is from Alabama. Benny gets the most characterization–he’s the wise guy from Brooklyn who never stops making jokes, plus he’s the only one with blond hair–but he’s also the most annoying. These guys have a few beats about their relationship peppered in there now and again, but it is all pretty shallow, without a convincing performance amongst them.
The big draw for the film, I assume (alongside the prehistoric monsters), is the tribe of women that the four survivors meet. But this isn’t nearly as scandalous as it might sound. All in all, everyone behaves pretty innocently. The young ladies mostly just seem to want to sit with the guys and make doe-eyes at them.
They also by all appearances enjoy getting to the hairdresser and the beauty salon from time to time, as there is very little about them that actually looks untamed.
The movie makes the women extra hilarious by giving them a goofy affected speech, which comes across as amateurish effort to make them sound ancient and mysterious. We first hear this with Sandra, the tribe’s leader, when she stands before the group to talk about the arrival of Steve and his comrades:
Thou hast done well to make the strange men captive. They came from the seas as the hairy men once did. Ye were young then and cannot remember, but the hairy men killed our fathers, mothers and brothers, and we alone are all that are left of our people. This time we will not be driven from our land. These men will not escape. They must be killed.
But the girls don’t agree. “Nay! Nay! Nay!” they all yell. This leads to Sandra attempting to cut off any romantic entanglements that might ensue by sending them men away, but along a path where they are likely to be killed by the various monsters that inhabit their island.
Of course she softens eventually, but it is perhaps to the movie’s credit that it never goes the obvious route and tries to develop a romance between her and Steve.
Or I don’t know, maybe that would have been better, because it would have been something.
As it is, the “hairy men” show up and kill Sandra abruptly with a spear to her back, and then run around attempting to steal away all the girls for their own.
Our heroes try to help, taking out a lot of the enemy with what appears to be an astounding amount of ammunition that they are carrying around. Ed gets killed in the process which makes the others sad of course, but it doesn’t last long because before long the local volcano erupts and kills everyone–the hairy men, the women, Steve’s crew, all the dinosaurs, and ultimately the whole island itself. It just completely obliterates itself, with only Steve reaching his boat to get away.
All of this makes the ending exciting but also makes the movie feel kind of pointless. It’s cheap and bad no matter what, but somehow having nobody survive but Steve, with only the medallion he received from Sandra as corroborating evidence, makes the story feel like a waste of time, rather than something that went somewhere narratively.
Plus the stock footage of the volcano goes on for so long that it actually begins to become kind of boring.
Even though these stills make it look kind of awesome, it’s not really.
So yeah, there’s not much in Untamed Women to recommend, and what there is is most lifted from other movies. I’d call it the worse film that I’ve watched in this series, except that I also saw The Flying Serpent a little while ago and that is also a contender.
Hopefully we’ll find something more interesting to see in 1953!
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