Come on, Bela. Smile big and show off those pearlies.

If you’ve ever lain awake at night and wondered what it would have been like if Martin and Lewis had made an “Abbot and Costello Meet the Wolfman” type of movie with Bela Lugosi, then you should probably keep a good psychiatrist on speed dial. Those who have lost sleep over the issue, however, will probably be happy to discover that Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla exists. The rest of us are free to be dismayed to learn that such a thing exists.

In addition to its titular celebrity, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla stars the short-lived comedy duo of Mitchell and Petrillo. According to many sources, this film is the only record of their act – although one could argue that anything starring Martin and Lewis is also a record of Mitchell and Petrillo’s act. The movie begins in the jungle of the island of Cola-Cola, where the stranded duo are discovered by the local natives. It isn’t long until suave lounge singer Duke Mitchell is getting cozy with the chief’s daughter and spastic comic Sammy Petrillo is winning over the natives with his rapid-fire delivery of hackneyed one-liners.

Strictly. No. Comment.

The two learn from the lovely and western-educated Nona that there is hope for them to get off this island in the person of Doctor Zabor, a scientist who conducts experiments on monkeys in a remote castle. Nona agrees to introduce Mitchell and Petrillo to the doctor when she goes to assist him in his lab – not suspecting that Zabor kind of has a thing for her, let alone that he won’t appreciate having competition from Duke.

Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla is a movie built on generics. It has a generic comedy plot, generic comedy extras, and all of the bits that you would expect to find in a movie of the era, right down to the mandatory skinny-boy-chased-by-fat-girl routine as the gangly Petrillo is hounded through the forest by Nona’s plus-sized sister, Saloma (played by Muriel Landers, who went on to be featured in Doctor Dolittle with Rex Harrison). Even Bela seems to realize the cookie-cutter form of the movie, as he bares his blackened teeth in a variety of by-the-numbers snarls, scowls, and evil grins.

“Fame! Um-bwana live forever!”

The story is that when preparing for his role as Lugosi in Ed Wood, Martin Landau watched Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla several times and declared that “it made the Ed Wood films look like Gone With the Wind.“ In a way, Landau is right. While the production values are much better than anything Ed Wood ever made (although that could be considered a textbook example of “damning with faint praise”) and the acting is generally stronger than in any of Wood’s films, it misses the wild, anarchic glee that Wood brought to his work.

Instead, Brooklyn Gorilla is bogged down by its formula. It is an unoriginal slog through worn-out material that manages to feel like one of the worst movies you have ever seen – and then somehow manages to get even worse. Unlike Wood, who thought he was doing something original, the actors, director, and writer of this film were all attempting to create a hollywood comedy in the style of other great comedy teams of the day, and as a result it feels not so much like a movie as a cobbled together Frankenstein’s monster of a comedy – a criminally insane, lumbering collage of the re-animated corpses of other, better movies.

“That’s why the call me Mr. Fahrenheit!”

It could be said that this collage aspect of the film reflects the comedy act that it was meant to highlight. Mitchell and Petrillo’s act is not so much an imitation of Martin and Lewis as it is a carbon copy. Even Petrillo’s facial expressions are bit-for-bit recreations of Martin’s takes – an issue that isn’t helped by the fact that Petrillo has a strong resemblance to a Silly Putty-stretched Lewis.

One of the sadder realizations I had while watching the film was that Mitchell and Petrillo actually weren’t that bad, all they needed was an original act. Petrillo’s comic timing and his physical humor are both spot-on, but hindered by the fact that his act was written for Jerry Lewis and not for Sammy Petrillo. Meanwhile, Duke Mitchell proves that he’s actually not that bad of a singer, but the songs he has been given to sing are mediocre at best, and Mitchell has too much of a boyish enthusiasm and wonder in his face and eyes to pull off Martin’s jaded, debonaire slacker.

“I’m bustin’ out of this movie, and you can’t stop me!”

To students of film history or horror buffs who devour everything Lugosi ever touched, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla is a no-brainer addition to a film library. While the movie may be a bomb otherwise, however, it has an insidious way of getting in your head. Once you’ve seen it, you’re filled with an insatiable desire to show it to all of your friends and family. Part of this is because you want them to see just how bad of a movie it is, and part of it is because you desperately need the affirmation that you are not crazy, that this movie does exist, and that it is that bad.