Safari Drums

An amateur film crew comes to Africa to shoot some footage. They don't just want any old wildlife footage (which is a shame as the Bomba series had more than enough of that to go around). They want something exciting and unique. When they hear about Bomba the jungle boy, you can pretty much guess their reaction. It also turns out one of the film crew is a murderer and it's up to Bomba to figure out who it is. Douglas Kennedy is in the cast so I'll let you put two and two together on that particular plot point.

Another Bomba movie starring Johnny Sheffield. This is the first of the series released under the Allied Artists brand. Sheffield is good in the lead but it's not exactly Hamlet. The only other regulars in the series besides Sheffield and his chimp are the Scrooge McDuck-ish Leonard Mudie as Andy Barnes and Smoki Whitfield as Eli. Barbara Bestar plays the requisite cute girl in the film. She's one of the more forgettable female guest-stars in the series. Which is all the more strange since she's one of the few Bomba seems romantically interested in. The movie makes use of stock footage as well as footage from previous Bomba movies, which just makes the whole thing seem cheap. Routine entry in the series with little to recommend it above the others, save for nice fight scenes between Bomba and a panther and Bomba and a lion. Those fight scenes are Hollywood movie magic. But there's also a fight between a lion and a tiger that is very much real. That won't sit well with many today. The irony is that in staging this fight between the two animals just for footage, writer/director/producer Ford Beebe becomes exactly like the arrogant filmmakers in this story.