Safari Drums

Reports of a murderer being in the area have commissioner Leonard Mudie alarmed, and if that isn't enough, he has to deal with the arrival of an American film crew looking for footage of wildlife fighting. Mudie contacts Bomba (Johnny Sheffield) through drum beats to ask him if he will guide them through the jungle, and the answer comes back quickly from four days journey away, a very blunt no.

I actually liked this one better than most of the later Bombas (maybe a 5 star) with decent action and a mystery plot line they don't usually do.But why, in a movie emphasizing how cruel it would be to force a tiger and lion to fight for a film, did the filmmakers do just that?

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).

SAFARI DRUMS (Allied Artists, 1953), Produced, Written and Directed by Ford Beebe, the first of four "Bomba" adventures under the new Allied Artists banner, following its previous eight installments for the then folded Monogram Studios, is an agreeable story helped somewhat by a better-than-average script. A far cry from the Johnny Weissmuller/ Tarzan adventures produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 1930s, SAFARI DRUMS, in reference to drum beat code messages sent across the jungle, resumes John Sheffield, formerly Johnny Sheffield of Boy fame in the Weissmuller/Tarzan series, in leopard skin loincloth and spear weapon carrier, for another fun-filled 71 minute adventure for the Saturday matinée crowd, to predictable results.

Johnny Sheffield, Bomba the Jungle Boy, faces off with a dangerous jungle guide, which he takes on with the help of his jungle animal friends. As with most all the Bomba films, there's a ridiculously small budgets, lots of stock footage, and some embarrassingly bad looking backlot jungles.

Bomba the Jungle Boy smells a rat when a rifle-happy team of filmmakers invades the African jungle to shoot a moving picture--and, Bomba fears, to shoot innocent wildlife as well. Turns out one member of the nefarious troupe has robbed a local guide of his diamonds and killed him, so a drum warning is played for Bomba to keep the unit preoccupied until the police arrive.

**SPOILERS*** Bomba, Johnny Sheffield, plays private detective here in trying to find a killer who's a member of a safari taking wild life movies in the bush and plain country of Central East Africa. There's the head of the safari Larry Conrad, Emory Parnell, who's so obsessed with taking wild life action film that he's secretly trying to arraigned a fight between two big cats so he can bring the footage back to the states and make, by showing it in the movies and on TV, millions off it.

What can you say about Safari Drums. Bomba is a white man-Boy.

The Bomba The Jungle Boy Pictures series was running out of gas by the time Safari Drums were telling Johnny Sheffield that a movie company was in the neighborhood shooting. Safari Drums adds a mystery element to the proceedings here.