n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

In 1949,Monogram Pictures(also known as Allied Artists)released the first of 12 Bomba movies starring Johnny Sheffield,who played the character of "Boy" opposite Johnny Weissmuller and also Maureen O'Sullivan in eight "Tarzan" films, was chosen under Producer Walter Mirisch to star as Bomba. At the time this movie came out,Johnny Weissmuller was gone as "Tarzan",after 12 films to star in the "Jungle Jim" movies for Columbia Pictures,while newcomer Lex Barker,replaced him as the new "Tarzan" in five movies while Maureen O'Sullivan went into semi-retirement.Veteran director Ford Beebe,a "B" picture veteran whose speciality was mostly action-adventure films and also movie serials,was hired as director/writer for the series. In all,Beebe directed all 12 Bomba pictures that were released between 1949 and 1955. Owing more to the Tarzan film series than the children's books they claimed to based on,the Bomba movies were made on a shoestring budget with predictable plots that rely on stock jungle footage.The first of the series,"Bomba:The Jungle Boy",released in 1949 was a basic standard fare,more or less aimed as a children's matinée attraction. In this first outing,a photographer and his daughter arrive in Africa hoping to capture the local wildlife on film. Instead,they encounter(and never photographed)a killer leopard,a swarm of locusts,deadly lion worshippers and to the rescue to save them and protect them from the deadly encounters of the jungle comes Bomba the Jungle Boy! All of these within its 70 minute running time. Most of scenes involved the photographer's daughter(wearing a well-tailored leopard's skin)spends most of the movie with Bomba while her father and his assistant search for her.As for Producer Walter Mirisch,after the success of the "Bomba" pictures,along with his brothers,formed there own company The Mirisch Corporation. The Mirisch Corporation,and under the powers that be at United Artists,produced some of the biggest hits ever to come out of Hollywood during the era. Films like "The Magnificent Seven", "The Apartment","West Side Story","The Great Escape","The Pink Panther",and "In The Heat of the Night",just to name a few. However,Producer Walter Mirisch won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1961 for "West Side Story",and again in 1967 for Best Picture of "In The Heat of the Night".

Johnny Sheffield who had grown too old to play Boy in the Tarzan films got a nice break from Monogram Pictures and was able to extend his career with the Bomba The Jungle Boy series of films. Like Tarzan, Bomba grows up in the jungle and in fact this film bears no small resemblance to Tarzan, the Ape Man.Bomba's Jane is in the person of former child star Peggy Ann Garner who is a visiting photographer with her father Onslow Stevens. She gets separated from Stevens and enjoys an idyll of sorts with Bomba who is more articulate than those early Weissmuller Tarzans.The only other regular in the Bomba series is Commissioner Andy Barnes who is a glorified game warden here and played by Charles Irwin. In later films Barnes would be played by Leonard Mudie.Some stock jungle footage is integrated nicely into the film, better I would say than a lot of the Tarzan films done at RKO at the same time with Lex Barker. Not a bad beginning for the series.

Bomba, the Jungle Boy (1949) ** (out of 4) When MGM decided to take their Tarzan series into a different direction, Johnny Weissmuller headed to Columbia to start the Jungle Jim series while his son, Boy, went to Monogram and began production on another Tarzan rip- off, Bomba, which would end up running for twelve films. The series opener has Pat Harland (Peggy Ann Garner) and her father (Onslow Stevens) are in Africa trying to take photos of some rare animals when she ends up in the jungle lost. Soon Bomba (Sheffield) shows up to show her some of the finer, less appreciated things in life. There's no question that this series should have been called TARZAN, JR. and there's no question that what brain cells the MGM series had are pretty much gone here. This isn't a horrible movie but at the same time it's doubtful too many are going to find it completely entertaining and this is due to several factors. One is that the screenplay really doesn't offer us anything new, original or really all that entertaining. I thought for the most part we got one boring sequence after another and in fact it takes nearly thirty-minutes before Bomba shows up, another ten-minutes for any sort of action and it takes yet another fifteen-minutes before Garner finally gets into her leopard-skinned outfit. As with the Tarzan films and the countless other rips, this film gets the benefit of many stock footage shots of the wildlife in Africa. We get to see a wide range of animals but it's obvious the footage was shot for other movies as it looks quite poor and even for stock footage the stuff isn't that good because the shots are so far away from the target and out of focus that at times you struggle to even tell what you're looking at. For some reason the film is pretty light on action as there are only a few fight sequences and even these are pretty tame. The first time Bomba fights a fake leopard it all happens off camera. The one saving grace to the film are the performances. Sheffield does a nice job playing the lead character and Garner adds up some nice support. The two feature some nice chemistry together and fans of HOUSE OF Dracula will enjoy seeing Stevens in his part. At just 70-minutes the movie goes by at a decent pace but it's just too bad they didn't try something fresh or original to throw a little life into the picture.

***SPOILERS*** The first of a dozen "Bomba the Jungle Boy" movies has Bomba,Johnny Sheffield, together with his pet monkey Oto get involved with the Harland's Pat & George, Peggy Ann Gardner & Onslow Stevens, who traveled to darkest Africa to photograph the wildlife there. Not that he wanted too,Bomba always likes to keep to himself and his animal friends, but by saving Pat's life from a killer leopard he was stuck to be with her until he could reunite Pat with her father who in thinking that Bomba had kidnapped Pat wanted nothing more then to put a bullet between his eyes.The film has Pat who at first thought that Bomba was some kind of a coconut in his weird ideas of civilization soon began to realize that his type of lifestyle suited her better then the one back home in Indana in that life was far more interesting and exciting in Bomba's world, "The Valley of the Monkeys", then her's back in the states. It was later in the movie when Pat's pop and his good friend Andy Berns, Charles Irwin, and native guide Eli, Smoki Whitfield, caught up with her that she decided to go back home leaving Bomba a bit disappointed in what he did for Pat and her father in saving their lives from the lion worshiping native cult the Basis who without his help would have massacred the whole lot together with Andy & Eli!Nice stock footage of the jungle and those animals who inhabit it including a real life Lion hunt by the Basi warriors where they took on and killed a charging lion after he took down and mauled a number of them. We also get to see that Bomba unlike Tarzan, who's son Boy he played in some half dozen movies, knows enough English to be able to get by and be understood which shows that he was brought up by an Englishman, old hermit naturalist Cody Carson, not a family of apes like the ape man was.P.S Johnny Sheffield who made a career of swinging on jungle vines and tree branches, as both Boy & Bomba, as effortlessly as the apes and monkeys in the jungle tragically died after slipping off a tree he was pruning in his back yard on October 15, 2010! Either Johnny was too old and out of shape or just forget how to grab and hold on to the tree breaches at the time by him being retired from making Bomba and Boy movies for over 55 years!