A must for film historians, watch it not for the 3D so much as for the master performance by Nigel Bruce and the early work of a young Robert Stack.Īs for the original story, scientists later learned one of the lions had a bad tooth and could not eat its normal meal of wildebeest and zebra. Fortunately Bwana Devil is devoid of 3D gimmicks (except an odd kiss scene between Stack and co-star Barbara Britton), but that also means you could watch the film without 3D technology and not realize it was intended to be seen in 3D. Close-up animals like the lions, a panther, and local monkeys are better integrated into the scenes. As for the animals, the stunt lions are beautiful, but clips of giant African wildlife are oddly interspersed throughout to beef up the setting. As we discussed earlier in our reviews of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Predator 3D, it is nature that is the triumph of 3D when filmed right. The Ghost and the Darkness handles these themes better.īeing the first 3D movie it should not be surprising that the effects in Bwana Devil are rudimentary. But it is also a cringeworthy look at British imperialism and the dominance of the local peoples that comes with it. His stupidity gets innocents killed from almost the opening scene to the last, from a cook he drags along from another town to a very young African child.īwana Devil has the feel of a live-action Jonny Quest, and it’s fun to see all these Teddy Roosevelt Hunter types doing their thing. Hayward isn’t up for the task of completing a railway across East Africa between Kenya and Uganda even before lions begin plucking off workers one by one. Angus MacLean, Hayward’s jovial friend and confidante. Nigel Bruce, in one of his final film roles, plays Dr. Stack’s performance reveals a frenzied and crazed character who makes nothing but bad decisions over the course of the story. Robert Stack plays Bob Hayward, an ineffective chief engineer and leader of local tribes building a railway. It’s not shown in its original 3D format, but as we have suggested before here at, watching it via 3D glasses and an up-converted 3D television system will get you close to the original 3D presentation. Bwana Devil is now available via streaming on Amazon Prime. The story that inspired director Arch Oboler’s 1952 adventure Bwana Devil would later be adapted as the 1996 film The Ghost and the Darkness starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer (as well as a lesser direct-to-video movie, Prey, in 2007). The choice of subject matter for the first 3D was a good pick– the gruesome, real-life attacks on workers in Tsavo, Kenya from March through December of 1898 by a pair of lions.

Bwana devil 3 d trailer