Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Michael_Elliott Safari Drums (1953) ** (out of 4) Number nine in the Monogram series has Bomba (Johnny Sheffield) once again in the jungle minding his own business when some movie people show up to film some animals. Bomba gets involved when it turns out that one of them murdered a man and the jungle boy must also be sure that the men don't try to harm any of his animal friends. By this time in the series there's no question that they were running out of fresh ideas and the films were becoming quite a hard chore to sit through. Thankfully this entry is a step up from the previous ones and I'd argue that the final ten-minutes here are the best moments in the series to date. With that said, the typical issues are still here including the ultra low-budget that really doesn't allow the filmmakers to do too much. As usual, there are way too many scenes where nothing is going on other than cast members standing around talking about stuff that really doesn't add up to anything. These dialogue scenes might work if they were actually saying something interesting but rarely does anything you care about come from their mouths. Another problem is of course the stock footage but at times this can add some campy charm. As with the previous films, Sheffield is at least entertaining in the part and you can tell he's giving it his all even though he probably shouldn't be. Barbara Bestar plays the love interest here and the supporting cast includes Emory Parnell, Douglas Kennedy and Paul Marion. I won't spoil who the killer is but the actor makes for a good villain. The final ten-minutes has more action than any of the previous movie put together. This includes a sequence where the filmmakers (in the movie) get a tiger and lion to fight a rather violent battle, which might offend some. There's also the action/chase sequence with Bomba that contains some nice drama. SAFARI DRUMS isn't a classic and it's not even a good movie but for a Bomba movie it's certainly not bad.

sol1218 **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. Bomba who's been informed by his good friend the district Deputy Commissioner Barnes, Leonard Mudie, to stay with the safari until the local police arrive is forced to put with with Conrad and his kill crazy, in killing wildlife, assistant Brad Morton's, Douglas Kennedy, antics in killing anything that moves with him being almost totally helpless to stop it in order to prevent blowing his cover! there's also pretty Peggy Morton, Barbara Bestar, Conrad's secretary who knows what her boss is up to but is in no position about it in fear ending up as dead on the animals that he and his trigger happy assistant Morton are planning to gun down. Getting to the murder victim it's famed geologist Staplenton who was killed by a member of Conrad's safari who not only stole a cache of uncut diamonds hat he had in his possession but the map where they came from where there's a whole cave or mine loaded with them.It's the action scenes that really make "Safari Drums" worth watching with it's plot so confusing that at times you feel like your seeing two or even three films with different story lines at the same time. Bomba does his best to keep the audience from falling asleep with his vine tree swinging and fights to the death with a black panther, who tried to attack and kill Peggy, and man-eating lion who almost mauled him to death. In the end Bomba did his job as a jungle PI or private detective as well as jungle, at age 22, boy by finding just who murdered Stapleton but it was one of his jungle friends who ended up doing the killer in. As for Conrad's once in a lifetime movie of the big cat fight that he secretly staged, behind Bomba's back, it was gone forever! In that Bomba's monkey friend and companion chimpanzee N'Kimba broke into his makeshift jungle dark room, looking for what he thought was a stack of bananas, and exposed it-the film-to the light of day! P.S I noticed that the writer producer and director of the movie "Safari Drums" Ford Bebee was so hard up for scenes to put into it, to fill it's 70 minutes running time, that he was forced to insert footage from previous Bomba films to fill the gap.

deadzombie What can you say about Safari Drums. Bomba is a white man-Boy. wearing a leopard loin cloth,who lives in the Jungle. He has no job,no clothes no monies, no credit cards or cell phones. they made a few of these Bomba boy movies in the 1950's. I only remember the Tarzan movies. They were like B movies. The script were always the same. white men come to the Jungle to shoot wild animals,smuggle animals for the zoo,shoot movies of wild animals fighting etc. The stories were contrived.they appeared as the second feature movie on the marquee. It hard to write anything about these Bomba movies because they were not bad and not good. If you like Jungle Boy movies, Tarzan movies you might like Bomba, he got left in the Jungle when Tarzan and Jane left the Jungle for Hollywood and left Bomba the Jungle boy to hunt,fish,learn to read and write English from Johnny Weismuller before he left Africa/. Did Bomba the Jungle boy ever have a girlfriend.?

bkoganbing 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.Now granted the Bomba series was intended for juvenile audiences, but just by looking at the cast list you should be able to tell Sheffield and Commissioner Leonard Mudie just who was the individual who killed an archaeologist and is hiding with the film crew. I think most of the juveniles in 1953 could have told as well.Emory Parnell is the producer/director who wants and stages unusual action shots, Barbara Bestar is the film star, Paul Marion is the cameraman and Douglas Kennedy is their guide. Things never go quite right for Parnell in this film.Bomba's adventures are getting a bit thin here.