**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.
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