"Made in 1933 to cash in both on Buster Crabbe's fame as an Olympic swimming champion and on the spectacular King Kong/Tarzan adventure epics so prevalent then, this film has been unjustly shunted aside and forgotten. It's grand Saturday-afternoon fare, but also unusual enough to keep adults happy and amused too, and its spectacular climax of a circus fire and the unleashed animals running amok in city streets is a well-staged sequence that still carries a real thrill. A neat mixture of jungle and circus genres, it's the kind of unsophisticated (but far from naive) hokum that nobody makes any more, more's the pity." --W.K. Everson.
Crabbe plays Kaspa, the Lion Man, raised by East African jungle lions after his parents are killed on a safari. He speaks only lion, and is as fearsome as his feline friends. When an entrepreneuring circus owner realizes the fortune to be made off such a specimen of human, the Lion Man swims off to civilization where he becomes involved with a kindergarten teacher.