She Demons

If you get a kick out of Plan 9 and other 50's B classics you are looking in the right spot.

How can you lose when you combine a mad scientist, scantily clad dancing girls, a volcano, Nazis with monster animal girls(stil scantily clad)? Did I mention the planes doing bombing runs, cheesy dialogue, stock characters and goofy storyline?

Yup some campy gold here. Go into it with appropriate expectations if you enjoy this genre(?) and I expect you will enjoy it.

Richard E. Cunha made few good low budget B movies. This movie otherwise could have been utterly forgettable, isn't due to his ability to select actors who could act, and his ability to keep the story going without falling apart.

While not at the success level of Roger Corman's B movies, Cunha's movies has similar quality that keeps them from being an utter schlock. This movie is about the same level of story as Roger Corman's "Wasp Woman". Both focus' on intrigue of beautiful woman turning into a monster.

This movie stayed with me since I saw it as a child because of the transformance scene of the above mentioned beautiful woman. Three characters that told most of the stories to this movie, namely the blond girl, the main character, and the Nazi captain could all act. This kept the story together and didn't go the way of other similarly budgeted movies.

They could have inserted another 10 minutes of skin exposures by the girls, and tormenting of the girl that was on the operating table, and the movie could have been twice as good, but if they did that they might have blown the budget or ran overtime against the double feature movie that these movies were usually shown in theaters.

One of the hidden classic amongst the truly low budget movies from the '50s. If you're a fan of Roger Corman's earlier movies, this movie might be for you.

I first saw 'She Demons' on TV as a youngster, and was frightened by it; as I grew up, I saw it a few more times as an adolescent and a teenager, and then, it sort of disappeared from TV.

I found a VHS copy in a video store 3 years ago, and had a movie night with some friends. We howled at the bad acting, the bad makeup of the 'She Demons', and especially at their weird dancing.

The climax, still effective, is the end when Mona reveals her face. A must see if you're in the mood for campy horror and a lot of laughs.

****SPOILERS**** Extremely corny but entertaining movie about a group of Nazi storm troopers occupying a Caribbean island in 1958 with a bunch of She Demons running around, if their not behind bamboo bars, doing their worst.

The Nazis leader Dr. Karl Olser, Rudolph Anders, has been experimenting with the women on the island in order to get their skin somehow grafted on his wife Mona, Leni Tana, who was terribly burned some time ago in an accident in Dr.Olser's lab. The doctor is also working on a way to create a perpetual energy machine for the Fatherland by harnessing the heat of the lava from a volcano on the island. Unknown to him is that his beloved Fatherland an Fuehrer have been kaput since 1945. There's also a plan for the USAF to bomb the island back into the Atlantic Ocean by using it as target practice.

A South Atlantic hurricane sweeps up a group of unsuspecting Americans on the island consisting of Irish McCalla, Jerrie Turner, Tod Griffin, Fred Malkin, Sen Young, Sammy Ching, and Chris Kamana, Charles Opunui, and that begin to interfere with Dr. Olser's plans.

As Jerrie Fred and Sammy check out the inner island Chris who stayed behind on the beach is attacked and killed by a gang of She Demons. This makes the trio go inland to avoid the deadly She Creatures only to find the Nazi base-camp where Jerrie, who was checking out Dr. Olser's lab, is captured by Igor Gene Roth, Dr. Olser's right-hand man. When Igor get a little too friendly with Jerrie Fred springs to her rescue and in the fighting knocks Igor into a cage of She Demons who gorge poor Igor to death.

Unbelievably bad acting especially by Irish McCalla who seems to think that she's doing a photo-shoot for Cosmopolitan Magazine and shows about as much fear of the Nazis and She Demons on the island as if she were afraid that the bad side of her face. I didn't notice anything bad on either sides of Irish's face, was being photographed.

Rudolph Anders is so ridicules as Dr. Olser that he seemed drunk in almost all of his scenes, which were totally outrageous, just to get enough courage to do them. In one famous scene with Jerrie Dr.Olser tried to get her drunk with a bottle of champagne only to end up drinking the entire bottle by himself and then having Jerrie smash it over his head.

Sammy, Sen Young, who was supposed to be the comic relief in the movie overdid it so much that he almost had the Nazi storm troopers cracking up and falling all over the place by his antics when they were supposed to act mean and evil.

Tod Griffin thought that he was doing Shakespeare and overacted so much in his scene in Dr. Olser's lab throwing out lines like "Please I beg of you do what you want with us but please, please leave the girl alone" Where at the same time Dr. Olser acted like Griffin was just a fly on the wall instead of being impressed by his golden oratory.

Just when Dr. Olser was to stick Jerrie with the needle the USAF blasted the island to pieces. The bombing activated the volcano who's lava flow followed by earthquakes engulfed and killed Dr. Olser and his wife Mona and the whole crew on Nazis and She Demons. Jerrie Fred and Sammy get to the beach and finding a rowboat row to safety, some 300 miles away to the US mainland, with a story that nobody would believe not even themselves.

1957's "She Demons" marked the the second in a quartet of infamous horror titles from resident Astor Pictures director Richard E. Cunha, boasting an increased budget of $65,000 to complete a double bill with his debut "Giant from the Unknown." This is the picture that heralded the duo still to come, not a lone Conquistador for a menace but beautiful busty women wearing monstrous faces and little else threatening the weak stomachs of male characters on screen while parading in skimpy outfits for the benefit of masculine audience members. For those who admired Allison Hayes in her sultry dance of voodoo in "The Disembodied," there are a multitude of shapely bodies engaged in some kind of movement, some perfectly normal looking, others more savage due to their fanged appearance, resulting from experiments being conducted on a Pacific island stronghold for aging Nazis still devoted to the cause, the volcanic finale shot at the ubiquitous Bronson Caverns. The big cheese is Rudolph Anders as Col. Karl Osler, whose wife has been disfigured by the heat of molten lava, attempting to find a cure from the faces of female subjects kidnapped from neighboring islands. This hoary, old fashioned plot dragged out to 77 minutes is a rehash of Bela Lugosi's devoted husbands from Monogram items like "The Corpse Vanishes" or "Voodoo Man," while predating an identical European trend begun with "Eyes Without a Face," adding to the decade's mix "Atom Age Vampire," Jess Franco's "The Awful Dr. Orlof" (and various follow ups), Peter Cushing's "Corruption," and Claude Mulot's "The Blood Rose." Osler isn't played as much of a threat, but as described he sounds very much like the feared Josef Mengele, well versed in the art of transmutation in seeking to create the perfect Aryan specimen, Rudolph Anders repeating this low key approach in his next role as Boris Karloff's best friend in "Frankenstein - 1970," in which Karloff's scarred and twisted visage is the result of Nazi emasculation (Anders had smaller parts in "Phantom from Space" and "The Snow Creature"). Of greater marquee value for Cunha is casting Irish McCalla for the lead, television's Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, starting out a spoiled socialite before settling down to become a woman of action moving through more jungle hijinks (her last feature was playing a nurse in 1960's "Hands of a Stranger"). Little known Tod Griffin offers up masculine heroics, Charlie Chan veteran Victor Sen Yung provides comic relief, and reliable Gene Roth is again one of the villains, though dispatched too early to make much impression. More outrageous than "Giant from the Unknown," "She Demons" would be matched in pulchritude by the director's next double bill, "Missile to the Moon" and "Frankenstein's Daughter," before returning behind the camera as cinematographer, finally eking out a living as proprietor of an Oceanside video store in California.