by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles and I a movie at 10 p.m., She Demons, one of Richard Cunha’s late-1950’s productions from
Astor Pictures and Screencraft Enterprises. I had downloaded this from
archive.org and burned it to a DVD along with two other 1950’s cheapies Charles
and I had recently seen at one of the Vintage Sci-Fi screenings, Phantom
from Space and Killers from Space, and I hadn’t had much hope for it — not only did
the title indicate a likely bad movie but everything about it on imdb.com said
its only entertainment value was as camp. But the presence of Richard Cunha as
director and co-writer (with H. E. Barrie, almost certainly no relation to the
creator of Peter Pan!) gave me at least some hope since the other Cunha films I’ve seen, Frankenstein’s
Daughter and Missile to the Moon (a 1958 remake of 1953’s Cat Women on the
Moon and a significantly superior film to
its predecessor, though still pretty trashy), had managed to put at least a few
engagingly fresh spins on the clichés. So did She Demons (listed on imdb.com as being from 1958 even though
the copyright date is 1957), even though this time Cunha the director got
saddled by Cunha the co-writer with a plot so ridiculous it seems like he and
Barrie put all the clichés into a Mixmaster and assembled them in whatever
order the machine spat them out. Let’s see if I have this right: the movie
opens with stock footage of a hurricane in Florida (I think) and then we cut to
a TV studio where a newscaster (Hank Simms, playing himself) is announcing that
this is the worst storm in decades and expressing concern for the well-being of
a multimillionaire’s yacht that is carrying his daughter, Jerrie Turner (Irish
McCalla, coming from a stint of about a year as the star of a TV series called Sheena,
Queen of the Jungle — somehow Charles
neglected to joke that she had siblings called Scotch McCalla and Welsh
McCalla) along with crew members Fred Maklin (Tod Griffin, not much in the
acting department but fun to look at, especially since he spends a lot of the
early reels shirtless), Sammy Ching (Victor Sen Yung, the only cast member
either Charles or I had heard of before and who oddly looks about the same as
he did in the Sidney Toler Charlie Chan movies even though this was almost two
decades later and one would have expected more visible signs of age) and Kris
Kamana (Charles Opunui, who I’m assuming from that name and his appearance was
a native Hawai’ian).
They end up shipwrecked on a deserted island and for a
while it’s The Admirable Crichton
meets Gilligan’s Island as Irish
McCalla delivers quite an effective performance as the spoiled rich bitch who
keeps complaining about the facilities, or lack thereof, and the fact that
while the male crew members salvaged the radio from the yacht they didn’t save any of her beauty gear. They keep walking
around the island in search of prehistoric life, and they keep passing the same
two prop boulders which Charles predicted, correctly, we’d get to know really
well. Alas, our castaways realize they’re not alone on the island when first
they see footprints and then Kris gets killed by two spears in his back that
look like giant toothpicks turning him into an hors d’oeuvre. They get to watch
a bunch of native — though they look white — girls doing a ceremonial dance and
wonder which is going to be sacrificed to Kong — oops, wrong movie (though the
score music director Nicholas Carras wrote, or dug up, for this sequence sounds
an awful lot like the “Aboriginal Sacrifice Dance” Max Steiner composed for the
original King Kong) — only soon
after we’ve seen them au naturel
the girls start turning up in hideous makeups that make them look like animated
tikis. Obviously director Cunha and his makeup person, Carlie Taylor, intended
this to be scary, but they look both too gross and too ridiculous to be
frightening. There is one cool
scene in which the women devour a large, white-haired man who’s been menacing
Our Hero Maklin and getting the upper hand in their screen brawls — Maklin
lures him into the She Demons’ cage and they have at him.
Our intrepid
castaways also get a gun held on them by a man in full black-leather Nazi drag,
and it turns out the island is the redoubt of Nazi mad scientist and
Mengele-style human experimenter Col. Karl Osler (Rudolph Anders, who seems to
have got his idea of how to play a Nazi from Conrad Veidt in Casablanca). It seems that he’s discovered an inexhaustible
energy source from the lava inside the earth’s core and he’s using it to
restore the beauty of his wife Mona (Leni Tana), whose face got burned with
acid in an accident in his lab. He’s developed a way to transfer the genetic
energy — what he calls “Character X” — from hot, hunky women to his disfigured
wife (sort of like what Bela Lugosi was trying to do in The Corpse
Vanishes and Voodoo Man, and as atrocious as those movies were the
resemblance was close enough I found myself wishing that Lugosi had still been
alive when this film was cast so he could have played Anders’ role), though
she’s still wearing Mummy-like bandages and they end up looking like She
Demons. At one point Jerrie Turner (ya remember Jerrie Turner?) gets kidnapped by the Evil Doctor and he asks her
a series of interrogatory questions to which she gives evasive non-answers that
suggest that were she alive today she’d be a good candidate for a job in the
Trump administration (blonde bimbo who’s hot, spoiled and can’t answer a simple
question? Check!). Meanwhile being on the island alone with her hunky co-lead
has brought her down to earth and made her fall in love with him. Eventually
their plans to escape the island are facilitated by Mona, who’s tired of all
the lives her husband is destroying just to make her look beautiful again and
who gives Jerrie keys to escape the bamboo jail in which Osler is keeping
Maklin and Sammy, along with a gun and the location of a rowboat.
While all
this is happening both we and the castaways (who got the information from their
ship’s radio before it was smashed to smithereens by the baddies) have been
aware that the U.S. Air Force, thinking the island is uninhabited, are planning
to drop atom bombs on it to test them. In the end the Air Force is the deus
ex machina that wipes out Osler and his wife
(he gets a picturesque exit being burned to death by his own lava), along with
all the guards in his private army (who are so dementedly incompetent we figure
this must be where Col. Klink’s staff from Hogan’s Heroes ended up after the war), while our three intrepid
explorers find their way to the rowboat Mona directed them to and row away from
the island, reasonably confident that a Navy ship there to observe the results
of the bomb test (ya remember the bomb test?) will rescue them. She Demons has its good aspects — notably finely honed
cinematography by Meredith Nicholson (the photography is clear, bright and
occasionally atmospheric — unlike a lot of “B”’s from the period, at least you
can tell what’s going on) and a quite powerful performance by Irish McCalla.
It’s one of those scripts in which an actress is called upon to play multiple
emotions without much in the way of helping her transform from one to the next,
but McCalla nails all the aspects of her character in a way that should have
marked her for biggers and betters (instead she did a few more roles, mostly
guest shots on TV, and retired from acting in 1963 to marry Patrick Horgan,
though they divorced in 1989, before she finally died in 2002). It’s just that,
as with Cunha’s other films Frankenstein’s Daughter and Missile to the Moon, the good aspects of She Demons get subsumed among the risible and tacky ones!
