She Demons – (1958). I’ve wanted to see this for a long time because it has a special meaning for me. As a very young kid, I went into the hospital with bronchial pneumonia and spent time in an oxygen tent. To help pass the time, I was given a magazine to look through – Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland – and there was a TV in the room, on which I was able to watch WPIX Channel 11’s Chiller Theater. The feature that Saturday was She Demons. Obviously my parents or the Universe at large was trying to corrupt my mind and get me into 1960s Monster Culture.
I didn’t recall the plot of She Demons – I recalled that it involved “island girls” wearing skimpy two-piece outfits who danced and were turned by Evil Mad Scientists into She Demons, which were basically the same island girls, only with ridiculously long fangs and fingernails and with REALLY bad complections. When I came across a used copy I had to watch it.
The film stars Irish McCalla, whose only other major credit was as TV’s Sheena, Queen of the Jungle in the 1950s. Here she plays the spoiled rich brat daughter of some rich guy. She and three guys – a racially diverse bunch with a black captain, an Asian guy in a Hawaiian shirt, and a White Guy Hero type – are shipwrecked on a deserted island, but manage to salvage a comically huge radio. Unfortunately, it only receives, which is how they learn that the US military intends tro use the island a a bombing target in a couple of days.
Three of them take off to explore the island to see if anybody else is there (they find footprints). McCalla is frightened by a python – Sheena would be disgusted – and they end up going in circles. When they get back at last, they find that the camp has been trashed, the radio broken, and the captain has been speared with a couple of very inadequate-looking bamboo spears. They also find a body in the surf – it’s a She Demon with those ridiculous fangs and fingernails, and Kermit the Frog ping pong ball eyes.
The go in search of the people who attacked, and come upon a group of non-demon shes dancing to the sound of drums (the beat of the drums conspicuously does not match the hand motions of the drummers. Well, they’re played by the “Diane Nellis Dancers”, so it makes sense that they dance for no good reason. It also kills fifteen minutes of screen time.(When I look up the “Diane Nellis Dancers”, on the internet, the only hits I get are for this movie. If they hadn’t made this piece of schlock, nobody would remember them.)
When they finish their dance number, the dancers are surrounded and captured and hauled away by Evil Nazis, in full Nazi regalia, even on an apparently tropical island. Our heroes follow them.
It turns out that this island is the stronghold of a Josef Mengele type named Colonel Carl Osler, who’s a doctor as well as an officer. In addition to turning beautiful (well, at least good-looking) island women into She Demons, he’s also doing a Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus/ Eyes Without a Face schtick where he’s trying to restore his wife’s beauty by – I don’t know – doing beauty transfusions from the island women. His wife Mona goes around in bandages like the Invisible Man, because (as we see at the end of the flick) she looks kinda like The Red Skull. In case you’re wondering about how large the supply of Beautiful Island Women is – you probably weren’t, but I guarantee you’d eventually wonder about this – it turns out that after three days or so they de-uglify and return to normal. Except that they lose their memories. You get the feeling that Doc Osler has by now pretty much given up hope of curing his wife, and is just getting his kicks from repeatedly making she demons out of the dancers.
He’s also sitting on top of a supply of hot magma, which he uses for inexhaustible geothermal energy. Presumably he uses this to run the operation, although where the Nazi soldiers live and where they get their food is never explained.
When the castaways are captured in their turn and brought to Osler (These things never happened to the people on Gilligan’s Island) he sees Irish McCalla and starts thinking “trophy wife”. Although professing love for his little Red Skull, he dresses Irish up in one of her old gown (they’re the same dress size), and tries to woo her in his well-upholstered dining room. In a moment of rare intelligence for this film, she conks him on the head with the bottle og champagne he opened. Then she takes off her high heels (Osler’s wife’s), another intelligent moment, and escapes into the jungle. They chase her, and the jungle is filled with Nazi soldiers, she demons, and Itish. In the middle of all this, Mona findsher and commiserates with her. Disgusted that she can now be portrayed by Hugo Weaving, she gives Irish the key to the cage the two guys are being held in. She goes back, frees them, and they escape…
…right into the hands of Colonel Osler, dressed in full Nazi uniform and with a Luger.
Back in the laboratory, Irish is trapped down to a table, while the two guys are placed in a cage nearby. Osler is about to inject her with Ugly Juice when that long-promised bombing run takes place. Despite Osler’s boasting about how safe he is underground, the bombing brings down parts of the lab, freeing the two guys, who free Irish. The wall between the lab and the magma splits, and Osler gets covered in lava. Mona goes into to die with her husband, ripping off part of her bandges to show us her face. The three castaways escape, with very unconvincing stock footage of lava in the background. They go through tunnels and avoid Nazi soldiers, and eventually find their way to a rowboat and escape. White Hero Guy gets Irish McCalla, who’s no longe4r a spoiled brat. The End.
The movie was made by writer/director Richard E. Cunha, who released four fantasy films in 1958. This one was on a double bill with another Cunha flick, Giant from the Unknown, about a giant conquistador who gets revived from suspended animation and goes on a killing spree, until he falls off a dam. This one was shown to me at the local YMCA. He also made the abominally bad Missile to the Moon and Frankenstein’s Daughter. I saw all of these in my misguided youth. Cunha was like an even-lower budget Roger Corman or Bert I. Gordon, cranking these out at under $80,000 each.
Next up – I lucked into a copy of Caltiki, the Immortal Monster.