The She-Creature (1956)

When I first heard about this film, I thought it was going to be typical 1950's B-movie stuff with someone in a cheesy costume going around attacking people. I was quite disappointed to find that most of this film wasn't even about that at all! It was mostly about this hypnotist who tries to seduce a woman by having her look into her past lives or something. It was hard to follow and I wasn't even sure how the title She-Creature was a part of this. It amounted to very little. If there's anything good about it, I guess it was at least a little unique.This wasn't even quite standard for films of the time. It really is just a pointless movie. I couldn't even tell that that creature was female! I don't know if I've ever seen more spinning papers in a movie before. That's probably why this is a dead horse trope. It's clichéd even by the standards of this time period. *

As awful as The She-Creature is, it may hold some interest for the following types: Those wondering what Chester Morris would look like with black shoe polish on his hair...People who don't believe whiskey can make a 52-year old man look as if he is eighty-two -- here's what's left of Tom Conway...Serious perverts who may become excited by the sight of a female Creature from the Black Lagoon -- wow! dig those scaly 38-double-D's...Old School Catholics who need to suffer for penance during Lent. Watching this stinker is such torment, you can skip the Hail Mary's for a whole week...The usual desperate insomniacs.Others should avoid The She-Creature as if it were a two-foot tall fire ant mound.

There are many films that would qualify for the list of all time worst, (1972's "Asylum of Satan" would be a superb candidate!) This film, however, beggars disbelief.The career of Chester Morris is (like Rudy Vallee's singing), is one of the great mysteries of the entertainment industry. Utterly devoid of discernible acting talent, utterly devoid of charm, he managed, nevertheless, to put to service a jutting jaw, a permanent scowl and an inflexion-less voice in a long motion picture career.That career, was largely over by the time "She Creature" was made, as were the careers of co-stars, Tom Conway, and Freida Inescourt.The resulting film, is a mish-mash of re-incarnation, hypnotism and "Creature From the Black Lagoon" tropes against production values of ludicrous poverty, (the "wealthy" Tom Conway inhabits a beach side home where the paste board interior walls boast sparkle chips, making his office etc. look like the inside of a 1958 Los Angeles Savings and Loan).Not to mention, that the script makes absolutely no sense, the dialog is embarrassing, the acting, (by all concerned, though Lance Fuller comes off best) abysmal, and the whole thing is ponderously dull.No one on the production team seems to have had any idea of what they were doing, (many scenes are under-lit and actors routinely block out the key light of the player with whom they are playing the scene).The final sequence depicts Lance Fuller and Marla English in a nighttime, moon lit garden, where, (absolutely no kidding here) they both cast their shadows on the cyclorama behind them ! You get the general idea. And unlike a bad film redeemed by campiness, (such as one featuring Acquanetta) this has no redeeming qualities.One can only imagine what people like Inescourt thought making this. Given the hypnosis theme here, perhaps she and Conway were hypnotized into believing that it was still the 30's and that they were still at Warner Brothers.You have been warned!

And now for something completely different: a woman is hypnotically regressed to reveal a former life as a seventeenth-century lass and one of the primeval sea creatures from which--didn't ya know--humanity evolved. The beast looks like a cross between Gillman and a gargoyle, but the really odd thing about it is that it emerges from the ocean as a ghostly figure and quickly materializes into a solid man-size monster that dispatches victims with a karate chop to the shoulder with a crab-like, but apparently non-prehensile, fin/claw. This female of the species goes on rampages as rapacious as any male and only once demonstrates any discrimination in the attack. It's difficult to tell what, if anything, might kill or even repel her, since the cheap sets call for such tight shots that she's on top of her prey before they scarcely begin to fight. And when the sieve of a script does try to explain anything--let alone the monster--it just causes more confusion. The slimy hypnotist who controls the latest carnation/evolution of the creature somehow does so despite her profound hatred for him and desperate resistance to trance. He's seen leaving an apparent murder scene, yet these pre-Miranda-era cops fear lack of evidence and a suit for false arrest--which of course means charging someone for something that's not a crime. As anyone knows, murder IS a crime, and the police think the large, reptilian tracks left at the death site were faked by a human being. Of course, the cops in this film also finger half the items in sight and phone the lab boys only after throwing flour all over the floor to check the footprints. Much of the plot and dialogue are just as dopey, so it can be fun to anticipate the next oddball occurrence. The acting is adequate, though Tom Conway appears to sometimes stare too obviously at cue cards. Even the (unneccessary) comic relief is rather weird. It's a loquacious Scandinavian butler who keeps losing his bow-tie.