She Devil (1957)

This film begins with a biochemist named "Dr. Dan Scott" (Jack Kelly) feverishly working on a research project involving human adaptation to disease by using fruit flies. Although his experiments on various animals were a tremendous success he now wants to try it on an injured or sick human being. But complicating matters is the fact that his main sponsor, "Dr. Richard Bach" (Albert Dekker) vehemently disagrees with human research without further testing. He changes his mind, however, when he meets a patient named "Kyra Zelas" (Mari Blanchard) who is suffering from terminal tuberculosis and doesn't have long to live. To everyone's surprise, upon injecting the experimental formula, she fully recovers within hours. Unfortunately, both doctors soon learn that the serum has side effects they never reckoned with. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this was a fairly decent horror film which definitely benefited from the complete disdain Kyra had for any and all social norms that most people have to observe. She was totally without conscience and human feeling. Even so this movie was clearly a grade-B film and for that reason I have rated it accordingly. Average.

Copyright 1957 by Regal Films, Inc. No New York opening. U.S. release: April 1957. U.K. release: July 1957. No record of any Australian release. 6,977 feet. 77 minutes.SYNOPSIS: A variant on "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" with Mari Blanchard making the transformation from sickly womanhood to beautiful, homicidal vamp.VIEWERS GUIDE: Adults.COMMENT: "B"players wrestle with a "B" script of unabashed banality. Neither the director (who co-authored the script) nor the special effects and make-up men are much help.OTHER VIEWS: A morbid and thoroughly disagreeable exercise in medical malpractice, murder and juvenilely pseudo-scientific mumbo- jumbo. Addicts of the artless may find compensation in the absurdly high-flying medical/ethical conversations ("She was destined to die anyway"). — Adapted from the "Monthly Film Bulletin".Neumann's film, "She Devil" was a step up, but not by much. Based on Stanley G. Weinbaum's story, "The Adaptive Ultimate", it postulates what might become of a person who has taken a serum derived from the fruit fly, "nature's most adaptive insect". Unfortunately, the answers that the film provides are unbelievably dull ones. Mari Blanchard plays the tubercular patient that is injected with the serum. It cures her but it has the Jekyll-Hyde effect of altering her physical appearance (her hair lightens and her skin color changes) and it gives her criminal tendencies... Under Neumann's plodding direction and script, the effect is dull rather than dramatic. The greatest visual asset of the film is the appearance of Albert "Dr Cyclops" Dekker as the elder scientist, but he and the rest of the dispirited cast are given little to do. — Dennis Fischer in an article published in Gary J. Svehla's marvelous fanzine "Midnight Marquee".

As Bill Warren points out elsewhere, director Kurt Neumann had a lot of enthusiasm for the potential of science fiction movies, but he didn't quite seem to have the talents (or the budgets) to make consistently good ones. He seems to have plenty of intelligence - hence adopting a story with the fascinating idea of seeing what would happen if a human being were injected with a serum that enables her to "adapt" to any threat or environment - but he didn't seem to be able to create scenes without tons of expository dialog, or patch the enormous plot holes in the screenplays.She Devil...it has its moments. As a friend said, someone ought to give Albert Dekker the Purple Heart Actor's awards for his valiant attempts to soldier on as he is forced to deliver line after line of clunky dialog in scenes that are going nowhere. And there are some good framing shots and set ups here and there - at times the actress who plays the woman test subject does manage to project a chilly, barely human glamour that makes you believe that she could take a man for everything and kill him once she was bored with him.But the screen play asks the viewer to believe that a millionaire widow wouldn't have a retinue of courtiers and employees and bodyguards who would follow her everywhere, and who wouldn't make a major fuss when she went missing after she visits the two men in the world who created her and know her secret. And it wastes a lot of time foreshadowing a leopards presence in the lab without ever doing anything interesting.Anyway...this what happens when you try to get by with one special effect (the woman seems to be able to change her hair color at will) and pretend you've created a movie about "ideas"...when you don't know how to do anything really interesting with that idea.Still way better than some of its contemporaries (dreck like "Voodoo Woman" make this look like Scorcese) and worth seeing once if you are fascinated by 50's scifi.

I remember seeing this movie when I was a kid on the Sunday afternoon TV matinee. In the film, a terminally-ill woman will die unless an experimental drug is administered by the scientist who developed the serum, if I remember correctly, from some type of insect or spider (or was it some deadly plant?). Her life is saved, but she has developed extraordinary methods of survival and becomes seemingly indestructible. What can the scientist do to solve this situation? In many ways, this film is typical of the 50's "horror" genre as seen in its low-budget, B-list tier of performers and the opinion that a man can save a woman, but who can save a woman from herself (especially one who's developed into some kind of monster)? As a kid, I remember being really impressed with a scene where, to avoid being caught, the woman (having developed those incredible survival techniques), mentally changes her hair color from brunette to platinum blonde (much like a chameleon). I remember thinking that would be really cool to be able to do that! So while this film is no awards-contender, it's a memorable quasi-horror title from the 50's!