Mujeres demonio

Shipwrecked on an island during a hurricane, four survivors - spoilt heiress Jerrie (Irish McCalla), explorer Fred Maklin (Tod Griffin), and crew members Sammy Ching (Victor Sen Yung) and Kris Kumana (Charles Opunui) - discover a tribe of sexy native women who are being used in experiments by evil Nazi concentration camp doctor Karl 'The Butcher' Osler (Rudolph Anders).

In his attempts to restore the beauty of his disfigured wife Mona (Leni Tana), Osler has transformed numerous native women into vicious 'she demons', retaining their hot bods but wiping their minds and giving them hideous fizzogs in the process. When Jerrie, captured by the Nazis, spurns Osler's amorous advances, she too is scheduled to become a she demon...

This hokey '50s drive-in flick boasts all sorts of exploitation goodness: Nazis are always a winner, as are voluptuous native girls (played here by The Diane Nellis Dancers, who perform a hilariously bad dance routine). The 'she demons' themselves are memorably daft, with manky skin, oversized teeth, and claws. Also adding to the trashy vibe are a couple of scenes of torture, with a native babe flogged to death, and Fred and Sammy shackled and forced to walk in circles until exhausted.

Unfortunately, even with a short running time of 77 minutes, the lack of any real plot development means that the film does start to drag after a while, although the finalé, as our heroes escape from the Nazi lair while lava floods the island, is quite fun.

4.5 out of 10, rounded up to 5 for the terrible stunt doubles who look nothing like the actors they are standing in for, and for McCalla's giraffe-like neck.

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.

****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.

Fans of badfilm will want to check this one out. This schlock horror-comedy-burlesque hybrid doesn't take itself too seriously, although hero Tod Griffin appears to be taking himself too seriously. It is fascinating to hear his deep and earnest voice, resonating as it does from his skinny chest, as his skinny arms gesticulate.

For counter-point to our under-whelming and over-acting hero, we are treated to the spectacular physical endowments of Irish McCalla, whose performance does not resemble thespian-ism in even the most theoretical sense.

The most likable of our 3 heroes is comic-relief Sammy, played ably by Victor Sen Young, a veteran of many B-films and a former screen son of Charlie Chan. Shortly after this film, Young took the role of Hop Sing in Bonanza, playing a very distasteful stereotype...Young fares better in this film, as there is only one obligatory Chinese joke...the rest being non-denominational wise-cracks and general goofiness. He is a an early version of the Hipster Doofus...alongside Maynard G Krebs and Jughead Jones, paving the way for Cosmo Kramer.

The Mad Nazi Scientist Commandant is fun to watch...very evil, very nuts, very lecherous...and the actor appears to have been drunk during most of the filming...good stuff all around.

There's some fun cheap monster make-up, and for good measure it's worn by a bunch of burlesque dancers wearing grass skirts and bikini tops. Got to love that. The burlesque dancers are billed in the credits as the Diane Nellis dancers, and most of them thankfully are not wearing the monster make-up, so we see their lovely faces as well as their lovely bodies.

Now here's a couple questions for the scholars: Who were the Diane Nellis Dancers and what became of them? Who was Diane Nellis and what became of her? They probably had interesting lives, all of them.

The dancers play some kind of strange pale-skinned primitive women, and they perform a sleazy nightclub type 'jungle dance.' This dance lasts for several minutes and is the highlight of the film...this type of cheesecake stuff is incredibly tame compared to what our 12-year-old children can watch on MTV. The dance is a good thing because pretty girls in bikini tops and grass skirts will always be needed by our world.

I have seen plenty of schlock-horror films from this era, and this is the only one I know of that contains an actual cheese-cake burlesque club type dance. It is this innovation to the genre, plus Irish McCalla's endowments and her very brief semi-striptease (a tease striptease, if you will) that she performs early in the pic, that distinguish this film. For surely the infusion of burlesque elements into this epic foreshadows the nudie-horror films that came in the 1960's.

A boat is lost in a hurricane and 4 people scramble onto the beach of an unchartered island. The leader of the group is a young man named "Fred Maklin" (Tod Griffin) who not only has to figure out how to keep the group alive but also has his hands full with a beautiful but spoiled blonde by the name of "Jerrie Turner" (Irish McCalla). Not only that, but he has two even worse problems he has to deal with. First, he overhears a radio broadcast saying that the island they are on will be bombed out of existence within a couple of days. The second problem is that the island is controlled by an evil Nazi doctor "Colonel Karl Oster" (Rudolph Anders) who is performing cruel experiments on native women he is holding hostage. Anyway, rather than spoil the movie for those who haven't seen it, I will just say that this was pretty much a typical low-budget B-movie produced in the 50's which has one saving grace-the beautiful Irish McCalla. Unfortunately, her presence wasn't enough for me to rate this film higher than I have. Slightly below average.