The 1956 film THE SHE-CREATURE might have been a little on the cheesy and incoherent side, but compared to this hysterically poor remake it looks like CITIZEN KANE. Sporting bottom-of-the-ocean production values and acting, this is another one of the wretched remakes of sincere '50s monster movies carelessly belched out by Larry Buchanan in 1966-'67. The sinister Dr. Basso is an evil hypnotist who prowls the California beaches in a moth-eaten tux and top hat that make him look like Snidely Whiplash. The grumpy, short-fused old creep makes for a very uninteresting villain. He has a woman under a spell that causes her to materialize in the very first form in which she ever walked the earth, namely, a guy in a skindiving wetsuit and a ridiculous Halloween mask with lopsided ping-pong balls stuck onto it for eyes. Inarguably one of the least convincing monsters ever used in a movie, the dimestore demon was nevertheless used in another Buchanan disaster called IT'S ALIVE! It clomps laughably along making a noise like an electric motor in need of maintenance and occasionally kills people who are silly enough to wander around the beach at night even though there have been numerous unsolved murders there. The sort-of hero is a dorky Air Force psychologist (sometimes he's called a parapsychologist) who is described as "a national hero". The science-versus-supernatural doubletalk is preposterous and never makes enough sense to invite serious consideration. At a beach party, a rock group does a song about Batman. When the goofy creature advances toward the camera, the fin sticking out of the left side of its head frequently refuses to stand out like it's supposed to. Since the beast is an early version of a reincarnated girl, it's repeatedly referred to as a female, but, just like in FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER (1958), the suit is obviously being worn by a man. Cops always find trails of seaweed leading to and from the locations of the creature's attacks but there's never an inch of seaweed hanging on the beast when we see it. In at least one scene you can hear the director whispering instructions to his actors, and at one point a strange echo effect kicks in, so bits of dialogue can be heard twice. The whole movie is grainy and sometimes suffers from severe color shifts or goes momentarily out of focus. Many shots go on too long and the actors deliver their lines in slow, stiff, aggressively unrealistic monotones. (It's probably unfair to entirely blame the actors for their weak performances, since they had only Larry Buchanan to direct them.) When a man fires a gun, we see a closeup of his hand holding the weapon but clearly NOT firing it, while a noise like someone slamming a door is dubbed in to suggest the gunshot. The script says the victims are horribly mutilated, but one dead body is found propped up on a sofa without so much as a drop of blood visible on it. Buchanan used to complain about how little time and money he was given to make these things, but even taking his limited resources into account he should have come up with something a little less awful than this. There aren't any interesting camera setups, effects, or anything else that might have added a little professionalism. As with his other features, Buchanan directs with his typical stunning personal balance of incompetence and indifference. Another fine mess brought to you by Azalea Pictures, a company with a name that sounds significantly like "assail ya".
