She Demons

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.

This ranks right up there with "Plan Nine From Outer Space" and the rest of the Z-grade sci-fi and horror films made during the 1950's and it's also as much fun to watch. Story is about four people getting shipwrecked on an uncharted island and at first they believe it's unoccupied but when one of them is discovered murdered with spears they quickly change their mind. The Captain is Fred Maklin (Tod Griffin) and his first mate is Sammy Ching (Victor Sen Yung) and they also have the spoiled rotten but beautiful Jerrie Turner (Irish McCalla). They explore the island and discover a bunch of scantly clad young women who are being held in bamboo cages by Nazi's!

*****SPOILER ALERT*****

The three of them are captured and taken to an underground laboratory where they meet Col. Karl Osler (Rudolph Anders) who explains to them that he uses the young women for his experiments with radioactivity and the genes from animals to try and fix the face of his wife Mona (Leni Tana) who was disfigured in an accident. Fred and Sammy are taken outside to be beaten and locked up in bamboo cages by Nazi soldiers while Karl puts the moves on Jerrie and tries to persuade her to stay with him but Mona overhears everything and then helps them to escape.

This film was directed by Richard Cunha who built a career out of making very bad low budget films. Where do I start my comments? The jungle that they wander about in looks exactly like some of the sets from "Gilligan's Island" and later on it's easy to spot the scenes that are filmed in the infamous Bronson Canyon where so many other films have been made. You can't help but laugh when McCalla recoils in fear at the harmless Python hanging from the tree and has to be rescued by Griffin. And speaking of him he seemed determined to get McCalla's romantic interest and even ignored the many insults that she hurled in his direction like "You could have at least saved me another pair of shoes". McCalla never had much training as an actress but she was very beautiful and tall and was a very successful model that helped her land the role of televisions "Sheena". Griffin looks ridiculous without his shirt on and I kept wondering if he could pull his pants up any higher. Anders keeps that devilish grin on his face even when he's talking about "persuasive measures" and this film has actors giving the worst German accents since "Hogan's Heroes". Why would a bunch of Nazi soldiers who know that the war has been over for 12 years and are not getting paid allow themselves to be ordered about by some nut? And the uniforms they wear look brand new! Aren't those uniforms made for a much colder environment? You would think that with what they have to wear they would drop like flies from heat stroke. The young girls in this film are listed in the credits as the "Diana Nellis Dancers" and if anyone knows anything about them let me know. Why would a bunch of girls who were kidnapped by Nazi's and attempting to escape stop to perform an exotic dance? Somebody...please...logic! Even with the silly attempts at acting I did feel that Yung came out the best and does show some real sincerity and he would of course go on to play on "Bonanza". If your a connoisseur of bad films than you definitely need to check this out.

I first saw 'She Demons' on TV as a youngster, and was frightened by it; as I grew up, I saw it a few more times as an adolescent and a teenager, and then, it sort of disappeared from TV.

I found a VHS copy in a video store 3 years ago, and had a movie night with some friends. We howled at the bad acting, the bad makeup of the 'She Demons', and especially at their weird dancing.

The climax, still effective, is the end when Mona reveals her face. A must see if you're in the mood for campy horror and a lot of laughs.

****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.