Savant Short Reviews: She Demons & Monster from Green Hell Reviewed by Glenn Erickson With so many low-budget '50s fantasy films coming out, the selection is quickly reaching down to the lower levels, where the so-bad-they're-good movies dwell.  These are the kind of quickies cult fans go for, making all kinds of excuses for their interest.  Savant's interest is nostalgia for the movies, yet also for my own youth, when I watched something like Missile to the Moon and had not the slightest notion that there was anything 'bad' about it.  Hey, I cried at the emotional ending of Teenagers from Outer Space, if that helps you understand where I'm coming from here. Two new Image releases this week, from the ubiquitous Wade Williams collection, are Monster from Green Hell and She Demons.  Are either of them any good?  Well, it depends on what entertains ye ...  Savant can't resist the unadulterated awfulness of Monster from Green Hell, even though it consistently puts me to sleep (who needs pills?).  She Demons, on the other hand, has enough salacious and ridiculous content to have you shaking your head in disbelief, a reaction which passes for entertainment at this level of production.  I'm assuming that if you've read this far, you're ready to find out more! Monster from Green Hell Image Entertainment 1957 / b&w / 1:37 (looks best matted to 1:78) / 71m. Starring Jim Davis, Barbara Turner, Robert E. Griffith, Eduardo Ciannelli, Joel Fluellen, Vladimir Sokoloff Cinematography Ray Flin Production Designer Ernst Fegté Film Editor Kenneth G. Crane Original Music Albert Glasser Writing credits Endre Bohem and Louis Vittes Produced by Al Zimbalist Directed by Kenneth G. Crane
	Synopsis: Scientists Quent Brady (Jim Davis) and Dan Morgan (Robert Griffith) are shooting small animals into space to see if gamma rays produce mutations.  One such rocket goes haywire and gives its wasp passenger 40 hours of exposure before landing off course in Africa.  A few days later the two scientists leave their desert lab to see if African reports of giant monsters are true.  There they pick up guide Mahri (Eduardo Ciannelli) but cannot reach their main contact Dr Lorentz (Vladimir Sokoloff), because he's killed while out looking for the monsters himself. Lorentz' asssistant Arobi (Joel Fluellen) and his daughter Lorna (Barbara Turner) accompany them into the region known as Green Hell, where a mutated race of giant wasps, spawned from Quent and Dan's original astrowasp, are terrorizing the natives. Monster from Green Hell was one of the first science fiction films Savant saw, as it was demoted into television syndication immediately after its release and played constantly for years thereafter.  Viewing this DVD was the first time I got all the way through it ... and I thought I had repeatedly fallen asleep because it showed late at night! This is as quick as quickies get, a movie consisting of more than 50% footage from an old safari movie (Mogambo? King's Solomon's Mines?) The effect is sleep-inducing, whenever the story gets more than a few minutes away from a giant wasp attack.  Some of the footage is reasonably well edited by director Kenneth Crane, but almost all of it is repetitive long shots from the veldt, intercut with our actors.  1   The first unit looks to have been filmed mostly in Griffith park, usually with only two or three 'native' bearers as opposed to the hundreds seen in the stock footage.  The need to pad the film is apparent in one shot in Bronson Caves.  Our explorers enter screen left as small figures in the frame, and take at least 30 seconds to stroll forward, while absolutely nothing of interest happens.  3 There is one real set in the film, that must have been sketched by legendary production designer Ernst Fegté on a cocktail napkin.  Nothing in the rest of the movie looks even remotely designed, except for the hilarious monsters.  The monster wasps are clunky stop-motion models, animated, matted, and front-screened into scenes by Jack Rabin and Louis DeWitt.  These independent effects men were perfectly capable of doing great work with minimal resources, which, it must be concluded, were not available on this picture.  Not only do these wasps, with their tiny fluttering wings, look like the plastic 'cootie' toys I used to play with, but the large live-action head mock-up for closeups isn't much of a match.  Its fiberglass texture and streamed lines always remind me of the spaceship found underground in Quatermass and the Pit.  One rather grossly overscaled wasp coming over a hill is very similar to a shot in the original Godzilla and is quite effective; but later on a crawling wasp is matted into Bronson Caves and looks simply terrible. Monster from Green Hell is essentially the kind of 'nothing' monster movie that relied on good effects to provide a few thrilling moments when the monsters attack, like The Black Scorpion.  The script calls for a socko conclusion with a hive of wasps on the rampage.  Money and time must have plain run out, for we see only a couple of angles with more than one insect.   Instead of a real sequence, editor/director Crane can only come up with a meaningless, free-form dissolve montage.  Every effect shot we've seen before is double-exposed with lava flows and boiling magma, and intercut with some of the dullest 'observers' I've ever seen.   Bad movie, + bad effects, = dissatisfaction.  On the faint plus side is a fairly ambitious scene of a wasp killing an animated python, that might have been edited out of many of the television prints that used to circulate - or perhaps Savant was just napping. Jim Davis, then a character actor in mostly Westerns (The Big Sky) who later made his name on TV's Dallas, has an Oklahoma drawl that undercuts all credibility as a scientist.  2  Eduardo Ciannelli, the original Kali cultist from Gunga Din, meanders through his jungle guide role, mostly staring at his shoes.  Joel Fluellen, familiar from Friendly Persuasion and The Chase, is good as the safari master (carrying the gun, a progressive touch), but the other 'native porters' are strictly from the unga-bunga school of stereotyping.  Female lead Barbara Turner is the antithesis of what is expected in these kinds of films, neither an obvous looker nor a strong personality.  She also has a strong accent, and distractingly imperfect teeth, an unusual thing for a leading lady.  If the Internet Movie Database hasn't confused two Barbara Turners, she soon hereafter gave up acting for a successful writing career, as she's credited with the adaptation of Petulia, many TV movies, and finally the screenplay for last year's Pollock! Final note ... the name of a native village is given as Mogwai, or Mogway ... which leads Savant to suspect that Joe Dante lifted it for use in his Gremlins movie! Image's DVD of Monster from Green Hell is taken from a good but not great 35mm print.  There are more scratches than one would like, but the show is basically intact.  One short passage must have warped from deterioration, because the left side of the screen keeps shifting out of focus.  Like many of Wade Williams' presentations, these must be collector screening copies that were transferred, and not original print elements.  The main titles of both of these films clearly demonstrate the fact that they were intended to be matted down, top and bottom.  Cropped on a 16:9 television, the compositions are markedly improved, and even some of the sub-par effects of Monster have more impact.  A trailer is the only extra advertised, but unless it's hidden away, it's not there.  Savant couldn't locate it. CORRECTION by way of Gary,'He Who Knows All' Teetzel:  "By the way, the trailer is hidden in the menu screen.  Highlight the wasp that appears in the center and click." She Demons Image Entertainment 1958 / b&w / 1:37 / 77m. Starring Irish McCalla, Tod Griffin, Victor Sen Yung, Rudolph Anders Cinematography Meredith M. Nicholson Production Designer Harold Banks Film Editor William Shea Original Music Nicholas Carras Writing credits H.E. Barrie and Richard E. Cunha Produced by Marc Frederic & Arthur A. Jacobs Directed by Richard E. Cunha
	Reviewed by Glenn Erickson The timeless quartet of Richard E. Cunha movies are Giant from the Unknown, a not-terrible movie where the Giant is just a big man, and we know exactly where he came from; the cut-rate Frankenstein's Daughter; the even cheaper remake of Cat-Women of the Moon, Missile to the Moon; and finally, this totally bizarre oddity.  One of the sleaziest kiddie matinee movies of the '50s, She Demons is a grab-bag of themes and clichés, handled so crudely that it's simply irresistable.  Whereas Monster from Green Hell will appeal to big-bug fanatics and few others, She Demons is a great party picture with everything camp enthusiasts enjoy - terrible jokes, hammy acting, terrible direction. Synopsis: Four shipwreck survivors are stranded on an island used for Navy bombing practice: the spoiled and rich blonde bombshell Jerrie Turner (Irish McCalla), the skipper Fred Maklin (Tod Griffin) who wishes she'd stop being selfish and notice him, and two crewmembers, smart alecky Sammy Ching (Victor Sen Yung) and superstitious Kris Kamana (Charles Opuni).  After Kris is found killed by bamboo spears, Fred decides the island is inhabited after all, but by what is the question - because another corpse found in the surf, a female body, has a horrible scarred face, lidless eyes and jagged fangs.  Stealing into the jungle interior, the castaways find more of these she-demons, along with native women who aren't disfigured, locked in cages and being whipped by uniformed, jackbooted Nazi soldiers - twelve years after the war ended! This picture must be a favorite of sickos everywhere.  Where else can you see curvaceous native girls with zombie faces, watch Nazi goons whip helpless native girls without zombie faces, and see a mad doctor attempt to restore the appearance of his skull-faced wife, through atrocious experiments?  What's remarkable about the Astor release She Demons is that it not only got a standard theatrical code seal and release, but that it was syndicated for years on television in kiddie horror shows! Where's my powder-blue cashmere shorty? The charm of this movie is its excess, and has nothing to do with quality.  Even Irish McCalla (known only to tots older than I as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle really can't act or move comfortably on screen, and only the talented Victor Sen Yung does anything with his corny lines.  The camerawork is not bad, but the blocking and direction are strictly from the Ed Wood school.   Whatever they've done to poor Ms. McCalla, she looks attractive in far fewer shots than you'd think - rushed lighting harshens her features, and the wrong key costume makes her already long neck look slightly deformed.  Tod Griffin has a bad tendency to run and walk with his arms held gorilla-like at his sides, like he had sores in his armpits.  With so little of interest on view, one's attention strays to things like Irish's neck and Tod's monkey arms. Besides a standing Jungle set, there are only a couple of mad lab interiors, including some concrete block stairs that look suspiciously similar to a set in Frankenstein's Daughter.   Caves are provided by lots of crumpled-paper stone walls, and a few angles once again in Bronson Caves.  All are filmed flatly, using the fewest camera setups necessary to display the action.  It's all there: silly native dances that look like watered-down burlesque, a stuntman with completely mismatched hair and build who steps in for Tod Griffin's hero, and stock Germans who prance around in shiny uniforms that should have worn out years before.  One storm trooper is actually given the name Egore! The Nazi 'butcher doctor' Osler is played quite nicely by Rudolph Anders, a bit player in a dozen wartime films who got featured roles only in Z pix like this one.  The lengthy scene where Osler's unaccountably serene captives listen while he tells them every detail of his evil scheme, is just one crazy idea after another.  Osler gets things started by implying that the reason the Earth stays warm is from the molten lava at its core, and not the sun.  He's kidnapped island girls to perfect his atomic scar-healing methods, because the Führer cannot stand physical imperfection, and even after all the inferior races have been eliminated, there will be lots of German soldiers that cannot be permitted to exist with unsightly wounds. Osler abandoned nuclear energy for heat extracted from the volcano on which his lab is built, and unfortunately his wife Mona (Leni Tani) had her face burned off in a fluke volcanic accident.  So now he's using the island girls to cure Mona's ugliness through a transfusion-like process that exchanges a genetic quality of the blood he calls 'character x'.  The victims instantaneously get Mona's looks, turning into hideous She Demons, while Mona benefits a bit from each of their 'beautiful' character x boosts.  Additional nonsense has the girls reverting to their original good looks in a few weeks, so Osler can use them again.  But animal 'character x' is put into the stew for some reason, which accounts for the fangs, etc.   There hasn't been this much crackpot pseudoscientific baloney floating around since Invaders from Mars. Every development of the plot is drop-dead stupid, with the added presence of the Nazis to give the whole affair a lethal dose of Bad Taste.  Fred and Sammy are forced to walk in circles chained to railroad ties, while the storm troopers gloat.  The She Demons are mindless savages who claw the air like animals from their bamboo cages, yet have perfect female bodies covered by neatly-arranged two-piece costumes.  4 The 'pretty' native girls dance passively while waiting to be rounded up and tortured again.   We only hear Egore (Gene Roth) whipping one of them, but we're treated to the sight of her bloodied bare back, arranged 'just so' to thwart the censors.  6  Nazi butcher Osler, of course, gets the hots for Jerrie, coaxes her into a black dress and tries to seduce her with champagne, his teutonic manners, and the promise that she can become his consort, and queen of his island paradise (which consists of one volcano, two snakes, and a handful of gross-out native women).  When Osler's wife sees how his affections have strayed, she decides to help our heroes after all.  5  Naturally, the Navy bombing raid coincides with a volcanic eruption, which puts paid to the Nazi swine and reunites our now romantically blissful couple. Image's DVD of She Demons uses yet another collector's positive print with some bad wear marks near reel changes, and a couple of splices at lousy moments, like the middle of the 'exotic' native dance.  The sound is a clear mono.  The advertised trailer does appear on the menu screen, and it turns out to be pretty silly assembly of highpoints, crudely edited with funny taglines and text titles.  Savant likes She Demons and has no excuses for his own bad taste ... 2001's gorehounds will probably classify it as quaint and light-hearted entertainment.  However, if YOU feel the desire to check it out, Savant accepts no responsibility for your possible rage! A final note: the artwork on the covers of Wade Williams discs is, if anything, getting worse.  In the case of these two curiosities, the garish ugliness of the packaging accurately reflects the movies inside! On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, She Demons rates: Movie: Fair Video: Fair Sound: Good Supplements: Trailer Packaging: Snapper case Reviewed: June 1, 2001 On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Monster from Green Hell rates: Movie: Fair Video: Fair Sound: Good Supplements: Trailer, hidden: click the wasp in the center screen. Packaging: Snapper case Reviewed: June 1, 2001 Footnotes: 1. The pith helmets and other clues make me think it all came from Stanley and Livingston.  Direct-to-video director Jim Wrynoski tells me he does the same thing now: he purchases stock footage from big action movies, and costumes and directs his own actors into new stories, using the bought footage for production value. Return 2. Which is unfair to scientists, who obviously come with all kinds of accents. Maybe the problem's just the vacant look in Davis' eye, or his meaningless grin. Return 3. Monster from Green Hell is a major Griffith Park - Bronson Caves movie. Nearly every possible view of the small site is utilized, with no alteration whatsoever. Return 4. this has to be a low point in the objectification of women for the feminist politicians in the audience: commercial necessity requires babes & monsters, and here they're combined in the sleaziest way possible.  Tots can recoil from the mangled faces, and older juveniles can ogle the women in their skimpy costumes.  Something for everyone! Return 5. In his book on Georges Franju, Raymond Durgnat defends the 'mad doctor kills beautiful women to restore his daughter's ruined face' plot on the basis that good pulp fiction fills generic molds with superior style.  Durgnat must have been thinking of this movie as the bad example.  Mad doctors have been doing transplants and transfusions to restore loved ones since the silent days, but except for mentions of some Mexican films in the Phil Hardy book, I don't know of any 'clinical' horror film about transplanting faces before this one. Return 6. the next step in the tasteless use of Nazi associations is 1964's The Flesh Eaters, with its flashbacks showing Gestapo fiends shoving semi-nude female victims (presumably Jews) into lethal swimming pools.  The scenes were cut from most theatrical runs, but the combination of sick & offensive ideas mixed movie horror with other kinds of sadistic taboos.  Next stop, the soft-core Nazi pornography movies. Return [Savant Links] [Article Index] [Review Index] [About Savant] DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2007 Glenn Erickson Go BACK to the Savant Main Page. Return to Top of Page