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 Treasure hunters get themselves shipwrecked in a hurricane on an "uncharted
Pacific island." On the island they discover a "secret Nazi base where a
sadistic scientist" is doing a bunch of experiments on the local jungle girls.
These experiments turn the girls into "hideous, savage she-creatures!" They
note that this movie stars Irish McCalla and she is described as a "statuesque
blonde sex kitten." They also let us know that she was "TV's original Sheena, Queen Of The Jungle." 1958, 77 minutes, DVD
If you ever sat through Frankenstein's Daughter and thought to yourself, "you
know, I really wish the guy that directed this had gone on and made a movie
about some shipwrecked goofs on an island inhabited by a crazy Nazi scientist
who is conducting unspeakable experiments on native girls in an effort to cure
his horribly disfigured wife" then your prayers have been answered. In fact,
not only do you get the compelling and utterly ridiculous tale that most comic
book writers from the forties rejected as being too gratuitously unrealistic,
you've got just the cast to carry it all off with that special kind of acting
panache usually reserved for Ed Wood and H.G. Lewis movies. First of all,
there is the big, blonde goddess Irish McCalla playing the spoiled rich girl
named Jerrie (that was an unfortunate name since every time her boyfriend Fred
called her that and there was a Nazi hanging around, I thought he was talking
to the Nazi). Irish's chief acting ability is standing around being a big,
blonde goddess while saying all her lines with the same authenticity that
characterizes the color of her hair. Competing with Irish for honors in the
whole "actors cost money - so we got you" category is the male lead, a guy
named Tod Griffith. He plays Fred Maklin and for the life of me, I can't
remember what his job was or why he was on this island. I know that Jerrie's
(the girl not the Nazi) rich daddy was funding this trip and that they were
looking for this island, but I have no idea why. Anyway, this Tod guy's main
asset in the acting department is this voice that sounds like he's trying to
make it deeper and more forceful than it truly is. While Irish stands around
huffing about how miserable she is, Tod has a lot of great scenes where he
delivers dialogue that is straight out of a 1950s horror movie (wait a sec...).
In between these two titans of the footlights is non other than Hop Sing
himself! Playing the second banana named Sammy Ching, he tags along making
idiotic comments on everything as they get in and out of trouble on this
island. Almost without exception the things he says are both unfunny and seem
way out of place. He does get off with the "I'm as smart as cook in a cheap
chow mein joint" blast or something along those lines, but other than that, he
doesn't deliver any amusing, but ethnically objectionable lines like you would
hope, I mean expect.  Everything gets going in this one with the arrival of Hurricane Emily through
some newsreel footage. Once it has been established that there's been a really
bad storm, we are taken to a beach on an island where four people are
recovering from surviving a ship wreck. This means that the three guys are
doing stuff like lugging boxes they managed to save around and that the girl is
sitting on a box brushing her long golden main. This is Jerrie and she
instantly starts whining about the fact that the guys couldn't save more of her
clothes and the leader (you know he's the leader
because he's white the other two are black and Asian) gives her the old "you're
a spoiled brat routine" that is the basis for a lot of these shipwreck movies
where the female is portrayed as being more concerned about her appearance than
secondary stuff like food, water, and plain old survival. The two minorities
probably spent most of their time wondering which one of them was going to get
it and which one was doomed to be the unfunny sidekick. The black sea captain
is later found with a couple of spears in his fat gut, so Ching gets the spot
as the
tagalag the rest of the flick. Not sure who the lucky one was in that whole
situation. While they're trying to figure out what to do, Hop Sing gets the
radio working and we overhear some fighter pilots talk about the big bombing
run they're going to do over the island tomorrow. We also see these jets fly
overhead. Apparently during their reconnaissance they didn't see the survivors,
the shipwreck, the big Nazi lab, or all the she demons that were running around
loose on the island spearing unfortunate sea captains. Fred decides that this
must be the island they were looking for. I don't know how he figured that out
(the captain didn't know where they were and he supposedly knew those
parts "like the inside of his hat.") and I really wish I could remember why they
were even looking for it in the first place. I suppose with all these Nazis,
she demons, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle running around, I can be forgiven
for forgetting the most basic plot points. Do I even have to point out that an
island used by the Nazis for dastardly experiments and by the U.S. air force for
bombing runs is probably not real hard to locate?  With the captain dead and the appearance of strange footprints in the sand, it's
probably not that hard to figure out that you've landed on some island that Dr.
Moreau
sublets to some lesser mad scientist and I think that about this time they also
saw a she demon running around. It was Fred that coined that catchy term after
Irish said that the woman had a face like a demon (how catty of her) and Fred
says, "yeah, a she demon." Great work Fred! There isn't much going on with
this island as far as natural threats (I expected claymation dinosaurs, giant
spiders on string, or man eating plants, but all I got was a regular old snake
menacing Irish until Fred pulled her out of the way). Luckily for all of us,
the island is teeming with all sorts of horror movie elements like native
girls playing war drums, she demons, Nazis, and mad scientists. Fred, Hop
Sing, and Irish walk around the island and come upon a bunch of scantily clad
dancing native girls that looked to me like white chicks, but I've never been
on that secret island so who am I to say what the natives really look like.
These chicks are beating drums and doing a big dance number that you would
expect to see in one of the finer gentlemen's clubs and then a bunch of Nazis
show
up and herd them all away. Apparently all these girls had escaped their Nazi
captors and instead of trying to get away or hiding, they decided to practice
their cheer squad routines fifty feet away from the Nazi compound. Our
intrepid threesome follows and sees one chick getting whipped while she's
chained up. Once she's good and dead they go and check on her and find out
that she really is dead. Then they all go into this door that leads into a
mountain. The head of the Nazis follow them and starts picking on Irish. He
interrogates her and she gives him a bunch of smart ass answers and just when
he's about to smarten up her smart mouth, Fred appears and tells him to pick on
a man, fatso! Yeah! There is a badly choreographed fight that does little
more than expose Fred for the wuss he is. You would think that Fred, a guy in
good shape about twenty years younger than the lard butt Nazi would have no
problem taking out this Teutonic trash, but he gets beat around like you
wouldn't believe before finally killing the guy (I think he got fed to some she
demons or something). I was just playing it like
Fred was British or something. 
I know you'll be shocked to find out that the pansy hero, dumb blonde and
annoying sidekick get themselves caught by the remaining Nazis and brought to
the mad scientist in charge of all of this mayhem. What follows is a funny
scene where the mad scientist actually tells them that since they're never to
going to leave the island alive, he'll fill them in on his whacky plan. First
though, Fred has to show us all how well-informed he is (the mad scientist
actually comments on this) by immediately recognizing this guy as "The
Butcher," a moniker he got from his work in the concentration camps. Fred goes
on to make several more unflattering remarks about this guy, but he is right -
it does turn out that he is one Colonel Karl Osler and he delights in holding
court with an distinctly Colonel Klink accent and sniveling manner that makes
us hate him not just because he's some Nazi war criminal, but because his face
carries this look like he hasn't crapped in days and he talks with some kind of
Nazi lisp (or maybe that is just the bad accent). Throwing aside the whole
debate as to whether it's appropriate to trivialize what the Nazis did by
reducing them down to horror movie villain status, the idea that ten years
after the war, there is still a guy with a small army of loyal soldiers hiding
out on an island conducting all sorts of pointless experiments is one of the
sillier ideas you'll run across in the whole "secret lab-deserted island"
genre. First of all, who is supplying these guys? Col. Klink says it's all
brought in by submarine. How do the Nazis still have subs a decade after they
wimped out and quit? Second, why hasn't the U.S. air force noticed any of this
activity? Third, am I the only that thinks having your hidden Nazi lab located
in the middle of a U.S. bombing range is a really bad example of "hiding in
plain sight?" Well, Col. Klink already has his lab there so I suppose we
should just move on. Just what is this prune-faced slug up to? He explains in
a rather lengthy segment that he has harnessed the lava beneath the island and
turned it into energy and then did something with that energy so that he
created a perpetual motion machine. Realizing how little sense any of that
makes, Klink goes on to say that that's just his hobby. His real passion is
farting around extracting something from the native girls and injecting them
with animal juice which turns them into the she demons. Somehow this is all
done in an effort to find a way to fix up his wife who was horribly disfigured
in a lab accident (Have you met The Brute Man , Mrs. Klink?). I'm not sure but
I think he was at this lab in the first place developing some kind of skin
graft procedure for the Reich, but why he stayed and kept working after the
Reich was dumped on that stack a dimes they call a neck is beyond me. Once Klink finally exhausts himself and shuts up (Are you sure you're finished?
You don't have any more evil schemes, nefarious experiments, or whacky
inventions to brag about?) he has Fred and Hop Sing taken out and the Nazi
guards do a little whipping and surprisingly enough don't take kindly to Hop
Sing spitting in their faces. Fred and Hop end up doing time in a bamboo cage
next to some she demons. I don't know why Klink is still keeping them alive,
but I'm sure he knows what he's doing. Inside the compound, Klink has gotten
Jerrie to get all dressed up in a slinky black dress and then tries to paw her
and offers her the opportunity to be Mrs. Klink. The real Mrs. Klink hears
some of this and that probably explains why she's giving her the key to the
bamboo
cage later on. Anyway, once Sheena sees this horny old German trying to
stretch a single into a double, she cracks a bottle over his head and escapes.
She meets up with Mrs. Klink, gets the key, and sets her friends free, but they
get
recaptured about two seconds later by Klink. It's back to the lab. Sheena
gets strapped down for some experiment (hey, you know, I was thinking about the
marriage thing - could we have separate bedrooms, maybe?) when suddenly the
bombers show up and cause the lava to do something so that it oozes through the
wall and engulfs Klink in its fiery grip (it looked like cake batter). Another
escape ensues, followed by a pretty lame shootout with the remaining Nazis and
then they head to the beach where their rescue row boat awaits them. This one
manages to pack an awful lot of ill-conceived ideas and half-baked notions into
its hour and fifteen minute running time. I would say it's worth your time
because of the stunning combination of all the disparate plot elements, the
clunky dialogue, and the acting that will leave you as limp as the dummy they
chucked off the cliff at the end of the picture. Irish and Fred have zero
chemistry together, Hop Sing is forced to deliver lines that are completely
pointless and you can almost imagine Irish and Fred just turning back to stare
at him every time he has say these insipid things. Klink does his best to chew
every piece of scenery that's not made of metal and the idea that ten years
after the war on a deserted island, there are guys running around in starched
storm trooper outfits further enhances the viewing experience presented by this
exquisitely noxious slice late fifties Velveeta. My only beef is that they list
this at about $25. These entertainingly rotten films are fun to have on DVD
(They'll never wear out!), but it is difficult to justify spending more than
ten or fifteen bucks on them. She Demons has to be seen to be believed and you
should be constantly amused by it (unless you're a Nazi), but it's probably
best to see if you can get it used or something. A movie like Bloody Pit Of Horror is worth every penny of the full retail price, but She Demonsis only retarded fun, not milestone retarded fun.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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