The Astounding She-Monster (1958)
As is usually the case in $18,000 movies, the behind-the-scenes shenanigans are infinitely more interesting than the half-finished product someone barfed up on screen. The liner notes by film historian Tom Weaver for The Astounding She-Monster recount a few amusing anecdotes that surrounded this movie's production. Probably the best among them is the story of how they got villain Keene Duncan to double as a bear by wearing a bear skin suit for a fight scene, only to have him almost suffocate because he was smoking a cigarette inside the suit while they were filming.
The liner notes turn out to be the best thing here since The Astounding She-Monster features no budget, stupid dialogue, little to no action and one set. The movie is exactly what you would expect from such a concoction: it feels twice as long as it its embarrassingly short 62 minutes. When it's all said and done, you'll realize that the hour you spent in the doctor's waiting room to have your old lady treated for head lice and had to page through a six year old Highlights for Children magazine so you could pretend like you didn't know her, was much easier to endure than this tiresome crud.
When this thing starts up, some narrator gets going about how there's all these planets and they've destroyed themselves and that Earth may do the same, but that these advanced planets may not let us do it because we could destroy the whole universe when we blow ourselves up. Since almost all these really short, cheap sci-fi movies start out with the narration gimmick, I'm assuming that this aspect of the film costs about as much as you would guess: nothing.
As the narrator tells us after all the hoopla about outer space, some young rich girl goes and gets herself kidnapped from her Caddy in broad daylight in Beverly Hills or whatever free location this was shot at. Inside the car are two guys, Nat and Brad as well as a hard looking woman named Drunk (at least that's what Nat keeps calling her). There is absolutely no reason why Drunk is in on this caper that I can tell, but she provides us with the best line when Nat calls her "Drunk" and she responds that she prefers to be called an alcoholic (all this occurs while she's holding a bottle of booze). Sounds like just the kind of person you'd want on your kidnap team.
Cementing this film in its status of "crap so bad it has B-movie loser Robert Clarke in it" is the presence of B-movie loser Robert Clarke. The liner notes say that after working on this picture and seeing how easily and cheap these types of things can be made, he was inspired to make his own movie and thus was born the tumor called The Hideous Sun Demon. This is just one more reason to hate The Astounding She-Monster.
Clarke plays the hotshot geologist Dick Cutler who is residing in an isolated mountain cabin retreat. Aided by his trusty collie Egan (competently played by Clarke's real life dog), he spends his time crushing up rocks and moving a few beakers around. He also notices a light flashing across the sky and thinks that it's probably just a meteor and he'll try and check it out in the morning.
Back in the kidnappers' car there is a crisis! First of all, Brad has seen a woman near the side of the road in a skin tight outfit that causes him to wreck the car! Having gone through about three Dodge K cars for that very reason myself, it's difficult to fault him for that. Second and most important though is the fact that Drunk has run out of booze! For everyone's sake, I hope that they wrecked this thing right outside a tavern or something.
It turns out though that they wrecked it right outside Dick Cutler's geology hideout. They all go up to the house and hold Dickie at gun point telling him that they are going to be borrowing his Jeep. He tells them that his Jeep doesn't have any lights and that they'll never make it down the twisting mountain road at night. I think having a motor vehicle that's not equipped with working headlights is a pretty cool feature and I also found his concern for the kidnappers safety to be heartwarming. Probably doesn't have to do with the fact that the kidnappee is this bottle blonde broad with very large and dark caterpillar-like eyebrows.
They spend most of the rest of the film standing around in this cabin talking and threatening one another. The kidnapped girl gets slapped, Dick slugs a bad guy, Dick gets beat down by a bad guy - that sort of thing. Sometimes the park ranger calls to warn Dick about kidnappers in the area, ask about flying saucers, and what are those gunshots I've been hearing? It's a spectacularly dull evening for a hostage situation in a mountain cabin.
Brad keeps seeing this alien chick peeking in the window at him and eventually goes out to investigate. She walks toward him and he shoots her several times before she touches him and kills him. When Brad doesn't return and when Nat hears the gunshots, he goes out to investigate. This leaves the victim, Dick and Drunk home alone. These are the best scenes by far as the victim and Dick constantly try and entice Drunk to go the bedroom and get that extra bottle of hooch that she needs. Come on, just one more drink! Everyone's a lush! Go on, there's plenty more where that came from!
Finally, someone goes and gets it, but before Drunk can partake of her prize possession, Nat shoots it out of her hand. He's also hauling around the dead body of Brad. Dick takes one look at the corpse and the handprint on its face and using all his geology training immediately declares that this has all the indications of a death caused by radium poisoning. Dick also immediately tells Nat that he has a secondary case since he touched Brad.
As if being diagnosed with cooties wasn't bad enough, that space chick is still out there on the loose. In fact, she's breaking through the window and standing around in the cabin making faces at everyone! The humans run out of the cabin and try to escape in the Jeep, but soon the Jeep doesn't run at all. What about the headlights problem? Don't worry about that - even though the scenes before and after are shot at night, this scene of the Jeep cruising around before it breaks down are all shot in daylight!
They go back to the house and Dick uses his brainpower to come up with a plan to destroy the She-Monster. He's going to throw a bucket of gas on her and then Nat is going to light her skin-tight butt up! It all works according to plan except that Drunk knocks the bucket out of Dick's hand and everyone scatters. Drunk gets killed in the ensuing melee, but she was probably going to be dead of alcohol poisoning by morning anyway.
There's another encounter with the alien where Nat gets slabbed and that leaves it up to Dick and the kidnap victim to save the day. Dick comes up with another cunning plan. He's mixing up some special acid that will burn through the layer of metallic skin she has. Dick knows this because of some alpha waves she's giving off. I don't know how he knows about her metallic skin or whatever, but he is a geologist. She-Monster breaks in and Dick drops the acid on her and she vanishes except for the locket that contained a piece of paper which was a message from the Planetary Council offering Earth a spot in that prestigious organization. Whoops!
This was a terminally moronic affair notable for the skin tight outfit of the She-Monster and nothing else. It goes without saying that the idea that some advance Planetary Council would send out an ambassador that couldn't communicate and just wandered around the woods with her deadly radium touch is galaxy-sized stupid in the grand scheme of things.
They tried to have a special effect go on with this She-Monster by filming it so that she appeared to shimmer, but it just looked like it was Drunk behind the camera and she couldn't find the focus button. The She-Monster herself had no lines, didn't do anything but crash through a window and try and touch everyone. She did manage to fall off a cliff once in a laughable moment that saw her spinning wildly before she landed.
Even if She-Monster didn't know the language (though the note was in English) she should have been smart enough to interact with people so that she didn't kill them all. Even though I'm trying, I don't believe I can overstate just how dumb this movie was. I don't think you could even trick Drunk to watch it, no matter how much hooch you told her was in the bedroom.