Highly Cunhalogical :: Richard E. Cunha's She Demons (1958)

Our adventure begins when four shipwreck survivors wash up on an uncharted desert isle somewhere in the Caribbean. (I think, meaning I think they're in the Caribbean.) Said survivors were part of an ill-fated expedition to find a legendary lost land-mass, where many a strange and salty sea tale of demons and monsters and sailors never heard from again who dared go ashore was born. (I think, but who the hell knows for sure. And, eh, it won't really matter in a couple of minutes...) Led by Fred Macklin (Griffin), his crew is rounded out by Sammy Ching (Yung), Kris Kamana (Opuni), and Jerrie Turner (McCalla), the spoiled daughter of the wealthy kook who financed this trip in the first place. (Jerrie bemoans the fact that the only reason the old man paid for all of this was to just get her out his hair for awhile.) Well, by dumb luck and dumb luck only, they've found what they were looking for but now find themselves stuck there indefinitely. Eureka! And here's hoping all of those legends are just legends, am I right?


As they work to salvage what little they can, a malfunctioning plot-specific radio sparks off long enough to report that the search for them has been called off and they're all presumed dead, and then, while Sammy tries to fix the infernal thing, it confirms that, one, the circling planes overhead are Navy scouts, and two, according to the pilot chatter, these castaways have had the misfortune of getting themselves stuck on Naval bombing range, with the next bombardment ready to commence the following morning! Leaving Kamana to guard the camp, the others head inland looking for better cover before the bombs start falling, with Macklin and Jerrie sniping and snarking at each other every step of the way. (Just kiss her already!) And aside from a menacing snake, a cursory exploration finds the island seemingly deserted. I say seemingly because they keep finding human footprints everywhere but no other sign of who left them. But upon returning to the beach, the trio finds their camp destroyed, the radio smashed, and Kamana dead with several spears sticking out of his chest! They also find another body, a native woman judging by her garb, rolling in the surf. Closer examination shows her face is hideously disfigured, twisted into demonic mask of pure and adulterated e'yuck.


Then, the sound of distant drums draws our curious castaways further inland, where they discover more scantily clad island girls (only these beauties appear to be normal) engaged in some bizarre native ritual. But, this orgy of dancing and bongo drums is soon interrupted by the arrival of a squad of armed jack-booted thugs dressed in Nazi SS uniforms, who round up the girls into several cages (-- some already full of disfigured captives like the one on the beach), save for one new captive, who is chained up and summarily whipped to death by the brutish Igor (Roth) as an abject lesson to the others on what will happen if they try to escape again ... That's right, folks. Not only has this doomed expedition been marooned on an island that is inhabited by blood-thirsty She-Demons and scheduled for demolition by the U.S. Navy, but it's also serving as a refuge for a band of rogue Nazis led by a mad scientist (Anders), whose experiments in glandular secretions resulted in all of those pathetic and distorted creatures. And the only thing that could possibly make things even worse is if this cursed island was perched on top of an active volcano. Well, guess what? And, believe me, all of that accumulated shit is about to hit the fan.

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xx No, my dear. You are mistaken. It's only the
xx unimaginative who cannot believe that man is
xx incapable of improving upon nature."

-- Carl "The Butcher" Osler xxxx

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She Demons opens with a stock-footage hurricane shredding some unnamed coastal town to pieces (-- this storm being the root cause of the shipwreck that gets our cinematic ball rolling), and that's a pretty apt metaphor when dealing with the filmography of Richard E. Cunha, where cheapness, cheesecake and exploitative sleaze meld together into a volatile storm of Buhwuhbuhwuh -- what the hell... that tends to overwhelm audiences with there self-destructive tendencies. But if you look a little closer, into the eye of the filmmaker, there's actually something pretty cool, unique, and even ground-breaking things going on in the middle of all that chaos. Don't get me wrong. Logic or coherency do not apply here. Don't bother to think about them rationally -- that way leads to madness, folks. But taken on their own Cunhalogical terms, his films are twisted, tweaky, and an absolute riot to behold, and, I believe, serve as the absolute zenith of independently produced Grade-B schlock.


Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Cunha, like a lot of his B-Movie brethren of this strata, got his first taste of filmmaking in the Army Signal Corps. After his hitch was up, he landed a job with Toby Anguish Productions, who provided material for the new and expanding medium of television, with the likes of The Adventures of Marshall O'Dell and Captain Bob Steele and the Border Patrol. When Anquish retired, Cunha and Arthur A. Jacobs (often mistakenly identified as Artur P. "Planet of the Apes" Jacobs) bought him out and rechristened themselves as Screencraft Enterprises. A lot of commercial work followed -- Texeco, General Mills cereals -- and the duo seemed content with that lot until one of their stock scriptwriters, Ralph Brooke, put a bug in their ear that they should jump on the insurgent monster-movie bandwagon, that had every crackpot crawling out of the woodwork to make their own hair-brained creature-feature at the time, and make some real money.


Cunha and Jacobs finally scratched that itch with Giant from the Unknown, the tale of an ancient conquistador named Vargas, who comes back to life after hibernating in the snow and ice for a couple of centuries to terrorize the town of Pine Ridge. A surprisingly moody and effective thriller, with a nice Hitchcockian wrong-man twist when the hero is initially blamed for the rash of animal mutilations and mounting homicides, Giant from the Unknown was in the can in six days for the princely sum of $54,000 dollars. Cunha managed to save money by skirting around the unions, sending their representatives to the wrong locations while he shot somewhere else with non-union extras. It was also originally intended for Cunha to only serve as the film's cinematographer but he slid into the director's chair to save even more money. Needing a giant monster that was just as cost-effective (read: cheap), the producers found Buddy Baer (uncle to Max "Jethro Bodine" Baer Jr.) to play Vargas. And his hulking, 6'7" frame, with make-up provided by the great Jack P. Pierce (-- after Universal unceremoniously dumped him after years of service), and decked out in fiberglass armor crafted by Harold Banks (-- who would go on to design and build the "Gumby" rock-creatures for Cunha's even more Cunhalogical Missile to the Moon), makes for quite a menacing figure.


Not surprisingly, it took longer to find a distributor for their inaugural effort than to actually film it (-- three months from inception to the final edit). Luckily, Jacobs had some ties to Astor Pictures, a company based out of New York, who agreed to distribute the film -- but there was a catch. The catch being that in those days of double-horror-bills, Giant from the Unknown needed a co-feature that Astor was willing to pony up for if Cunha and Co. were up for it. They were, and the end result was the ultimate Cunhalogical flick, She Demons.

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[She Demons] used women as both sex objects and figures of horror, giving Cunha his status as a maker of rotgut kitsch. In sex, gore and a feeling of general ugliness, these were the 1950's nearest thing to R-rated shock as black and white American-made films went.

-- D. Earl Werth xxxx
The Sleaze Creatures xxxx

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Co-writing the script with H. E. Barrie, Cunha's sinister island adventure probably drew inspiration from the lurid pulp novels and men's "Sweat" magazines of that era. (Though a check of publication dates on a lot of these mags makes one wonder who inspired who...)





Also around this time there was a lot of global buzz about the hunt for escaped Nazi war criminals, namely Josef Mengele and Adolph Eichmann; the former providing the inspiration for Cunha's vile villain, Carl "The Butcher" Osler, whose dubious experiments are only matched by the callous disregard for his test-subjects. And after a lot of digging, the only other expatriate mad Nazi scientist angle that I could find that predates this flick was Sam Katzman's Creature with the Atom Brain. And, right or wrong, a lot of deviant medical/sexual Nazisploitation flicks, from Love Camp 7 to Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, were destined to follow. And, believe it or not, She Demons also beat the likes of Georges Franju (Eyes without a Face) and Jesus Franco (The Awful Dr. Orloff) to the cinematic punch by several years on the whole kidnapping nubile young women for some dastardly face-swapping experiments to restore the beauty of a disfigured loved one; in this case, Osler's wife, Mona (Tana). In point of fact, the revelation of Mona's damaged face is one of the more unjustly unsung *bleaugh* moments of this or any cinematic era.

See! *bleaugh*

And not only is the mad little Nutzi dabbling in God's domain in a glandular sense, he's also tapped the Earth's molten core for an unlimited energy source in a scene that rivals Ed Wood's take on the horrors of Solarnite in Plan 9 from Outer Space in both concept and execution in that neither makes one damned bit of sense and both, I believe, were unnecessary to the plot but necessary as padding to get the much needed 7th reel of film to break the magic 70-minute barrier. Anyways ... Luckily for Cunha's marooned party, Mona's guilty conscience (and her husband's less than subtle attempts to dump her and get Jerrie in the sack) finally boils over, and, through her, they manage to engineer their escape. For while the She Demons get their revenge on that lout Igor, Mona openly defies her husband and saves Jerrie, who is strapped to a gurney and about to have her glands scrambled.


Meantime, those Navy bombers have finally arrived, and as the island is pasted, Osler's lava machine overloads, killing him. With no hope for a cure, Mona remains behind, then, as more bombs fall, the long dormant volcano erupts, and our trio valiantly shoots there way out of the compound (and watch for a helluva nasty head-shot by Macklin, followed by a spectacular dummy death plunge) to the beach and the promised escape craft as the whole island implodes in a hellish inferno, taking all of Osler's evil with it.


Wow. All of that crammed into 77 mad-cap minutes. (And, to be honest, about half of that is still padding.) Even with an increased budget of $80,000 provided by Astor, She Demons was still brought in in just six days. The beach scenes were shot at Malibu (-- not far from where Jim Rockford's trailer sat according to Griffin), the familiar nooks and crannies of Bronson Canyon provided the caves and quarries, while the jungle and laboratory sets were built at Screencraft's own mammoth studio facilities. Yeah, those lab sets are pretty shoddy and the She Demon make-up F/X by Carlie Taylor, aside from that brief glimpse of Mona, is even shabbier, but there are a few things, and more than you'd think, that I can unashamedly trumpet on their merits. First is a rousing score by Nick Carras that brings the percussion hard and heavy, which helps bring some gravitas to our ears when by all rights there shouldn't be any by what we're seeing with our eyes. The cast has some actual chemistry and play well off of each other, and though most of the overt comedy falls flat on its face there are some truly hilarious zingers to be heard if you keep your ears open. Also, mention should be made of a trio of action set-pieces that really stand out; namely the stunt where Osler is buried in lava:



Or the fire effects when Mona walks back into the inferno:


And best yet, a truly effective matte shot when a wall collapses behind our fleeing heroes to reveal a molten stream of lava.


Still, with all these minor technical triumphs, the gaffes and goofs in this fractured flick still rule the day; and none stand out more ridiculously than the epic fistfight between Macklin and Igor. Sure, it was edited together quite competently from many takes and cuts -- except for the bits where they went back and re-shot a few angles with a stuntman who is so not Tod Griffin and cut them into takes with the real Tod Griffin that one can only watch and boggle:

Tod Griffin.

Not Tod Griffin.

Griffin was a TV actor by trade, whose biggest credit up til then was starring in a Captain Video knock-off called Operation Neptune. Victor Sen Yung, his faithful sidekick, broke into the industry as one of Charlie Chan's innumerable Number One sons. This was to be his last theatrical credit before he switched mediums and moved out west to cook for the Cartwrights on the Ponderosa in syndicated perpetuity. And just by browsing their credits on the IMDB easily shows this wasn't Anders' or Roth's first rodeo on the whole Nazi thing, and Anders really has a ball as the smarmy amoral wütender Wissenschaftler.


As for our bevy or beauties and dried oatmeal-faced demons, I give you the Diane Nellis Dancers. Alas, all further research on them proved about as fruitless as the attempted choreography of their salacious dance number.


But the real casting coup was landing Irish McCalla, who totally deserved her top billing. Coming off her own TV series as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, the former Glamour Queen and Pin-Up idol (she was an original Varga girl) was hired for her looks first and her acting talent last. Still, I kinda dug the spunk and unsuspected backbone she brought to her character that, honestly, was sketched out as nothing more than rich bitch with the gooey center in the script. I absolutely adore the scene where she backs down Igor in a battle of wits, claiming she "swished onto the island on a dry martini." Look, by no means does McCalla show anything, here, that would suggest any kind of career beyond these eye-candy roles. But ya gotta admire how she wasn't afraid to get into the middle of the stunts and how she butted heads with her director and refused to back down when Cunha kept pushing her to show more skin in the cheesecake sequence on the beach, where she changes clothes behind a makeshift curtain.


So pleased with the box-office returns on both ends of this wonky double-feature, Astor immediately commissioned Cunha for two more, which turned into the nigh inexplicable, even by Cunhalogical standards, Frankenstein's Daughter and the aforementioned Missile to the Moon, a cheaper remake of Astor's already dirt cheap Catwomen of the Moon. (I think they even recycled that ratty giant spider-prop.) Before filming began, Cunha and Jacobs amicably dissolved their company when Jacobs moved onto greener TV pastures. (Truthfully, you can kinda sense his guiding absence in these follow ups.) And aside from serving as the cinematographer on Ralph Brooke's Bloodlust, a teenaged take on The Most Dangerous Game -- that is nowhere nearly as retarded as that sounds, this, sadly, marked the end of Cunha's theatrical output. After which, he returned to TV, focusing on commercials. And that, dammit, truly and odiously sucks and a crying shame.

For, though his gruesome oeuvre may be small, one cannot deny Cunha's impact and influence on what followed. And with films like She Demons, Fiend without a Face, Monster of Piedras Blancas, and The Flesh Eaters kicking in the door, they paved the way for the grittier and more explicit fare that followed in the 1960's, culminating in another independent production, also made by a company known for their TV commercials, shot ten years later outside of Pittsburgh. Maybe you've heard of it.

Other Points of Interest:

Poster Campaign for She Demons.

This post is my contribution to Nathanael Hood's latest blogathon over at The Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear, where participants were asked to go all Bobby "Boris" Pickett on some gonzoidal monster movie gold nuggets from the 1950's. Hope you enjoyed it, and I encourage all of you to click on over and check out the other entries.


She Demons (1958) Screencraft Enterprises-Astor Pictures / P: Arthur A. Jacobs / AP: Marc Frederic / D: Richard E. Cunha / W: Richard E. Cunha, H.E. Barrie / C: Meredith Nicholson / E: William Shea / S: Irish McCalla, Tod Griffin, Victor Sen Yung, Charles Opunui, Rudolph Anders, Gene Roth, Leni Tana

The Monkey Did It (Maybe) :: A Beer-Gut Reaction to Frank Strayer's The Monster Walks (1932)

Back in the late 1920's, Ralph Like was an engineer for the New York based Biltmore Productions. By 1927 he decided to expand his role to producer, purchasing the Charles Ray Studios, so he could provide starring vehicles for his wife, Blanche Mehaffey. And for the next five years or so, Like's Action Pictures Inc. churned out about dozen programmers that ran the gambit from westerns, to melodramas, to adventure yarns. The 1930's saw a switch to sound and a company name change to Mayfair Pictures, which strung things along for a couple more years and about two-dozen more features, before a lack of substantial distribution [-- this was back in the State's rights era, where a film had to be sold by region if the creators couldn't afford a tour of their own, leaving the film in the hands of whoever controlled said regions --] caused Like to pull the plug, with Mehaffey soon following suit by pulling the plug on their marriage before the decade closed out.


Robert Savani, meanwhile, founded Astor Pictures in 1930 for the sole purpose of acquiring and re-releasing films, mostly from the likes of United Artists [Hell's Angels, Scarface] and Monogram [Black Dragons, Bowery at Midnight], but he also pillaged Like's back catalog, including The Monster Walks, shot in 1932, and sent it out nationally in 1938, which is probably why the film still exists today.


The film itself is nothing special, really; a no-frills rehash of The Cat and the Canary by way of the Rue Morgue, with a little medical mad-science peppered in to punch things up a bit, when another crackpot patriarch bites the dust, leading to the usual round-up of possible heirs to hear the reading of the will. There's the doe-eyed daughter, Ruth (Reynolds), and her square-jawed fiance, Ted (Lease), an invalid uncle (Lewis), and the family maid/governess, Emma (Mattox), and her dimwitted son, Hans (Auer), who all listen with baited-breath until the lawyer reveals all of the Earlton estate goes to the girl -- the money, the ancestral mansion, and the mad-laboratory complete with spazoid-monkey locked in cage in the basement. Of course, if anything should happen to Ruth, like, say, she gets murdered in the next few hours, everything would then go to Uncle Robert. Staying right on course, during the night, while she sleeps, an inhuman hand emerges from a secret panel and tries to strangle Ruth!


Luckily, her screams scares the thing off and brings everyone else running. Poo-pooed at first as just a latent nightmare over her late father's devious and dubious experiments, it soon becomes apparent to Ted that someone or some thing is after his bride-to-be. Fingers are pointed, and the motley collection of characters head to separate corners of the mansion to sulk. Leaving the trusted Emma to look after his girl, Ted strikes out to try and sniff out what really goes on here. Too bad for Emma, who is killed by the hairy assailant while sleeping in Ruth's bed. [Oops. Yeah, I think the location, there, is a clue, too. Anyways ...] Will our hero be able to suss out the tightening web of conspiracy against our heroine before she's snuffed out, too?

Maaaybe...

OK ... all poo-flinging aside, but, it's pretty obvious from the get go that Cheetah is a red-butted herring, and one of The Monster Walks biggest handicaps is that once the monkey is eliminated, with the cast being so small, and steadily whittled away with each reel, the true culprit couldn't be any more obvious.


The film also gets a lot of grief over the odious comedy relief provided by Willie Best -- here billed as Sleep-n-Eat. It's hard to defend this kind of racial humor, but amidst all the cringing and groaners are some truly hilarious isolated moments if we can keep things in context. Sadly, Best had a solid career going before a drug-bust derailed things. He was a pretty funny guy, who could hold his own against Bob Hope, but never got his due, unable to shake the stigma of these early roles. The only other familiar faces in the cast are Mischa Auer, the surly caretaker, who would go on to play loud Europeans (mostly mad Russians) for the likes of Frank Capra and George Marshall, and Martha Mattox, who turned these roles as morose and taciturn hausmädchens into a solid career.


To their credit, director Frank Strayer and screenwriter Robert Ellis try to twist things up with a little baiting and switching, some locked-room antics, and a few last minute siring revelations to give the final dot-connecting a more satisfying jolt, elevating The Monster Walks into that nebulous gray area somewheres between Moldy-Oldie and Classic Creaker status. It also helps that the film barely breaks an hour, as Strayer had wrung out everything he was gonna get by then and no amount of flogging was going to get anymore.


The Monster Walks (1932) Ralph M. Like Productions-Astor Pictures / D: Frank Strayer / W: Robert Ellis / C: Jules Cronjager / P: Ralph M. Like, Cliff P. Broughton / S: Rex Lease, Vera Reynolds, Sheldon Lewis, Mischa Auer, Martha Mattox, Willie Best