OVERLOOKED MOVIE: SHE DEMONS (1958)

Take one uncharted tropical island, one mad scientist/Nazi who doesn't realize the war ended twelve years earlier, a bunch of stormtroopers who ditto, a bevy of beautiful girls in bamboo cages, a violent tropical storm, an impending bomb test, a quest for a perpetual motion machine, human experiments to cure a terribly scarred face, and then throw in Sheena and Jimmy Chan/Hop Sing and you have B-movie drive-in fare that is entertainingly bad.

Tod Griffin (who appeared in a couple of dozen television shows in the Fifties) plays Fred Macklin is the captain of a boat that is shipwrecked on an unknown island during a hurricane.  Also shipwrecked is spoiled little rich girl Jerrie Turner (Irish McCalla) and crewmate Sammy Ching (Victor Sen Yung).  They immediately discover is about to be used for bomb tests, then they discover lovely girls (The Diane Nellis Dancers, yes, they are the She Demons of the title) doing a jungle dance.  When the girls are not dancing, they are kept in bamboo cages and are used in glandular experiments by Nazi Colonel Karl Osler (Rudolph Anders, a German-born actor who changed his name during World War II to Robert O. Davis, for obvious reasons).  Osler is trying to find a glandular cure for his wife Mona (Leni Tana, who acting career consisted of this film, one part of a two-part episode of One Step Beyond, and an uncredited appearance as "Woman in Queue at Post Office" in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain), who had been horribly disfigured during a laboratory accident.  Naturally crazy Nazi guy falls for Sheena and Mona gets jealous.  More things happen, but who cares?

Then there's the underground lab that has a window looking out onto the jungle.

This is the type of movie that is best appreciated ;late at night with a couple of rowdy friends and a lot of popcorn.  As far as I know, She Demons never got the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, but it deserves it.  Maybe Tom Servo and the gang will get to it in the upcoming season.

In the meantime, enjoy.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBwUGs1Plr0&list=PLBYmK6srprkAVHkon0xyiD4stCSy0iQRU