User reviews

This ranks right up there with "Plan Nine From Outer Space" and the rest of the Z-grade sci-fi and horror films made during the 1950's and it's also as much fun to watch. Story is about four people getting shipwrecked on an uncharted island and at first they believe it's unoccupied but when one of them is discovered murdered with spears they quickly change their mind. The Captain is Fred Maklin (Tod Griffin) and his first mate is Sammy Ching (Victor Sen Yung) and they also have the spoiled rotten but beautiful Jerrie Turner (Irish McCalla). They explore the island and discover a bunch of scantly clad young women who are being held in bamboo cages by Nazi's!

*****SPOILER ALERT*****

The three of them are captured and taken to an underground laboratory where they meet Col. Karl Osler (Rudolph Anders) who explains to them that he uses the young women for his experiments with radioactivity and the genes from animals to try and fix the face of his wife Mona (Leni Tana) who was disfigured in an accident. Fred and Sammy are taken outside to be beaten and locked up in bamboo cages by Nazi soldiers while Karl puts the moves on Jerrie and tries to persuade her to stay with him but Mona overhears everything and then helps them to escape.

This film was directed by Richard Cunha who built a career out of making very bad low budget films. Where do I start my comments? The jungle that they wander about in looks exactly like some of the sets from "Gilligan's Island" and later on it's easy to spot the scenes that are filmed in the infamous Bronson Canyon where so many other films have been made. You can't help but laugh when McCalla recoils in fear at the harmless Python hanging from the tree and has to be rescued by Griffin. And speaking of him he seemed determined to get McCalla's romantic interest and even ignored the many insults that she hurled in his direction like "You could have at least saved me another pair of shoes". McCalla never had much training as an actress but she was very beautiful and tall and was a very successful model that helped her land the role of televisions "Sheena". Griffin looks ridiculous without his shirt on and I kept wondering if he could pull his pants up any higher. Anders keeps that devilish grin on his face even when he's talking about "persuasive measures" and this film has actors giving the worst German accents since "Hogan's Heroes". Why would a bunch of Nazi soldiers who know that the war has been over for 12 years and are not getting paid allow themselves to be ordered about by some nut? And the uniforms they wear look brand new! Aren't those uniforms made for a much colder environment? You would think that with what they have to wear they would drop like flies from heat stroke. The young girls in this film are listed in the credits as the "Diana Nellis Dancers" and if anyone knows anything about them let me know. Why would a bunch of girls who were kidnapped by Nazi's and attempting to escape stop to perform an exotic dance? Somebody...please...logic! Even with the silly attempts at acting I did feel that Yung came out the best and does show some real sincerity and he would of course go on to play on "Bonanza". If your a connoisseur of bad films than you definitely need to check this out.

****SPOILERS**** Extremely corny but entertaining movie about a group of Nazi storm troopers occupying a Caribbean island in 1958 with a bunch of She Demons running around, if their not behind bamboo bars, doing their worst.

The Nazis leader Dr. Karl Olser, Rudolph Anders, has been experimenting with the women on the island in order to get their skin somehow grafted on his wife Mona, Leni Tana, who was terribly burned some time ago in an accident in Dr.Olser's lab. The doctor is also working on a way to create a perpetual energy machine for the Fatherland by harnessing the heat of the lava from a volcano on the island. Unknown to him is that his beloved Fatherland an Fuehrer have been kaput since 1945. There's also a plan for the USAF to bomb the island back into the Atlantic Ocean by using it as target practice.

A South Atlantic hurricane sweeps up a group of unsuspecting Americans on the island consisting of Irish McCalla, Jerrie Turner, Tod Griffin, Fred Malkin, Sen Young, Sammy Ching, and Chris Kamana, Charles Opunui, and that begin to interfere with Dr. Olser's plans.

As Jerrie Fred and Sammy check out the inner island Chris who stayed behind on the beach is attacked and killed by a gang of She Demons. This makes the trio go inland to avoid the deadly She Creatures only to find the Nazi base-camp where Jerrie, who was checking out Dr. Olser's lab, is captured by Igor Gene Roth, Dr. Olser's right-hand man. When Igor get a little too friendly with Jerrie Fred springs to her rescue and in the fighting knocks Igor into a cage of She Demons who gorge poor Igor to death.

Unbelievably bad acting especially by Irish McCalla who seems to think that she's doing a photo-shoot for Cosmopolitan Magazine and shows about as much fear of the Nazis and She Demons on the island as if she were afraid that the bad side of her face. I didn't notice anything bad on either sides of Irish's face, was being photographed.

Rudolph Anders is so ridicules as Dr. Olser that he seemed drunk in almost all of his scenes, which were totally outrageous, just to get enough courage to do them. In one famous scene with Jerrie Dr.Olser tried to get her drunk with a bottle of champagne only to end up drinking the entire bottle by himself and then having Jerrie smash it over his head.

Sammy, Sen Young, who was supposed to be the comic relief in the movie overdid it so much that he almost had the Nazi storm troopers cracking up and falling all over the place by his antics when they were supposed to act mean and evil.

Tod Griffin thought that he was doing Shakespeare and overacted so much in his scene in Dr. Olser's lab throwing out lines like "Please I beg of you do what you want with us but please, please leave the girl alone" Where at the same time Dr. Olser acted like Griffin was just a fly on the wall instead of being impressed by his golden oratory.

Just when Dr. Olser was to stick Jerrie with the needle the USAF blasted the island to pieces. The bombing activated the volcano who's lava flow followed by earthquakes engulfed and killed Dr. Olser and his wife Mona and the whole crew on Nazis and She Demons. Jerrie Fred and Sammy get to the beach and finding a rowboat row to safety, some 300 miles away to the US mainland, with a story that nobody would believe not even themselves.

Richard E. Cunha made few good low budget B movies. This movie otherwise could have been utterly forgettable, isn't due to his ability to select actors who could act, and his ability to keep the story going without falling apart.

While not at the success level of Roger Corman's B movies, Cunha's movies has similar quality that keeps them from being an utter schlock. This movie is about the same level of story as Roger Corman's "Wasp Woman". Both focus' on intrigue of beautiful woman turning into a monster.

This movie stayed with me since I saw it as a child because of the transformance scene of the above mentioned beautiful woman. Three characters that told most of the stories to this movie, namely the blond girl, the main character, and the Nazi captain could all act. This kept the story together and didn't go the way of other similarly budgeted movies.

They could have inserted another 10 minutes of skin exposures by the girls, and tormenting of the girl that was on the operating table, and the movie could have been twice as good, but if they did that they might have blown the budget or ran overtime against the double feature movie that these movies were usually shown in theaters.

One of the hidden classic amongst the truly low budget movies from the '50s. If you're a fan of Roger Corman's earlier movies, this movie might be for you.

1957's "She Demons" marked the the second in a quartet of infamous horror titles from resident Astor Pictures director Richard E. Cunha, boasting an increased budget of $65,000 to complete a double bill with his debut "Giant from the Unknown." This is the picture that heralded the duo still to come, not a lone Conquistador for a menace but beautiful busty women wearing monstrous faces and little else threatening the weak stomachs of male characters on screen while parading in skimpy outfits for the benefit of masculine audience members. For those who admired Allison Hayes in her sultry dance of voodoo in "The Disembodied," there are a multitude of shapely bodies engaged in some kind of movement, some perfectly normal looking, others more savage due to their fanged appearance, resulting from experiments being conducted on a Pacific island stronghold for aging Nazis still devoted to the cause, the volcanic finale shot at the ubiquitous Bronson Caverns. The big cheese is Rudolph Anders as Col. Karl Osler, whose wife has been disfigured by the heat of molten lava, attempting to find a cure from the faces of female subjects kidnapped from neighboring islands. This hoary, old fashioned plot dragged out to 77 minutes is a rehash of Bela Lugosi's devoted husbands from Monogram items like "The Corpse Vanishes" or "Voodoo Man," while predating an identical European trend begun with "Eyes Without a Face," adding to the decade's mix "Atom Age Vampire," Jess Franco's "The Awful Dr. Orlof" (and various follow ups), Peter Cushing's "Corruption," and Claude Mulot's "The Blood Rose." Osler isn't played as much of a threat, but as described he sounds very much like the feared Josef Mengele, well versed in the art of transmutation in seeking to create the perfect Aryan specimen, Rudolph Anders repeating this low key approach in his next role as Boris Karloff's best friend in "Frankenstein - 1970," in which Karloff's scarred and twisted visage is the result of Nazi emasculation (Anders had smaller parts in "Phantom from Space" and "The Snow Creature"). Of greater marquee value for Cunha is casting Irish McCalla for the lead, television's Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, starting out a spoiled socialite before settling down to become a woman of action moving through more jungle hijinks (her last feature was playing a nurse in 1960's "Hands of a Stranger"). Little known Tod Griffin offers up masculine heroics, Charlie Chan veteran Victor Sen Yung provides comic relief, and reliable Gene Roth is again one of the villains, though dispatched too early to make much impression. More outrageous than "Giant from the Unknown," "She Demons" would be matched in pulchritude by the director's next double bill, "Missile to the Moon" and "Frankenstein's Daughter," before returning behind the camera as cinematographer, finally eking out a living as proprietor of an Oceanside video store in California.

Shipwrecked on an island during a hurricane, four survivors - spoilt heiress Jerrie (Irish McCalla), explorer Fred Maklin (Tod Griffin), and crew members Sammy Ching (Victor Sen Yung) and Kris Kumana (Charles Opunui) - discover a tribe of sexy native women who are being used in experiments by evil Nazi concentration camp doctor Karl 'The Butcher' Osler (Rudolph Anders).

In his attempts to restore the beauty of his disfigured wife Mona (Leni Tana), Osler has transformed numerous native women into vicious 'she demons', retaining their hot bods but wiping their minds and giving them hideous fizzogs in the process. When Jerrie, captured by the Nazis, spurns Osler's amorous advances, she too is scheduled to become a she demon...

This hokey '50s drive-in flick boasts all sorts of exploitation goodness: Nazis are always a winner, as are voluptuous native girls (played here by The Diane Nellis Dancers, who perform a hilariously bad dance routine). The 'she demons' themselves are memorably daft, with manky skin, oversized teeth, and claws. Also adding to the trashy vibe are a couple of scenes of torture, with a native babe flogged to death, and Fred and Sammy shackled and forced to walk in circles until exhausted.

Unfortunately, even with a short running time of 77 minutes, the lack of any real plot development means that the film does start to drag after a while, although the finalé, as our heroes escape from the Nazi lair while lava floods the island, is quite fun.

4.5 out of 10, rounded up to 5 for the terrible stunt doubles who look nothing like the actors they are standing in for, and for McCalla's giraffe-like neck.

If you get a kick out of Plan 9 and other 50's B classics you are looking in the right spot.

How can you lose when you combine a mad scientist, scantily clad dancing girls, a volcano, Nazis with monster animal girls(stil scantily clad)? Did I mention the planes doing bombing runs, cheesy dialogue, stock characters and goofy storyline?

Yup some campy gold here. Go into it with appropriate expectations if you enjoy this genre(?) and I expect you will enjoy it.

A boat is lost in a hurricane and 4 people scramble onto the beach of an unchartered island. The leader of the group is a young man named "Fred Maklin" (Tod Griffin) who not only has to figure out how to keep the group alive but also has his hands full with a beautiful but spoiled blonde by the name of "Jerrie Turner" (Irish McCalla). Not only that, but he has two even worse problems he has to deal with. First, he overhears a radio broadcast saying that the island they are on will be bombed out of existence within a couple of days. The second problem is that the island is controlled by an evil Nazi doctor "Colonel Karl Oster" (Rudolph Anders) who is performing cruel experiments on native women he is holding hostage. Anyway, rather than spoil the movie for those who haven't seen it, I will just say that this was pretty much a typical low-budget B-movie produced in the 50's which has one saving grace-the beautiful Irish McCalla. Unfortunately, her presence wasn't enough for me to rate this film higher than I have. Slightly below average.

I first saw 'She Demons' on TV as a youngster, and was frightened by it; as I grew up, I saw it a few more times as an adolescent and a teenager, and then, it sort of disappeared from TV.

I found a VHS copy in a video store 3 years ago, and had a movie night with some friends. We howled at the bad acting, the bad makeup of the 'She Demons', and especially at their weird dancing.

The climax, still effective, is the end when Mona reveals her face. A must see if you're in the mood for campy horror and a lot of laughs.

This movie was pretty bad overall but it was still enjoyable to watch as the script was badly written for the most part but it did have some humorous and scary scenes. The acting was average at best but the special effects and cinematography were good considering when this movie was made.

There is nothing good about this movie at all, not plot, dialogue, acting, directing- nothing. Set on a volcanic island in the Caribbean (which just happens to have a Nazi group sent there in the closing days of WWII), we quickly descend into a maelstrom of bad acting, overacting and non-acting- and the acting is the best part of the film!

Just let me give a few examples: in the big fight scene between the brown-haired hero and the 250 pound head Nazi bully boy (not, I must add, the head scientist Nazi), the double for the hero is blonde and the double for the brute weighs about 170. The brute Nazi is searching for the three castaways (for castaways they are) in the mad Nazi scientist's laboratory with a torch, obviously having a hard time seeing- because the overhead light which is illuminating the room is TOO BRIGHT, no doubt. The hero is "hiding" behind a shelf- an OPEN-BACKED shelf which is located almost in the middle of the room. Another good guy is hiding around a corner. The corner is one foot wide and the hidee is two feet wide. In fact, the bad searcher Nazi guy ALMOST BUMPS INTO HIM. I mean, the searcher guy is like a WWF ref, for Pete's sake. The "scientist" has harnessed the power of lava to make women beautiful, apparently, a high priority project of the master race (Gee, why haven't our modern scientists thought of this?), and states that the lava is 65,000 degrees, about TEN TIMES HOTTER THAN THE SURFACE OF THE SUN. The teeth of the title She Demons ARE PART OF THE MASK!- they didn't even get separate teeth for this movie!

Pure schlock, and not funny schlock either. However, if you are into bad movies, catch it... at your own peril.

The top grade on my nostalgia meter doesn't help this film's overall rating very much. Until recently, I had not seen She Demons since it was televised often when I was a kid in the early sixties. It was much more watchable then. Although made in the late fifties, this film's villains are Nazis, feared more in the forties, complete with a gestapo-protected disturbed doctor bent on restoring his wife's face to its former beauty using a not-yet-perfected procedure which involves transferring the pretty pusses of his inventory of captive wild women (oops - that's another epic of the era). Nice thing about it, however, is that - aside from permanent memory loss - one's looks return in a few days, allowing for repetitive service. The scientist inhabits a volcanic island used for bombing practice and terminates any accidental visitors, the latest of whom is a trio from a hurricane-capsized boat. It is typical of the decade's low-budget (black-and-white, short running time, dialogue-dependent, cheesy make-up) tactics. Don't misunderstand my use of the word "classic" here: As a noun, my definition contains nothing but good-ness. A synonymous ADJECTIVE, however, is "total", as in "This movie is a classic example of how to construct a classic, inferior product."

A pleasure cruise for a self-proclaimed "beauty"(Irish McCalla)ends with a crash into a remote island controlled by an ex-Nazi scientist. The mad doctor transforms pretty girls into rubber-faced monsters. Skimpy clad dancing girls is the only redemption for this stinker. Also in the cast are: Tod Griffin, Rudolph Anders and Leni Tana.

I noticed before watching "She Demons" that the film has an overall score of 4.3 on IMDb. While this is pretty bad, it's really far worse. I think a fair score would be either 1 or, perhaps, 2--no higher.

The film begins with a bunch of stock disaster footage. Then the 'action' (such as it is) cuts to an island where four folks recently washed ashore during this hurricane. One is a 'red shirt'--soon to die. Another is an Asian-American bit of comic relief. One is a hero with about as much charisma as a tuna sandwich. The final is a hot blonde who is inexplicably angry at everyone during the first half of the film. Soon these folks realize that they are really screwed. The island is about to be used for bombing practice by the US Air Force AND it's populated by both crazed extremely well-groomed dancing girls AND Nazis!! This is certainly one of the strangest combinations in film history!

So why are the Nazis there? Well, a crazy old scientist (a Dr. Mengele- type) has been doing experiments on geo-thermal energy as well as work on making his hideously disfigured wife look normal again. These latter experiments involve the dancing girls who were kidnapped and are injected with a serum that makes them look like someone poured peanut butter all over their faces and gave them really crappy dental work. While there are only about a half dozen Nazis, the newcomers (who now number only three) have the advantage because they have the hero (who, frankly, isn't all that heroic or macho) and the angry PMS-driven blonde lady! Why no one even once mentions to the Nazis that the war has been over for many years is odd, by the way!

During the course of this incredibly silly film, you don't need to look all that carefully to notice that the stunt doubles sometimes have different color hair than the folks they are doubling for in the movie! Additionally, at one point one of the old Nazis is tossed into a wall and the wall shakes back and forth because it's obviously not a real wall!! Add to this ridiculous dialog and a dumb plot and you pretty much have "She Demons".

All right, it's cheese; add a little ham on white bread, and you got a sandwich with filling, if not much spice.

Very loosely based on "The Island of Dr. Moreau," this silly '50s drive-in aimed horror movie moves too well to be as bad as critics say. Nothing here makes any sense, but it's really background for pop-corn (and for that old '50s drive-in mating behavior, 'necking'). Making the villains fugitives from Nazi Germany is definitely a plus, because it adds to the senselessness of the mad doctor's 'experiments.' The 'dance of the natives' is stupid but enjoyably choreographed, and the babes are hot for their day.

Light-weight and generally inoffensive exploitation. Again, the pacing is the surprise - put your brain on hold and let it go through its B-movie paces, this won't bore you.

Woo hoo this movie is so horrible it's not even "good" bad, it's just...BAD! I'm a great fan of bad movies but seriously this one just does not work for me. In fact watching this was an almost painful ordeal because of the really bad acting, the lousy dialog, the lame attempts at humor and the incoherent plot! In my opinion this is definitely Director Richard Cunha's poorest movie especially in comparison with his other movies "Missile to the Moon" and "Frankenstein's Daughter". And watch for those 2 Nazi soldiers whose helmets look a couple sizes too large...or maybe their heads were a couple sizes too small?!? LOL

Leaden dialogue, some rather wooden acting and a slightly silly plot instantly eliminate any consideration of She Demon as a good film. In spite of its ingredients, it does manage to keep moving well enough to be watchable but we are firmly in am-dram territory.

It does, however, have the irresistable charm of a 3rd rate B-movie and therein lies its appeal. The old "so bad it's good" adage does rear its head here. It is quite engagingly awful, and when that happens in an attention-holding framework, magic happens.

It was never going to trouble the Oscars but it's well worth a visit, largely for all the wrong reasons.

... and She Demons shows why quite quickly. Her range of onscreen expressions ranges from slightly bored to mildly perturbed, until, after being menaced by mutant natives and Nazis for the first third of the movie, Irish nearly gets upset enough to grind her teeth a little bit. Best known for playing Sheena in a very cheap TV series, the tall athletic blonde only appeared a few times on screen afterwards. Despite her limitations, Irish is far from the worst element in this movie.

She Demons is a buffet of incompetence and poor planning. Fight choreography straight out of a Three Stooges short. An underground laboratory with a window view of the outside jungle. A blond stunt double for a brown haired man. Captured native girls (who according to the Commandant have been there for ten years!) stage an escape, but interrupt it for a long and terrible dance sequence, allowing themselves to be recaptured. A long lecture by the Commandant about alternative energy, while Irish and her lackeys lounge around casually, with no guards to keep them from overpowering him while he goes on and on about extracting electricity from lava. (That does not work, BTW. No credit for dumb science.) Everything feels like it was improvised on the spot to pad out the runtime with no thought as to how any of it would play when assembled together. The result is a staggering mess, which cannot even manage to make half-dressed native dancers and Nazis with whips watchable!

If this sounds like perfect fodder for Rifftrax, it was. It was one of their funniest episodes. Hilarious and highly recommended. The movie itself is garbage.

Fans of badfilm will want to check this one out. This schlock horror-comedy-burlesque hybrid doesn't take itself too seriously, although hero Tod Griffin appears to be taking himself too seriously. It is fascinating to hear his deep and earnest voice, resonating as it does from his skinny chest, as his skinny arms gesticulate.

For counter-point to our under-whelming and over-acting hero, we are treated to the spectacular physical endowments of Irish McCalla, whose performance does not resemble thespian-ism in even the most theoretical sense.

The most likable of our 3 heroes is comic-relief Sammy, played ably by Victor Sen Young, a veteran of many B-films and a former screen son of Charlie Chan. Shortly after this film, Young took the role of Hop Sing in Bonanza, playing a very distasteful stereotype...Young fares better in this film, as there is only one obligatory Chinese joke...the rest being non-denominational wise-cracks and general goofiness. He is a an early version of the Hipster Doofus...alongside Maynard G Krebs and Jughead Jones, paving the way for Cosmo Kramer.

The Mad Nazi Scientist Commandant is fun to watch...very evil, very nuts, very lecherous...and the actor appears to have been drunk during most of the filming...good stuff all around.

There's some fun cheap monster make-up, and for good measure it's worn by a bunch of burlesque dancers wearing grass skirts and bikini tops. Got to love that. The burlesque dancers are billed in the credits as the Diane Nellis dancers, and most of them thankfully are not wearing the monster make-up, so we see their lovely faces as well as their lovely bodies.

Now here's a couple questions for the scholars: Who were the Diane Nellis Dancers and what became of them? Who was Diane Nellis and what became of her? They probably had interesting lives, all of them.

The dancers play some kind of strange pale-skinned primitive women, and they perform a sleazy nightclub type 'jungle dance.' This dance lasts for several minutes and is the highlight of the film...this type of cheesecake stuff is incredibly tame compared to what our 12-year-old children can watch on MTV. The dance is a good thing because pretty girls in bikini tops and grass skirts will always be needed by our world.

I have seen plenty of schlock-horror films from this era, and this is the only one I know of that contains an actual cheese-cake burlesque club type dance. It is this innovation to the genre, plus Irish McCalla's endowments and her very brief semi-striptease (a tease striptease, if you will) that she performs early in the pic, that distinguish this film. For surely the infusion of burlesque elements into this epic foreshadows the nudie-horror films that came in the 1960's.