THE ASTOUNDING SHE MONSTER

d. Ronald V. Ashcroft (1958)

A young, pouting woman with extraordinary eyebrows, dressed in a skin tight iridescent metal catsuit and shimmering with radiation, arrives from outer space on a mysterious mission. Finding herself in a secluded forest, she stalks towards the only occupied place for miles around, a cabin occupied by a geologist and his dog. On the way, she kills a fox, a snake, a black bear and the members of a criminal gang who have kidnapped an heiress. Her silvery fingers are deadly, and the merest touch from her means radium poisoning and instant destruction. It's a bad situation, especially as she seems unstoppable by conventional means, i.e. she is shot about thirty times and it makes no difference, but these are Americans, so they just keep on firing into her.

Eventually, the geologist is able to whip up a cocktail of acids that kill the murderous alien and dissolve her away, leaving behind nothing but a trail of animal and human corpses and a medallion that contains a message from the President of the United Federation of Planets (or something like that) saying hello to the Earth and asking if we need any help with anything. It seems the young woman was merely an galactic emissary on a good will mission, a revelation that makes no sense at all unless the President of the United Whatnot of Whatever is an idiot, as sending a kill crazy person dripping with death to the middle of nowhere with a message of interplanetary importance was always bound to end in abject and embarrassing failure.

Super cheap, majorly clunky, the film only really jerks into life when the shiny un-smiley alien psycho lady is on the prowl but that's okay, as she's on the prowl for fifty minutes of its sixty five minute running time.  

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN

d. A. Edward Sutherland (1940)

The Invisible Woman has very little to do with H.G Wells, instead being a frivolous screwball comedy full of broad performances and lots of knockabout humour.

John Barrymore is the head scientist, a twinkly eccentric who has discovered the secret of invisibility. When he advertises for a human ‘victim’, he gets Kitty Carroll (Virginia Bruce), a headstrong young woman looking to heed ‘the call to adventure’. The experiment requires the subject to be naked, a detail that attracts much prurient interest and a great number of jokes, even though the most you see is a pair of bare legs. The story is padded out with a bit of romance and a subplot about a gangster who wants to steal the process but, for the most part, it’s mainly about glasses of brandy and lampshades and cats whizzing about with no visible means of support whilst supporting characters look on aghast. If you like that sort of thing (I do), it’s a lot of harmless, undemanding fun.

Barrymore is in his late fifties here, but looks in his seventies. He gives a good but pantomimic performance, but then the production isn't notable for its subtlety.  In a change from the usual self-parodying roles of this era, the script only makes a couple of references to his real life reputation as a drunken ne’er do well and womaniser, and even lets him declaim a few Shakespearean lines. Bearing in mind that he has only a year and a half to live he seems in pretty good form, but then, for all his troubles, he was always a good actor.

DEATH HAS BLUE EYES

d. Niko Mastorakis (1976)

A Greek curiosity that resembles a James Bond film scripted by the team behind Robin Askwith’s Confessions films, Death Has Blue Eyes (aka The Para Psychics) can’t make up its tiny mind as to whether it’s a comedy, a drama or a soft porn film. It is most definitely stupid, however, and more sexist than even a film from the mid-seventies should reasonably be.

We follow the misfortunes of two vain and gormless fools who, unbelievably, are supposed to be Vietnam Special Forces veterans. In their heads they are international playboys, but in reality they are moochers, freeloaders and con men, tricking their way into a hotel and charging their disgusting looking meals to someone else’s room. They don’t wear shirts under their jackets and all of their clothes are too tight. They talk like damaged children. They are two of the most unattractive male leads in film history. Actually, just history.

The discovery of their shabby, petty ruse leads them to start working as bodyguards for a rich woman and her daughter, a beautiful girl who happens to be able to use her mind to kill people and blow things up. The ‘boys’ are hired to protect her against foreign agencies that would like to put her powerful, deadly brain to their own unpleasant uses – or in some pickling vinegar.

Although it’s interesting to see Greece from a non-touristy point of view, the script rambles on to no great effect for too long. When there is action, it is done in a pedestrian, amateurish way or is undercut by the inanities of the script. In the most impressive sequence, the protagonists are sprayed with machine gun fire from an aeroplane as they run across a beach. The lead doofus looks up at the sky and shouts ‘you could have killed us, you bastard’. Well, yep.

The story can only be concluded by one of our stupid heroes pushing an old lady from a roof, thereby severing the mental link that has turned our heroine into a human bomb. I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did. The old lady had such a surprised look on her face.

This isn’t the end, although it should have been. Over the credits, we see the now rich  protagonists seemingly settled into a ménage a trois on a beautiful, deserted beach. As the credits roll, the two idiots start to tussle, eventually progressing to a brutal fist fight. It’s a needlessly confusing coda to a largely unrewarding experience.       

ENTER THE DEVIL

d. Frank Q. Dobbs (1972)

Slightly sluggish but intermittently interesting movie set in the Texas desert close to the border with Mexico. A laid back deputy with a little blond moustache and a taste for the Senoritas investigates the growing number of tourists, rock collectors and spelunkers who have gone missing in the area, little suspecting that they are the victims of a bloodthirsty satanic group who dispatch their sacrifices in a number of unpleasant ways: by sword, by rattlesnake, by barbed wire, by fire, oh, and by crucifixion, always by crucifixion.

There's something terribly cinematic / dramatic about a cave at night filled with a hooded, robed coven, especially when they are carrying flaming torches and chanting ominously in Latin, which is just as well, as these scenes are shown more than once and go on for ages. 

A sudden and surprising death ups the ante for a bit, but it shifts into a lower gear until a fairly predictable revelation and a bloody massacre conclude events. The last word belongs to the County Sheriff, who says he is going to seal up the devil's cave once and for all: 'maybe dynamite will put an end to all this foolishness', he drawls. Foolishness? A game of Knock Down Ginger is foolishness, the deaths of twenty people in the name of Satan is a different thing entirely.