After making the classic Giant from the Unknown (1958), director/cinematographer Richard E. Cunha followed up with the horror film She Demons (1958), an exploration of Nazi science and beautiful women turned into disfigured monsters.
Some of your universe's critics fail to appreciate She Demons for its contributions to cinema. For example, reviewer jnselko writes, "There is nothing good about this movie at all, not plot, dialogue, acting, directing-nothing." Reviewer dave13-1 writes, "She Demons is a buffet of incompetence and poor planning." And reviewer Fargo_North writes, "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!"
Read on for the truth about She Demons...
The film begins in the middle of a violent storm called Hurricane Emily as it moves through Surf City. A news report urges all viewers to be on the lookout for a boat called the El Paso, lost in the hurricane with passengers Jerrie (daughter of an electronics tycoon) and Frederick, as well as two “employees” (i.e., crew) named Samuel and Kris. The film cuts to a deserted island, where the four survivors of the shipwreck are now castaways. A shirtless Fred tells Jerrie, “I managed to save some clothes for you, but if they have formal dances on this island, I’m afraid we’re out of luck.” Then he explains to the survivors (and the audience) that Jerrie’s father financed the boat trip to look for an uncharted island with “strange creatures,” and they might have accidentally found it.
In a thrilling twist, the survivors see planes flying overhead, but a radio broadcast indicates the planes are not looking for the castaways but instead are planning to bomb the island! The intercepted radio transmission catches a pilot saying, “Three runs should blast that island out of this world.” However, Fred believes the planes are on an early scouting run and for unknown reasons will not bomb the island for another day or two.
Also, Kris finds footprints in the sand, but they do not appear to lead anywhere. Sammy quips, “Real crazy. You know, these footprints go in a circle. Maybe the natives down here are getting on this rock ’n roll kick.”
Seeing the pattern of the prints, Kris gets on his knees and begins chanting. He explains to Frederick, “This is island of evil.”
Later, the group makes camp in a convenient nearby cave. They intercept another radio broadcast saying they are dead, unfortunately indicating that nobody is searching for them. In further bad news, they hear drums beating as the sun goes down, but they decide to stay at camp and keep watch rather than look for the natives in the dark.
The next day, Fred, Jerrie, and Sammy search the jungle for natives but find nothing. In a comical interlude, Sammy finds a fraternity pin in the sand, and then realizes it is his own pin and they have been walking in circles. When they return to camp, they find that it has been ransacked.
They also find Kris’s body, killed by two bamboo spears.
The three survivors say they will follow a trail of blood, but instead they go down to the beach, where they drag a body onto shore. Shockingly, the body is not only that of a woman, but it is also dead, and its face is also horribly monstrous!
“A woman, a body with the face of a demon,” says Jerrie.
“A demon,” Fred replies. “She-demon.”
After burying Kris (but not the she-demon), the others trek into the jungle. They find a stream that bubbles with volcanic heat, so they follow it further inland. When they sit down to rest, Jerrie asks, “Where are we?”
Fred says, “You tell me. I don’t know.”
Sammy quips, “Don’t ask me. I don’t care.”
They hear drums again, and the film cuts to the source of the drums — a group of attractive young women without monstrous faces (in fact, their non-monstrous faces have expertly applied makeup) who perform an extended dance routing.
Observing the dance, Fred notes the women are dressed the same as the monstrous body they found in the ocean. “But their faces…they’re normal.”
“Even better,” Sammy quips.
When the dance is over, there is an even bigger surprise — a group of Nazi officers wearing steel helmets and carrying guns arrives at the clearing. The Nazis round up the young women and force them to march through the jungle and into a nearby tunnel in the rocks.
Of course, Fred and the others follow the Nazis through the tunnel, on the other side of which the Nazis herd the dancers into bamboo cages with thatched roofs. The film cuts to a laboratory, where mad scientist Dr. Karl Osler attends a woman with a veil over her face, Mrs. Osler. He prepares to give an injection to another woman, one of the dancers, who lies strapped to a table, when a Nazi officer interrupts to tell him the dancers have been rounded up. (Everyone, helpfully, speaks English with German accents.) When the officer leaves, Dr. Osler tells his wife, “Soon you will be beautiful again, my dear.”
After the experiment, which appears to be some kind of blood transfusion, the woman strapped to the table has been transformed into a she-demon.
“Always the same reaction,” Dr. Osler complains. “A mindless animal.” He tells the transformed woman, “Don’t struggle, my little beast. In a few days, you’ll be human again as before.”
Back at the bamboo cages, the Nazi officer whips one of the dancers. “Try to escape again and I’ll give you some of the same.” (A viewer sympathetic to the young women might hope that if they do escape again, they decide not to perform an extended dance routine at the other end of a twenty-foot-long tunnel from the Nazi camp.)
Fred, Jerrie, and Sammy move past a cage full of she-demons and open a door in a rock wall. Suddenly, they are inside what appears to be a castle built into a cavern system that Fred hypothesizes was originally a series of lava tubes. They find the laboratory, now empty. Jerrie, frightened by a bird in a cage, breaks down in tears. “I tried to be brave. I really tried.”
Fred holds her to his chest. “You’ve been very brave. It’s the first time I’ve seen the real you. The you that’s been hidden behind a hard, tough crust.”
Jerrie confesses that she loves Fred, and they kiss.
Outside, the Nazis discover the presence of our protagonists because they, perhaps unwisely, cut free the unconscious woman who was being whipped. They also left the door in the rocks open, so the Nazi officer takes a torch and enters the cavern system. When he reaches the laboratory, Fred and the others hide, but Jerrie inadvertently knocks over a beaker, which begins rolling back and forth on a table. The Nazi (whose name is Igor) sees it but thinks nothing of a beaker rolling back and forth — until it rolls off the table and smashes! He discovers Jerrie. “Herr Osler will be pleased to meet you,” he tells her, now thinking nothing of finding a young woman in the lab. “I will take you to him personally.”
When he asks her how she got to the island, she quips, “I just swooshed in on a dry martini.”
“What is this ‘swoosh’?”
“It means to float. American slang.”
“So you floated in on a dry martini. I’ve heard of this martini. So the Americans are still using them, eh?”
After some more comedic back-and-forth, Fred eventually steals Igor’s whip and pulls a knife on the Nazi. He tells Sammy to take Jerrie away so he can fight Igor in private. Fred knocks Igor down, then joins Jerrie and Sammy (who have been watching the fight from the doorway) and they all run out of the lab and the caverns.
Surprisingly, Igor follows them, but Fred manages to force him into the bamboo cage full of she-demons, who attack him. Unfortunately for Fred and the others, the cage door is now open, so the she-demons are free to wander through the Nazi camp.
Then, in another shocking surprise, another armed Nazi discovers Fred, Jerrie, and Sammy, and he captures them. They are brought in front of Dr. Osler, whom Fred recognizes. Fred reminds the doctor that Osler was called The Butcher for his activities during the war. “You’re one of the most wanted men by the War Crimes Commission.”
“You flatter me,” Osler replies. “I didn’t know I was so well known.” He explains his war crimes matter-of-factly: “I was merely fulfilling my responsibility as a soldier of the Fuhrer in developing a master race.”
“Those women in the cages, Dr. Osler. Those she-demons—“
Osler laughs. “She-demons? What an amusing name for my specimens. She-demons! That’s very amusing but quite appropriate.” Then he decides to explain his whole operation, seeing as how the prisoners won’t be able to reveal the information to anyone. “During the way, I performed some experiments which might be termed…unethical. But I simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity. You see, the people involved were sentenced to die, and how they died was unimportant. My obligation was to develop a method of replacing scar tissue on the human body by new skin. You see, my Fuhrer believed that since we were developing a master race there would be no place for scarred war veterans. Every Nazi was supposed to be a perfect human specimen.”
Osler further explains that the Nazis discovered that lava (“the largest natural resource on this earth”) could serve as a source of power as well as radiation.
Fred understands the genius of such research. “Whereas oil and coal and iron are only noticed on the extreme crust of the earth, the entire center is a mass of boiling rock. If someone could discover a use for this lava, well, they could have a constant supply of ready-made power from now until Kingdom Come!”
After much discussion of this power source, Fred realizes that the Nazis have basically discovered perpetual motion from the inexhaustible heat of the lava.
They are interrupted by Osler’s wife, Mona, who wears a bandage on her face.
True to character, Dr. Osler fills in Fred and the others with the entire backstory about Mona, whose face was burned during his experiments by exhaust from the lava, after which he vowed to make her beautiful again by transferring the beauty of the dancing girls to his wife. He calls the characteristic that he transfers to her Character X. “We all have in us a chemical quality, composed of genes, that gives us our personal appearance, our individual character. To eliminate it would be fatal. Therefore, I have devised a very complicated method by which I can physically exchange this secretion between two living persons.” Also, it is necessary to include animal genes in Character X, which explains why the young women behave savagely and animalistically.
After Fred and Sammy are lightly tortured by the Nazis, they rest in a bamboo cage. Sammy asks Fred if he thinks Osler has plans for them, to which Fred quips, somewhat confusingly, “Who’d want a wife with our face?”
Fred confesses he’s thinking about Jerrie. “Knowing Osler and his barbaric reputation, there’s no telling what torture she’s going through.”
Contrapuntally, the filmmakers cut immediately to a fancy dining room, where a uniformed Osler toasts Jerrie with champagne. “My only wish is to please you,” he tells Jerrie.
She retorts, “If your wish is to please me, drop dead.”
Osler forces himself onto Jerrie just as the door opens and Mona Osler secretly looks in. Jerrie slaps the Nazi, so he threatens to kill her friends unless she gives in. He also tells her that if she doesn’t become his lover, he will use her Character X on his wife, turning her into a she-demon. Fortunately, the resourceful Jerrie is able to pick up the champagne bottle and knock Osler out. She makes her escape and finds Fred and Sammy in the cage, but she is unable to free them so she runs into the jungle to hide. There, she tries to avoid both the she-demons wandering through the foliage and the Nazis searching for her.
Surprisingly, Jerrie is found by Mona, who wants to help her escape. Offhandedly, Jerrie mentions she left a compact mirror in the lab, so Mona, who has not seen her own face since the accident, can use it if she finds it. Mona tells her that, helpfully, there is a small rowboat on the other side of the island that Jerrie can use to escape. Mona gives Jerrie the key to the bamboo cage, then leads her back through the jungle. Jerrie frees the men, but they are discovered by an armed Dr. Osler.
The filmmakers cut to the next day as Osler ties Jerrie to a table so she can be transformed (temporarily) into a she-demon. Osler then explains that even though she will transform back into her usual self, she will not remember who she is, an effect that is permanent. Osler administers her IV just as we hear aircraft overhead. The room rumbles as the Navy begins bombing the island, as set up earlier in the film.
Dr. Osler is unconcerned as the room shakes and rocks fall from the walls. “They’ve bombed before. We are safe.”
Mona finally intervenes. She tells her husband to stop. Although he is disappointed by her betrayal, there are more important things to deal with, as a beam holding up the ceiling falls. Also, Dr. Osler yells, “If the volcano erupts, it will destroy the island!”
In a sudden and ironic shock, a pipe bursts and lava (or possibly mud) pours directly onto Dr. Osler!
Fred, Sammy, and Jerrie take Mona out of the lab, but she refuses to leave with them. When they ask why, she rips off part of her bandages to reveal her horribly disfigured face. “Would you go if you looked like…this?”
The protagonists leave, but they are nearly engulfed in a river of lava. “Let’s blow this crazy fire trap,” quips Sammy. (They ignore the innocent young women wandering around the island, who are never seen again.)
Running through a lava tube, they reach a terrain familiar to cinemagoers as Bronson Canyon. They manage to jump over some more lava before they witness the volcano exploding, then they finally reach the beach on the other side of the island. Fred is optimistic about their impending rescue: “We’ve got nothing to worry about. As soon as those pilots report the volcanic eruption out here, we’ll have the whole fleet for company.”
“I’ve got all the company I need right now,” Jerrie says, hugging Fred. In the final shot, we see the three of them rowing a boat into the surf.
The End
Like many classics, She Demons raises more questions than it answers. The pedantic viewer might wonder how Dr. Osler's experiments are being funded and supplied; as some might remember, the Nazis were defeated in 1945, 13 years before Osler's experiments on the island. Additionally, the identity of the many, many female dancers, while referenced in a quick line of dialogue, is unexplained; they are clearly of European descent, yet they were kidnapped to an island in the middle of the Pacific where they attempt to escape for the sole purpose of putting on an elaborate dance routine. Sadly, these questions, and others, must remain forever unexplained.
Director Richard E. Cunha would continue his streak of suspense classics with Missile to the Moon (1958), Frankenstein's Daughter (also 1958), and Girl in Room 13 (1960). He would then move on to directing series TV before dying at the age of 83 in 2005.