50's Edward L. Cahn Part One

CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN
(1955)
Overall: MEH

By the mid-50s, so, so many sci-fi horror yarns had come out where someone controls an unwilling sap through science or voodoo or whatever to murder people for some reason, and this makes Columbia Pictures' Creature with the Atom Brain undeniably banal.  To be fair, the stale premise is given an oddball tweak in that a gangster is the one pulling the strings as a surprisingly benevolent, foreign, ex-Nazi scientist has to make zombies out of people who speak through the gangster's voice.  Sadly, all of that sounds more wacky and fun on paper than it does in execution.  A problem with films like this is the using dramatic irony where we the audience know what is going on, yet half of the characters spend the entire movie trying to figure that out.  It makes for a lackluster watch in the wrongs hands and only one scene involving a former good guy-turned zombie who enters his friend's house and hangs out with his young daughter comes anywhere near being suspenseful.  The rest of the movie is police detectives and guys in lab coats spouting scientific gobbledygook while the bad guys stay in one set the entire time making their walking corpses stumble around lazily.

 

THE SHE-CREATURE

(1956)

Overall: WOOF

 

A textbook, dopey B-movie in every respect, The She-Creature was one of many such drive-in cheapies pumped out at the time by American International Pictures, a company that specialized in them.  It was inspired in part by Morey Bernstein's book The Search for Bridey Murphy, which sensationalized a past-life/hypnotism scam that was all the rage for a hot minute in the mid 1950s.  Of course as every horror movie from the period was practically required to have, a "man in a rubber suite" monster also shows up and the results are understandably ridiculous.  The "She Creature" of the title barely gets any screen time anyway, but what does get screen time is doctors, detectives, and a suspicious carnival hypnotist standing in rooms talking about said creature that we hardly see.  Edward L. Cahn's direction is underwhelming and the performances are stiff across the board.  If the camp level was sufficient for what the silly material deserves, this could be a less forgettable offering.  Sadly, it is instead played too straight, with no star power, no pizazz, a lame villain, and a lame monster that again, barely shows up in the first place.

VOODOO WOMAN
(1957)
Overall: MEH

Bringing back actors Marla English and Tom Conway from the previous year's The She-Creature, director Edward L. Cahn and producer Alex Gordon churn out another brainless cheapie with Voodoo Woman; one of several culturally insensitive B-movies to depict Third World natives gallivanting around half-naked to incessant jungle drums while practicing their primitive tribal rituals.   To screenwriter Russ Bender and V.I. Voss' credit though, it is the Caucasians here who come off as the most unlikable, with Conway conducting a convoluted scheme to transform a native lady into a mindless killing machine with a ridiculous monster costume on, (actually a modified version of the one from the aforementioned The She-Creature, here worn by visual effects man Paul Blaisdell), and Marla English blindly ignoring all signs of danger in order to get her greedy mits on some gold.  The tall, chiseled heroes smirk as much as the bad guys do if not more so, the African characters speak like cave men, Conway's way-younger wife cries and acts hysterical, and hardly anything interesting happens for seventy-seven minutes.  So in other words, no better or worse than any other drive-in double feature with a couple of minutes of creature action padded with over an hour's worth of boring characters talking boringly.