The Astounding She-Monster
A creature from beyond the stars. EVIL... BEAUTIFUL... DEADLY...!
Year of Release: 1957
Genre: Crime/Science Fiction
Rated: Approved
Running Time: 62 minutes (1:02)
Director: Ronald V. Ashcroft
Cast:
Robert Clarke ... Dick Cutler
Kenne Duncan ... Nat Burdell
Marilyn Harvey ... Margaret Chaffee
Jeanne Tatum ... Esther Malone
Ewing Miles Brown ... Brad Conley
Shirley Kilpatrick ... The She-Monster
Summary:
Hollywood gangsters kidnap a Beverly Hills socialite in her Cadillac convertible and whisk her off to a remote mountain cabin where a curvy "starlet" in a spandex spacesuit lands in her "white light" spaceship to bring handsome leading man Robert Clarke a message and to heat up his hormones. One problem with this cosmic encounter - her touch is deadly, so no messing around!
Review:
The Astounding She-Monster, remindin' us that when she's astounding and you can only go for an hour, she will not return for a sequel.
And speakin' of nuclear heat, Thanksgivin' dinner got even more complicated than usual this year after Roxanne Bigelow found out Cleave Furguson voted for Trump and threw 'im out on his ass. I say "found out" like she hired a private investigator or somethin', but I imagine it was pretty easy to piece together when he insisted on inspectin' her ballot to make sure she hadn't "made a mistake." Turns out she had made a mistake, but the only curing that happened was the slow roasting of Cleave's rump.
You hate to see this kinda thing happen - mostly 'cause it means havin' to witness the fallout from two angles at two separate meals instead of sittin' at home with your dog watchin' Mystery Science Theater 3000 like God intended, but I guess Cleave hadda move all his stuff over to Furry Mountain Stuffing and set up a cot next to the incinerator. Fortunately, Cleave had his own concept of a plan, and he was takin' his new life of eatin' directly outta the Dinty Moore can in stride and livin' the dream when Billy Hilliard and I showed up for dinner.
"Dude, it's almost December, ain't it about time you set Rudy up outside?" I asked as Cleave was strainin' to pull an elk hide over a stubborn piece of styrofoam.
"I dunno... ain't it about time you ate a bag of dicks?" Cleave growled.
I decided to stick with diplomacy given the way the vein in his forehead was startin' to look like a 3-D relief map of I-82 where it intersects I-80 down around Ogden, Utah, but you didn't need a Magic 8-ball to see how Cleave's first holiday sans Roxanne was goin'.
"Ya know, you'd think a guy who maintained abstinence until the age of 29 could handle goin' stag for two and a half weeks," I chuckled.
"Foun'v twiggow'd uh me," Billy agreed.
"Alright, you're right. I'm sorry. It's just been kinda hectic the last few days. The pizza'll be here in a few... what're you doing?" Cleave asked when I knelt down to survey the situation.
"No Kleenex boxes on his feet yet, there may still be time," I observed.
"What're you..." Cleave wondered aloud.
"You wook wike heow," Billy elaborated, gesturing toward Cleave's naturally-occurring No Shave November.
"I guess. Maybe I've been workin' too hard," Cleave shrugged.
"Yeow hivin' fwom yeow pwobwomv," Billy asserted.
"Ladies and gentlemen - Dr. Joyce Brothers. Huntin' season just ended and I'm..." he was sayin'.
"Huntin' season my frost-bitten hinder - you look like you haven't slept since Columbo went off the air," I told 'im.
"I just... I don't see why it was such a big deal," Cleave moped, floppin' down at his workbench and proceedin' to dig the crud out from under his fingernails with a lip slot cutter.
I was about to explain as well as a confirmed bachelor whose longest relationship involved a woman with the words "Juicy Coot" tattooed on 'er buns could but I musta telegraphed it, 'cause before I could provide a run-down of the female thought process Billy shot me this "don't go pissin' off our meal ticket before we eat" look, and so he and I dropped the subject and drug Rudy outta the storage room and propped 'im up next to the fire hydrant while Cleave paid the delivery guy.
"Now, abou' vah big veow," Billy mumbled more than usual after burnin' the roof of his mouth on a slice of pepperoni.
"Right? What was I supposed to do? Economy's in the shitter. Besides, it's not like it mattered - I mean, he didn't get our electoral votes anyway," Cleave insisted.
"The prudence of evicting everybody who harvests our food and slapping tariffs on everything we import, which is to say, *everything*, aside, I doubt that's what got 'er so P.O.'d," I explained as diplomatically as possible.
"He's not gonna do any of that crap," Cleave scoffed, his eyes rollin' back far enough to see what passes for his brain.
"Fine. He just wants everyone to *think* he's an idiot for... reasons," I shrugged.
"Then tell me, Carnac the Magnificent, what'd he do that burned her bacon so bad?" Cleave pressed, seemingly lucid for the first time since we'd arrived.
"Woe v. Way, much?" Billy managed between bites.
"When's she ever gonna need an--" he began to say.
"Assuming she doesn't -- and you don't know she won't -- other people, her daughter, for instance, might. Plus, ya know, she can see more than six inches in front of 'er face and understands that people outside of her direct field of vision exist," I offered.
"Teow him abow Caowow," Billy suggested, inhaling another slice in anticipation of a blow-up.
"What's he chewin' about now?" Cleave puzzled, his appetite seemingly waning.
"E. Jean Carroll. Some chick from New York. She sued 'im civilly for sexual assault, won, then sued 'im again for slander when he ran his mouth after the fact. She won that too. Judge ordered 'im to pay 'er the GDB of a developing nation in restitution," I explained.
"Doesn't mean he did it. People're just out to get him," Cleave shrugged.
"Could be that she and the dozens of other accusers all made up their stories. Not impossible. Recording of him bragging about doing that very thing aside. More to the point, though - how'dya suppose Roxanne'd react if she told you that happened to her and you dismissed it out of hand?" I asked, pickin' a piece of wayward sausage off my pants.
"That's a non-issue, 'cause I never would," Cleave snarled.
"Right. 'Bitches be lyin'' until you can personally vouch for their character is probably not the best argument for winnin' back your girlfriend, who, if she were to make a similar accusation, would be disregarded by your entire clientele because they wouldn't wanna hear what she had to say," I continued.
"You guys're just takin' her side 'cause you wanna fu--" he was about to regret saying.
"Don' do vah," Billy warned, staring icily into Cleave's face with a slice of Canadian Bacon in one hand and Cleave's hair in the other.
"We're tryna help you fix this, and when you're ready to do your part we'll try again. Until then, try seein' her side of it and maybe think about takin' a shower instead of just uppin' your Brut usage," I suggested before pryin' his hair from Billy's grasp and motioning for the door.
A lesser man woulda driven home, drawn the curtains, and drank themselves to Valhalla against a backdrop of I Dream of Jeannie reruns, but I'm made of sterner stuff. I honor commitments. I believe in tradition. And I... was still real goddamned hungry after barely polishin' off one piece of pizza while Billy left me to perform an incel intervention alone. Clever son of a bitch - he's always one step ahead.
Anyway, from there we gunned it on over to Sadie's place for round two of Thanksgeddon and instantly regretted it.
"What's that smell? Did you already eat?!" Sadie demanded.
"Well, SOMEONE did," I grumbled.
"That's alright. How is he doing?" Roxanne asked, having done the math that Sadie hadn't gotten around to.
"He's... uh... okay," I lied.
"He'v alfo a fuckin' iyuh," Billy added before turnin' on the Cowboys/Giants game and stretchin' out on the couch.
"Is that all?" Sadie yelled over the play-by-play.
"Oh, vehr'v mow, buh I dohn wanna be impowih," Billy replied, not taking the hint.
"Perhaps I wasn't making myself clear - on Thanksgiving one typically prepares a large game bird as the centerpiece of their holiday meal," Sadie suggested, trying to maintain the peace as politely as possible while her missus gestured impatiently toward the oven clock.
"Huh?" Billy called back, more concerned with the possibility of Dallas losing to the Giants and gettin' kicked outta the league.
"WHERE'S MY TURKEY, SKANK BAIT?!" Sadie shrieked directly into Billy's ear after closing the gap between kitchen and couch undetected.
Billy was on his feet like he'd just heard the telltale bulps of a cat about to vomit on the futon at 3am and barely managed to avoid throwin' a panic punch.
"Cwif womah! Whatcho pwobwem? Ih'v in vuh twuck!" Billy gasped, tryna lower his skyrocketing pulse rate.
"I didn't see it in there," I pointed out.
"Ih'v in vuh back. Puh it veow waf nigh fo I wou'n fogeh," he explained.
"Wasn't it pretty cold last night?" Roxanne asked nervously.
"Fo wuv, 'bow buff'ed my aff fuvowin' vuh walk ah... uh oh," he slowly realized.
Billy managed to block mosta Sadie's kicks and punches with a couch cushion and assured us that he'd return with a fully thawed turkey inside an hour and I've gotta give it to 'im - the guy can think on his feet in a crisis. Turns out that in a pinch you can stick a frozen turkey inside one of those industrial dryers at the laundry mat for about 40 minutes and thaw it pretty evenly while simultaneously tenderizing it.
Probably the best bird Mrs. Sadie's prepared in the five years she's been playin' Suzy Homemaker and alls I can say is this may be the greatest holiday innovation we've come up with since we realized cookin' the turkey upside down'd lock the juice in like gangbusters.
The meal itself was kinda gloomy under the circumstances, and I honestly don't know if Cleave'll manage to extricate his head from his rectal cavity before Roxanne moves on to cleaner pastures, but we're all holdin' out home for 'im. I guess if nothin' else he certainly came out on top in one respect - that being, a near miss with one of the worst turkeys in the history of cinema.
I don't wanna name names, but there are those among us who do take our holiday responsibilities seriously. So while Billy was over at the Sit 'n Spin preppin' dinner, I selected a holiday offering that embodies the best of the two themes I had hoped to incorporate into this year's gathering - namely, showing our thanks for all the fine cinematic offerings we have to be grateful for by remindin' ourselves just how bad things can get when left under the supervision of Chud monkeys, and the exhibition of a film whose primary theme is how quickly your life can go to hell simply by refusing to listen to the women in your life.
In hindsight I prolly shoulda waited until Billy got back to run this one on account of the collective acid reflux we suffered waitin' for him to get his act together, but I decided it wouldn't be practical to have everybody fallin' asleep in their cranberry sauce durin' the actual meal and chalked his absence up to God protectin' babies and fools.
I'm sure that by now you guys know how I hate to be negative about life in general and movies in specific, but I have strong evidence to suggest that this flick was one of the "advanced interrogation techniques" used as a means to extract confessions from the Watergate burglars. Still, hope springs eternal, and to prove what an unbiased, open-minded individual I am, I've taken the initiative to collect three points of interest from this flick in an effort to prove that even the most dreadful schlock can offer keen insight which, when properly digested, can help keep American life hummin' along and ensure another round of uncomfortable mealtime conversation next year. You can thank me later.
First, "enough radiation to kill an army" is no match for a good pair of work gloves. Second, man who store gallon of regular in kitchen have gas stove. And third, bad movies are more afraid of you than you are of them, so when confronted, simply back slowly out of the shot.
The movie begins with a wealthy socialite (Margaret) havin' her existence picked apart by what sounds like an ex-boyfriend she dumped in high school who never got over it, until she's kidnapped by a coupla mafia Don wannabees (Nat and Brad) and their booze flooz (Esther) who plan to hold 'er for ransom and use the profits to finance Chainsaw movies in the deep South. Only while that's goin' on, an alien who looks like she's been assaulted by Tammy Faye's makeup crew lands a few miles away and goes walkin' through the woods strikin' terror into the wildlife who flee the scene before she can break into a chorus of Disco Jesus. Eventually the kidnappers converge with the cosmic co-ed and Brad ends up totalin' their Dodge Lancer after gettin' caught in 'er high beams, so now the crooks hafta hoof it through the woods and invade the cabin of this geologist (Dick) who spends all his time talkin' to a dog and pourin' chemicals on rocks like he's got a degree in Alchemy from Trump University or somethin'. Then Dick and Nat debate the evils of Socialism and unfettered Capitalism until Brad notices the Kryptonian cupcake watchin' 'em through a window and goes chasin' 'er interstellar spandex through the hills where she's forced to give 'im a dose of radiation therapy to teach 'im some manners. Nat hears Brad's ineffectual gunshots and goes out to discover his body lookin' like he tried smugglin' a plutonium rod outta Oak Ridge in his underpants, but by the time he's able to drag the corpse back to the cabin Esther's flicked the radio on and learned that the Department of Missing Debutantes has put out an APB on 'em and so they hafta try drivin' outta there in Dick's Forest Service issue Willys Jeep even though its headlights look like it went fifteen rounds with Rocky Marciano.
Unfortunately, Twiggy Stardust stops 'em before they can blast off, and because her bullet bra has proven bullet-proof, her quarry try to ignite her bouffant with a flaming sock on a fire poker until she gets mad enough to risk burnin' down the entire San Gabriel National Forest by straddlin' Esther in 'er nuclear power pants. Thankfully, the aliens have prepared for this eventuality and installed a spark arrester to prevent friction-related explosions caused by close encounters with alcoholic lounge lizards; however, they failed to account for Earth's varying terrains, and when Miss Universe goes after Nat a heel breaks offa one of 'er interplanetary pumps and sends 'er rollin' down a ravine. Nat then returns to the cabin to collect his insurance and forces Dick to brave the pitch blackness of the midday sun, but the group doesn't make it very far before Booty Jetson ambushes 'em on the road, neuters their Willys, and gives Nat the bug zapper treatment while Margaret and Dick dash back to the cabin in a last-ditch effort to knock her reactor offline before Earth's collective Tunguska's cooked. This's about as far as I can go without spoilin' the ending, and while that may be the journalistic equivalent of pissin' in the tank of a Ford Pinto, there are certain journalistic ethics that I refuse to violate even if it might mean savin' someone from lethal exposure to one of cinema's cruelest mistakes.
Alrighty, well, far be it from me to discourage anyone from watchin' this thing, but I'm here to tell ya that immediately following the scene where the She-Monster murders and pitches the rubber snake outta view, Shankles threw up his Thanksgivin' turkey giblets and sauntered off to the bathroom, offering a tough but astute summary with which I am largely in agreement.
Keen-eared viewers will likely detect the hand of Ed Wood early on, and although it's been suggested that there was no actual script available during shooting, Wood is credited as a co-writer along with director Ronald Ashcroft who frequently worked alongside him in an editing capacity. Ashcroft, unfortunately, seems too fearful of ridicule to approach the cinematic heights of his mentor and, consequently, his directorial debut is a merciless exercise in drudgery that drags throughout much of its 62-minute runtime. Say what you like about Ed Wood, but that guy had the imagination of Walt Disney, the tenacity of a honey badger, and the enthusiasm of an 8-year-old on a Snickers bender - the result of which is a library of absurdly memorable films that seem to exist as much to give a middle finger to everyone who told him he couldn't do it as to satisfy his need to create. It's too bad that none of Ed's devil-may-care attitude rubbed off on Ashcroft, who has inexplicably managed to take a movie about an extraterrestrial supermodel in skin-tight spandex and turn it into a recruitment film for the order of Benedictine Monks.
It's not all bad - the opening narration (wryly delivered with sinister menace) misses the mark wildly enough to be genuinely amusing, the diffused shot of a match representing the spaceship checks the poverty box masterfully, the crew's disregard for continuity that becomes more and more apparent as the shoot goes on is delightful, and the pseudo-scientific babble that includes talk of "the Earth Galaxy" is solid, but ultimately, the lack of action and pitiful pursuit sequences bring it grinding to a slow, tedious halt.
I realize that it's Thanksgivin' and that watchin' a turkey is the whole point, but I really cannot put into words just how much respect I've recently gained for Larry Buchanan's The Naked Witch, which is basically the same movie but made a few years later when you could almost get away with showin' nekkid witches, and doesn't insult ya with a tacked-on morality play about how man's fear of the unknown can lead to an enthusiastic screwing of the pooch. The Surgeon General oughta slap a warning detailing the dangers of operating anything heavier than a Micro Machine upon viewing this film - we're talkin' cinematic NyQuil here.
I'm ashamed to admit that there is a non-zero chance my previous assessment was artificially inflated by the lingering form of Shirley Kilpatrick, so just to be on the safe side, let's delve a little deeper into this cosmic curiosity and make sure it gets what's comin' to it.
The plot is functionally a crime caper turned supernatural thriller that no doubt inspired the great Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino collaboration - From Dusk Till Dawn. Still with me? Alright, just checkin'. This flick has been known to cause catatonia from time to time and I can only imagine what *reading* about it might do to a person, so I just wanted to perform a quick welfare check and make sure no one's brain'd melted. When you get down to it it's kind of a double home invasion film, only the second invasion comes from outer space and creates no more tension or suspense than the terrestrial version preceding it. Expectations are low from the moment the criminals leave their victim's car (complete with ID) parked in the middle of a busy street, and from there we're treated to disabled vehicular headlamps preventing travel in broad daylight, an entire cast's stubborn refusal to lock the front door while menaced by a space sexpot, characters fleeing and returning to the doomed cabin a half dozen times, a man who keeps a gas can under his kitchen sink, an alcoholic Mexican standoff, nosy 1950s neighbors who readily accept asinine explanations for gunshots and screams for help, a bearskin rug attack, and a twist ending that'd make M. Night Shyamalan throw up. I suppose it's not the twist so much as the execution since Rod Serling made it work a few years later, but these things, when combined with a complete lack of suspense and sluggish pacing, smother any Mystery Science Theater potential the flick might have in its crib.
The acting is simultaneously too competent to elicit much amusement (though the dialogue picks up some of the slack) and too dull to build intrigue; the result of which is a thespianic no man's land where the audience is slowly bored into submission by the actors' inability to inspire an emotional response of any kind. As a practical matter you can't argue with Ashcroft's decision to hire a small but capable cast to create an air of professionalism, but even by the standards of 1950s science fiction films breaking even cannot carry the day when the flick plays like a Perry Mason/Dragnet crossover where Raymond Burr and Jack Webb pool their collective detachment to create a charisma vortex that engulfs the world as we know it and drags humanity screaming into an endless void of tedium where emotion ceases to exist and we all languish in eternal, wretched monotony praying for the sweet release of death. I guess what I'm tryna say is - it's a little dull.
Here's who matters and why: Robert Clarke (The Hideous Sun Demon, Beyond the Time Barrier, The Man from Planet X, The Naked Monster, Haunting Fear, Alienator, Midnight Movie Massacre, Frankenstein Island, The Incredible Petrified World, From the Earth to the Moon, Captive Women, Bedlam, Zombies on Broadway, The Body Snatcher), Kenne Duncan (Night of the Ghouls, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars), Marilyn Harvey (Rosemary's Baby), Jeanne Tatum (The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow), Ewing Miles Brown (The Stoneman, The Beast and the Vixens, Blood of Dracula's Castle, Giant from the Unknown, M 1951), Scott Douglas (The Dead Talk Back).
The special effects are as pitiful as they are sparse, and include the aforementioned diffused match standing in for a landing spacecraft, a rubber snake, a bear skin rug (not a person in a costume, a person in an actual rug), stock wildlife footage, and a strange blurring effect surrounding the She-Monster which I assume is meant to reflect the heat radiating from her. They couldn't even be bothered to stick a little rear projection out the back window of the car during driving sequences, so you're essentially watching PAs rock the car back and forth in front of a blank wall. Abysmal stuff even by the standards of low-budget 1950s sci-fi.
The shooting locations aren't bad and feature exterior sequences filmed inside Frazier Park, California, while the cabin exteriors were shot in the San Gabriel Mountains. The cabin interiors, however, were filmed on a sound stage in Los Angeles - presumably because the owners of the cabin were concerned about the property values should word leak that the movie was filmed within its walls. I will admit that roughly 20% of the day-for-night shots are serviceable and provide a nice view of the surrounding pines, but that's not a great ratio, and the limited number of shooting locations result in the characters simply fleeing from and returning to the cabin time and again, with multiple locations being recycled almost step-for-step. It's a shame that the budgetary restrictions didn't allow for more outdoor sequences, or for those sequences to be adequately lit to reflect the proper time of day, but silly as it may be, the location photography is still among the film's strongest assets.
The soundtrack is comprised of the usual manic strings and boisterous brass that accompany most genre flicks of the era and comes to us via our old friend Gene Kauer, who composed similar scoring for other poverty row productions like The Cape Canaveral Monsters, The Beast of Yucca Flats, and The Atomic Brain; though he would probably be best known for his scoring of Faces of Death two decades later. Kauer's score (despite being average at best) does elevate the production values ever so slightly, and might have done more had the editor not taken the most exciting bits and placed them over scenes of guys standin' around the forest shifting their weight from one foot to the other in search of their missing cohorts. There's nothing here at all to justify a 70th-anniversary vinyl release, but these kinda flicks tend to have soundtracks with a high floor and a low ceiling that often inflate the movie's overall score simply by contributing something hovering north of dismal.
Overall, The Astounding She-Monster is weaker than the sum of its parts and earns a score greater than it deserves due to its passable acting, shooting locations, and soundtrack. The entertainment value simply isn't there, and it cannot begin to match the hokey fun of flicks like The Beast of Yucca Flats or The Creeping Unknown, which I was forced to give lower scores based upon their abominable production values. That said, I am giving it two points for the explanation of why the She-Monster hasta walk backward out of every scene - that being, the back of the costume ripped, and with no money available to replace it, it was the only way to conceal the damage. Attempt no landing here - it's uniquely bad.
Rating: 15%