In 2014, Bill Nye debated creationism with Ken Ham, the founder of the Creation Museum in Kentucky. I was disappointed when Nye agreed to that debate, as I thought it tarnished his reputation a bit. It isn’t as if anything he could say would change Ham’s beliefs. Despite being held in an auditorium, the whole affair had a whiff of exploitation to it. They might as well have debated at a carnival.
I was thinking about this while watching 1956 B-movie The She-Creature. Chester Morris plays the villain, a mesmerist who works at a carnival. He is a doctor of hypnotism, a field of expertise that only exists in the world of B movies from the 1950’s and 1960’s, and made-for-TV fare of the 1970’s.
Morris challenges a professor played by Lance Fuller to dispute his powers, and it is that ridiculous debate which brought to mind the one between Nye and Ham. Fuller actually gets goaded into participating by many who are close to him, including his fiancée (Cathy Downs). Hmmm…somehow I doubt that would be a successful marriage. Alas, Fuller doesn’t have much to lose, as he isn’t exactly a reputable professor, either. His field is psychic research.
Downs is from a wealthy family, and her dad (Tom Conway) sees a potential financial windfall if he invests in Morris. This proves to be a sound bet, as Morris proves to sell a great many books and syndicated newspaper columns. And, for reasons completely lost on me, Morris even moves into their home. Shades of Rasputin, anyone?
While that is happening, there is some sort of rubber-suited monster coming from the sea periodically to kill various people Morris believes has slighted him. The creature isn’t the worst design I have seen, but it isn’t very good, either.
What is truly laughable is what the creature is. Marla English used to hang around the carnival a lot, until Morris roped her into his act. I have never heard of such a thing as a carnival groupie, but English may have been a pioneer in that regard. Morris uses hypnosis to regress her chronologically backwards through her past lives. The creature is supposed to be her earliest past life. I guess regressing any further would turn her into a fish or something.
This premise only left me with a great many unanswered questions. For one thing: if this is a past life, how is the creature often in one place and she is in another simultaneously? Can all of her past lives be brought back as their own corporeal beings? If so, I think it would be fascinating to see all of them as some sort of supernatural army.
I don’t understand how anything so batshit crazy could, at the same time, be rather tedious. Except for the weird mechanism driving the plot, the script is largely boilerplate. Fuller falls for English, and I was pleased to see Downs happily move on to a guy who had been pursuing her the entire time we saw her with Fuller.
The rules of the creature, and what can wound it, are so poorly defined as to be non-existent. It is sometimes invisible up to a point (?), so there’s a scene on a beach where Fuller has a row of police officers unload their pistols into what appears to be nothing but air in front of them. One officer complains he doesn’t think he hit anything, but I wondered how one could tell if they successfully shot an invisible being. If I was him, I would be wondering when the police started taking orders from a psychic researcher. And, if I was a town resident witnessing this spectacle, I would be wondering why my tax dollars were used to station officers up and down the coast roughly ten feet apart from each other.
If there is any reason to buy the blu-ray of this, it is for the episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 accompanying it, where Mike and the bots take pot shots at the film. I have happened to have recently seen numerous documentaries where directors such as Joe Dante express their disgust over that series, but I don’t see how they could deny a film such as this one is worthy of such mockery.
You, the prospective viewer, only has to wonder if The She-Creature is worth your time. I would say not, though there are a great many worse movies out there. This is too preposterous to lose oneself in a single minute of the runtime, while also being too dull to enjoy most of the camp. Wander back into the sea from whence you came, She-Creature, and take this movie with you.
Dir: Edward L. Cahn
Starring Chester Morris, Tom Conway, Cathy Downs
Watched on Shout Factory blu-ray