The She Creature Sure, it ain’t no contender for an Oscar, but damn if it doesn’t have a somewhat interesting and unusual plot. Its main problem is the same one that plagues a lot of cheap genre movies from this decade: dialogue, dialogue, and more dialogue! It takes quite a bit of time in between its horror moments, which are actually fairly atmospheric. The monster isn’t exactly convincing, but that’s no surprise. (Famed monster maker of the period, Paul Blaisdell, designed this beast and played it as well.) The acting is variable – some of it is quite entertaining, some of it woefully bad. (Lance Fuller has the dubious distinction of being the worst actor in this thing; talk about a stiff!) B director Edward L. Cahn certainly did better during this period; after all, he guided “It! The Terror from Beyond Space”, generally considered to be the inspiration for “Alien”.
The movie isn’t without its merits. Chester Morris is a delightfully sinister villain as Dr. Carlo Lombardi, a hypnotist who deals in matters of transmigration, age regression, and reincarnation. His unwilling assistant is young Andrea Talbott (the strikingly attractive Marla English); every time after he “puts her under”, a prehistoric monster that was supposedly HER in a long ago past life emerges from the ocean and kills somebody. The inept police, led by the stubbornly skeptical Lt. James (Ron Randell), and Dr. Erickson (Mr. Fuller) think Lombardi’s a big fat phony but still see him as dangerous; naturally, by the end of this picture their minds have opened a bit more.
“The She-Creature” ain’t high quality stuff, to be sure, and it’s ultimately too dull too much of the time to get rated very high, but it *is* at least amusing enough to have appeal for schlock devotees.
