Voodoo Woman
                                                                                               
Director: Edward L. Cahn
Year: 1957
Rating: 6.0
This film from AIP is B movie heaven for me. It is as bizarre as a low budget film can be and I loved it. Pure madness. I have to think what it would have been like going into a theater back in 1957 and being immersed in this insanity. I would have been thrilled. It has all sorts of derangement. A voodoo tribe wanting a sacrifice, a mad scientist trying to create a new species of indestructible humans, a wife imprisoned in the deep deep jungle with a huge black guard threatening to kill her if she tried to escape, a cave with a laboratory, a female hungry both for gold and anything in trousers, a sleazy bar with prostitutes and the white hunter hero. All this stuffed into a 77-minute delirious film. Right from the opening scene, this film goes over the edge into absurdity.



This was directed by trash-o-rama Edward L. Cahn whose other films around this period sported such titles as Creature with the Atom Brain, The She-Creature, Zombies of Mora Tau, Invasion of the Saucer Men, Curse of the Faceless Men and It! The Terror Beyond Space. When B films were great and outrageous. And you could see them in a theater. Cahn managed to bring on some solid actors for this bit of merriment. Leading off with the great Tom Conway, brother of George Sanders and well-known for his role a decade earlier as The Falcon in a series of films. He has always been a favorite of mine and it is somewhat sad seeing him in a film like this - he had also been in The She-Creature. Time catches up with all of us. He has aged considerably since his days as the affable sophisticated Falcon with his face looking like an old leathery baseball glove that needs waxing.



On the other side of aging is an early appearance of Mike Connors i.e. Mannix as the hero and acting exactly as he was to in his TV series. The femme fatale is played by Marla English who could make ice cubes melt in a freezer. She practically falls into any male lap in the vicinity and then stabs them in the back - or in this case shoots them dead. At one point in her career, it looked like it was going to take off, but she made a few poor decisions and now was hooked into films like this and She-Creature. This was to be her final film and she began another career as a wife and mother to a brood of children. She is hotter than a pistol in this and throws out sexual come-ons like a discount store making offers. The imprisoned wife is played by Mary Ellen Kay stuck in B films her whole career, Tarzan and the Slave Girl being perhaps the best known. But she is quite lovely. And we should not forget the myriads of black actors having to speak in some unknown accent and dance around with spears. Anything for a dollar in those days.



Ok, let's get to the good stuff. It opens with a small tribe of natives getting ready for a voodoo ritual. Among them is a tall white man wearing a large high hat that looks to have been made of twigs, grass and anything else the props person could find in the garbage. Underneath it is Tom Conway doing his best to disguise himself from the audience. He tells the chief (Martin Wilkins) to go ahead with his voodoo part on the only female in the village, the lovely Zaranda (Jean Davis). The chief lays her down on the table, places a voodoo doll on her and sacrifices a chicken over her allowing the blood to drip on her. Then Conway says, my turn and injects her with something that turns her into a monster with shaggy white hair, claws and scales that can withstand bullets and fire which he happily provides. He is completely bonkers and has set up shop in a small house not far away with a lovely blonde wife who is going crazy and wants to escape. His experiment goes well but poor Zaranda does not have the killing instinct that he wants and every time he orders her telepathically to kill, the monster reverts to human form.  Oh, where can he find a better subject?



Meanwhile, in the neighboring area a bunch of lowlife scallywags are drinking to oblivion in Marcel's bar. He has his girl Yvette (Giselle D'Arc) entertain the drunks as she sings Black Voodoo and lifts their wallets. Among the customers is the sexual buzzsaw Marilyn (Marla English) who has sniffed gold out there in the jungles and wants it badly. Badly enough to kill one guy and sexually hypnotize another to go with her to find it. Among the voodoo tribes. Along comes the handsome guide Mannix to lead them, but as much as she tries to get into his pants, he tells her I never mix business with pleasure. That is until he meets the wife.



When Conway meets her, he knows he has the subject for his experiments. She would make the perfect killing machine. And the tribe needs a few white people to sacrifice. How convenient that you folks came along. Did they let children see this in 1957? Prostitutes, voodoo rituals, madness, sadism. torture, human sacrifice, misogyny, genetic experimentation. I loved that Conway's plan was to take his monster back to America and tour college campuses to show his genius. We all need recognition.