User Reviews

As Bill Warren points out elsewhere, director Kurt Neumann had a lot of enthusiasm for the potential of science fiction movies, but he didn't quite seem to have the talents (or the budgets) to make consistently good ones. He seems to have plenty of intelligence - hence adopting a story with the fascinating idea of seeing what would happen if a human being were injected with a serum that enables her to "adapt" to any threat or environment - but he didn't seem to be able to create scenes without tons of expository dialog, or patch the enormous plot holes in the screenplays.

She Devil...it has its moments. As a friend said, someone ought to give Albert Dekker the Purple Heart Actor's awards for his valiant attempts to soldier on as he is forced to deliver line after line of clunky dialog in scenes that are going nowhere. And there are some good framing shots and set ups here and there - at times the actress who plays the woman test subject does manage to project a chilly, barely human glamour that makes you believe that she could take a man for everything and kill him once she was bored with him.

But the screen play asks the viewer to believe that a millionaire widow wouldn't have a retinue of courtiers and employees and bodyguards who would follow her everywhere, and who wouldn't make a major fuss when she went missing after she visits the two men in the world who created her and know her secret. And it wastes a lot of time foreshadowing a leopards presence in the lab without ever doing anything interesting.

Anyway...this what happens when you try to get by with one special effect (the woman seems to be able to change her hair color at will) and pretend you've created a movie about "ideas"...when you don't know how to do anything really interesting with that idea.

Still way better than some of its contemporaries (dreck like "Voodoo Woman" make this look like Scorcese) and worth seeing once if you are fascinated by 50's scifi.

The title She Devil is a dying woman with no hope who is administered an experimental serum. It's implied she acquired tuberculosis because of a shady past. This is never really followed up on. This not only cures here but makes her heal quickly and seemingly invulnerable to most injuries. It also has some positive and negative side effects- it makes her able to turn blonde and this seems to make her 1000 times hotter. The downside is she almost immediately turns into a thief, brazenly assaulting a man in a crowded clothing store and turning to murder over the slightest insult. She is now every man's nightmare, an empowered woman- evil, devious, deceitful, murderous and greedy but also his dream- blonde, beautiful, sexy and seductive.

The main character goes along with her misdeeds but is eventually convinced by his scientist friend who I think was secretly his gay lover to try to knock her out so they can remove that most sinister of human body parts- the pineal gland. Scientists to this day still don't know what it is for but filmmakers are convinced that when it's stimulated it causes one to turn purely malevolent. Unfortunately she isn't a Nipe addict like in Leech Woman but also doesn't turn haggardly. Eventually they are able to knock her unconscious in a ludicrous scene and remove her vile pineal gland through the nose because the younger scientist is still in love with her and doesn't want her scarred in any way. His hopeless love is never requited as we get some lame throwaway line at the end about only a higher power being able to save her now. This was pretty much the only time religion was mentioned in the movie and seems tacked on to give the movie some morals or something. It was definitely immoral portraying women as only being murderous, greedy sex-pots and men as complete horn-dogs who will do anything for a beautiful woman no matter how loathsome she is. At one point the characters receive a painting of the woman while she is on her honeymoon. She is really beautiful in it but also appears to be surrounded by hellfire, how appropriate. Even though she's no longer evil she dies at the end. We get a final line "she was so beautiful" proving that women only have value if they are good looking and men only care if they are good looking. A great message movie!

This is a melodramatic mixture of science fiction, crime drama and the typical femme fatale saga of film noir. It stars Mari Blanchard as a dying woman who is suddenly cured through a serum made out of something that came out of a fruit fly and she ends up with the ability to not only change her hair color but to be cured by a panther scratch, a bullet wound and survive a horrendous car wreck. She is probably one of the most wicked women in film history, looking into a mirror and watching her blond hair turn dark again after she is slapped by jealous wife Faye Baker whom she later strangles to death. Earlier, she had turned her black hair blond after assaulting a man who dropped money in a department store that she wanted to get her hands on.

Blanchard ends up married to Baker's widower, John Archer, whom she becomes instantly board with and arranges the car crash after he shoots her after realizing what a tramp she is. She is able to manipulate him into thinking that he was wrong when all the while she intends to smash his body into pieces as she walks away unscathed. It's up to doctors Jack Kelly and Albert Dekker to try and save her soul by convincing her to allow them to apply a reversal serum that will return her to who she was. but with a woman this evil, that will be difficult to do, and it becomes a definite question how the serum would react should she agree.

This is a hoot as far as melodramas go, and it has so many different themes, it is difficult to classify. I choose to consider it a combination of science fiction & horror because of the elements that Kelly and Dekker used to try to save her. They are not mad doctor's like Karloff or Lugosi or Price, but doctors who experiment with wild animals in an effort to find cures for humans. Blanchard doesn't start off as one-dimensional evil, but it is very apparent that the film is saying that you shouldn't mess around with science when it comes to a person's soul. This film is fun to watch for Blanchard's over the top performance and character actress Marie Blake (billed here as Blossom Rock) who gets a few good zingers in. Other than that, it is completely preposterous but one you can watch and have a good time laughing at.

Copyright 1957 by Regal Films, Inc. No New York opening. U.S. release: April 1957. U.K. release: July 1957. No record of any Australian release. 6,977 feet. 77 minutes.

SYNOPSIS: A variant on "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" with Mari Blanchard making the transformation from sickly womanhood to beautiful, homicidal vamp.

VIEWERS GUIDE: Adults.

COMMENT: "B"players wrestle with a "B" script of unabashed banality. Neither the director (who co-authored the script) nor the special effects and make-up men are much help.

OTHER VIEWS: A morbid and thoroughly disagreeable exercise in medical malpractice, murder and juvenilely pseudo-scientific mumbo- jumbo. Addicts of the artless may find compensation in the absurdly high-flying medical/ethical conversations ("She was destined to die anyway"). — Adapted from the "Monthly Film Bulletin".

Neumann's film, "She Devil" was a step up, but not by much. Based on Stanley G. Weinbaum's story, "The Adaptive Ultimate", it postulates what might become of a person who has taken a serum derived from the fruit fly, "nature's most adaptive insect". Unfortunately, the answers that the film provides are unbelievably dull ones.

Mari Blanchard plays the tubercular patient that is injected with the serum. It cures her but it has the Jekyll-Hyde effect of altering her physical appearance (her hair lightens and her skin color changes) and it gives her criminal tendencies... Under Neumann's plodding direction and script, the effect is dull rather than dramatic. The greatest visual asset of the film is the appearance of Albert "Dr Cyclops" Dekker as the elder scientist, but he and the rest of the dispirited cast are given little to do. — Dennis Fischer in an article published in Gary J. Svehla's marvelous fanzine "Midnight Marquee".

Jack Kelly plays a doctor who thinks he can cure all disease if he can get the human body to adapt to anything. Since insects seem to have the most power to adapt, Kelly explains his theory to a fellow doctor, played by Albert Dekker: "I used fruit flies. I putrefied the bodies, injected a cow, and produced the serum. After clarifying with albumin, operating in vacuum and rectifying with alcohol -"but Decker cuts him off with "Never mind the technique now." Thank you. Kelly has already experimented on several animals, and is now ready to test his serum on a human. Dekker isn't so thrilled with the idea, but when a terminal tuberculosis patient comes along, Dekker consents to have Kelly work his magic.

In short order, the patient, played by Mari Blanchard, gets well ... too well. She can't be harmed, can transform her hair color at will from black to blonde and back again, and turns into a first class b****. Yum. Kelly is smitten, while Dekker pretty much keeps stating the medical equivalent of "I think we effed this up."

Kelly and Dekker throw a coming out party for Blanchard, and one of the guests (John Archer) gets an eyeful of the dame. He hits on her while his wife watches. The wife calls Blanchard a trollop (or "ho," in modern parlance) and cracks her one across the cheek. Shortly thereafter, exit the wife. And shortly thereafter, Archer has a new wife. And shortly thereafter, Blanchard gets bored with Archer. And shortly thereafter - well, you know where this is heading.

Dekker finally figures out a way to anesthetize Blanchard; he uses the basic fact that no organism can exist in its own waste. (Don't worry; they are not going to back up the toilets.) Anyway, they are able to operate on Blanchard, and remove her pineal gland, which apparently has too much pineal stuff in it. Now her fate is left to a higher power (the film's producer).

Despite the overall silliness, the movie does present an interesting idea. This film was based on the short story "The Adaptive Ultimate," which is clever and took me all of ten minutes to read. There is also a 30-minute radio dramatization from 1949, available on the internet.

Blanchard seems to be having the time of her life. Every one of her entrances is announced by the same saxophone theme. She sashays all over the place in tight outfits and is sexy as all get out, whatever that means. Kelly acts stupid most of the time; however, I would imagine that's how most guys would act around Blanchard. Dekker gets a little irritating with his constant philosophizing and "we must do something" attitude as cast members are dropping like flies. Also, he wears a bad bowtie and his hairpiece is ridiculous. For fans of the "Addams Family" tv series, Kelly and Dekker's housekeeper is played by Blossom Rock, aka, "Grandmama."

I was COMPLETELY mesmerized by this film because I loved the concept of this woman who was in essence given everything a human being would need to survive and still gave into her baser instincts and became even more of a monster than before.

I believe that she started out as a petty criminal before they gave her the operation, so it was already in her to be this way already so I don't think they could have blamed it on the injection unless there was someone else to compare her progress with or a lab animal with similar characteristics- like a primate.

This added a much needed balance to Whitley Streib's novel "The Hunger", as the supernatural condition was given biological rules and parameters.

I simply adored the scenes where she would go for a Sunday drive with her rich new husband, and then run them both off a cliff in the convertible, dust herself off and walk home to plot her next marriage.

Genius!

I have kind of a photographic memory and only saw the film only once (30 years ago) when I was six, but those scenes stood out for me- (almost as the one in the very beginning of the film where she runs into a dressing room-being pursued by the police as a brunette, changes into the clothing hanging in the room, and walks out as a platinum blonde as all the cops are drooling all over her!!

It was a great lesson to me as a child that people only look at the surface and are always prone to fall victim to those whom their prejudices judge as being more desirable than themselves!

I wouldn't have touched her with a ten foot pole just cause her saccharine sweet personality barely concealed her contempt for humanity.

A LOVELY film which I hope someone finally decides to remake with a more scientific base (while keeping the humor!)

-Skittles!

Though this is clearly a "B" movie, the story the script was taken from was written by Stanley Weinbaum. Mr Weinbaum ranked right up there with Isaac Asimov as a science fiction writer in his time. The story was published in 1934 under the title "The Adaptive Ultimate." The story is quite good, especially considering it was written almost ninety years ago.

Casting is excellent. With Albert Dekker as Dr Boch, Jack Kelly as Dr Scott, & Mari Blanchard as Kyra. Ms. Blanchard adds an interesting touch to the film due to her unusual beauty. She has wideset eyes and a triangular face that comes to a near point at the chin. It reminds me of the head of a preying mantis.

Except for the aforementioned stiff line delivery, the movie is quite good with an interesting story and excellent effects. (Kyra changes her hair color from brunette to blonde, on camera, while moving). Some of the best lap-dissolve work I've ever seen.

Plot: Dr Scott has developed a serum that seems to be able to effect a cure on any mammal it is given to. He has experimented on a chimpanzee, a cat, a dog, and a panther. All had life ending injuries and all completely recovered. Only the panther displayed an interesting side-effect; it changed color from tawny brown to solid black. Dr. Scott wants to experiment on a human and he consults his mentor, Dr. Boch, about doing just that. Boch is clear that it is unethical to experiment on a human being, and agrees to supply one to Dr. Scott only if that human is certain to die without treatment. That human must also give consent, which Dr. Scott feels is likely impossible.

Nevertheless, days later Dr. Boch has just such a patient, one Kyra Zelas who is suffering from terminal tuberculosis. Dr. Scott injects Kyra with 10cc of the serum, and six hours later she seems to be making a recover. Within a week, she is well enough to be discharged. Drs. Scott and Boch don't want to release her back into the public because they want to continue to study her, so they offer Kyra the opportunity to live with them, and make it clear that the reason is so they can study her. It's also clear the Dr. Scott is more than slightly interested in her. Kyra may also have an attraction for Dr. Scott, but her repeated lying makes this questionable. After all, Kyra has changed from an ill, greasy haired, near skeleton, to a vivacious tantalizing beauty. Ms. Zelas readily accepts the offer and Dr. Boch gives her his home address and cab fare.

On the way to the taxi stand, Zelas stops in a dress store, sees a dress she wants (marked at $245), and then witnesses an older man pull out a wallet stuffed with bills to pay for a much younger woman's wardrobe. Zelas approaches the man as he stands at the counter to pay, and demands the money. When he refuses Zelas grabs the money. When the older man attempts to get the money back, Zelas grabs a large glass ashtray from the counter and hits the man in the head, nearly killing him. She then rushes into a changing room to hide. When the police arrive the begin going to each dressing room, searching for a woman in a black dress with black hair. As Kyra stands there, waiting for a sure arrest, her hair color changes from black to platinum blond. She sees this in a mirror in the room, ditches the black dress, and grabs a robe in the room. When she opens the door, the police see a blond, apologize, and Kyra makes her escape, after buying the expensive dress with the $700 of stolen loot.

This is the first of many murders she commits before Boch and Scott figure out how to sedate her and attempt to return her to normal.

After Dr. Boch removes the pineal gland, Kyra falls ill again with tuberculosis and dies. Her death is the end of the movie.

Story and Movie Differences: In the book, Kyra kills one older man in a park in order to rob him. There are numerous witnesses and she's put on trial. Before being called to the witness stand, her hair changes color, under a hat she's wearing, and the case is dismissed because she is clearly a platinum blond with silver eyes, and the witnesses say a brunet with pale blue eyes.

Kyra's hair, skin, and eye color change with the time of day.

Kyra leaves the doctors to seek her fortune, and begins an affair with the Secretary of the Treasury. As time passes, she is mentioned in the press more and more often.

She returns for a two day visit with the doctors, and muses aloud how she might become empress (of the planet or the USA is not clear). The doctors decide to act before she leaves. They remove the pineal gland, which Dr. Boch has determined is the root of the problem. It was grown overlarge and it is influencing both Kyra's attitudes and adaptability. As Dr. Scott watches her return to her old self, he remarks upon her beauty (which Dr Boch determines only Scott can see) and the story ends. Kyra does not die in the story.