Good idea lost in the noise

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

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".

They created an inhuman being who destroyed everything she touched! The woman they could not kill! This film was written, produced and directed by Kurt Neumann, best known for "The Fly" (one of his next features). He was also allegedly considered for the director's chair on "The Bride of Frankenstein", though I must say I am glad James Whale got the job.Worth noting is that the source material came from Milwaukee native Stanley Grauman Weinbaum, who sadly died at age 33 and never saw his work brought to the screen. Weinbaum, though not well known today, was influential in the 1930s and H. P. Lovecraft praised his work.While all of the film is quite good, the best part is probably the awesome sequence of a car driving off a cliff... no dummies were killed in the making of the movie!

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.

FYI: I first saw this movie as a youngster and vividly remember it, even though I can't say it was one of my favorites. In late 2004, I watched episodes of Science-Fiction Theater, a TV series from the mid-1950's. An episode of the series titled "Beyond Return", aired in late 1955, presaged the movie with the same story and even specific points (the evolution of the meek terminally ill woman to a murderous villainess, the changing of the woman's hair color, etc.) by at least a year. The TV episode is credited to Doris Young but that may have been as screenwriter, not necessarily as the original author. I'm sure that both the TV program and "She Devil" are from the mind of Stanley Weinbaum's 1935 story titled "Adaptive Ultimate".