Truly Dreadful Film

Better Late Then Never

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

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.

THE ASTOUNDING SHE-MONSTER is an amusingly bad B-movie of the 1950s, set in a cabin in a remote rural landscape where a bunch of kidnappers are holding on to a heiress and hoping to make themselves rich. Unfortunately for them, their plans are thwarted by the intervention of a female alien who arrives and proceeds to wreak havoc by bumping off the assembled one at a time. This is short and simple stuff, with some amusing 'fuzzy vision' effects used to depict the female alien who is dressed in the usual skin-tight costume. Hardly a great film, but B-movie fans will enjoy it anyway.

WARNING: "The Astounding She-Monster" is a movie for people with highly specialized tastes. It tells the story of a trio of kidnappers, their socialite victim, the geologist whose house they invade, AND a blond, radium-emitting alien in tight spandex who crash-lands her spacecraft near that same house. Potential viewers of this film must possess the following traits: They must love movies that are made on the supercheap, and that contain no outdoor synch dialogue; movies in which egregious day-for-night photography is used, worse than anything in "Plan 9," and in which non sequitur music that bears little relation to the story is standard. These viewers should also be OK with inept direction; the insertion of long, meaningless shots; offscreen narration that sounds as if it's being read by a hypnotized dodo; Grade Z acting by a six-person cast (well, maybe Robert Clarke gives a Grade D performance); and "special" effects that look as though they were filmed through a Vaseline-smeared camera lens. It also wouldn't hurt if potential viewers didn't mind scratchy-looking prints on their DVD, with abysmal sound that keeps dropping out, and with hardly an "extra" to be found. If the above seems to match your highly specialized tastes, then "The Astounding She-Monster" might be just the flick for you. Only don't say I didn't warn you!

Gangster: "Shut up, you lousy drunk!" Floozy: "I prefer to be referred to as an alcoholic!" If you view this as a sci-fi movie, it doesn't rate. As existentialist film noir, it's off the scale. Two aging gangsters and their gin-soaked moll kidnap a Beverly Hills socialite who looks like the cadaverous victim of a 1930's vampire movie. Through a series of misadventures, they end up in a remote geologist's cabin being stalked by an iridescent stripper from outer space. Every time the alien enters the cabin, they run outside and get in the jeep. Then she corners them on the road and they run into the woods. Then she finds them in the woods and they go back into the cabin. This sequence is repeated three or four times as characters are killed one by one. Imagine "Ten Little Indians" if it had been written by Sartre instead of Agatha Christie. The socialite gets lines like, "But, Dick, isn't radium in solid form a metal?" and my favorite, "I had no idea that a geologist used so many acids in his work." The hyper dramatic voice-over for several long sequences reinforces the idea that the plot for the film was actually developed in post-production. But then, existentialist film noir should be improv, shouldn't it?

Only an hour long with a paper-thin plot, this piece of 50s sci-fi cheese is the kind of inept classic that Ed Wood has become famous for. Lots of time is taken up with random footage of the She-Monster (Shirley Kilpatrick in a skintight glitter suit) wandering around in the woods. Four people in a cabin fight and get killed off by the lethal touch of this alien gal. Given that she doesn't say a thing, Kilpatrick really does carry this amateurish film with her menacing look and sexy outfit with a camera blur added to make her look out of this world. Lead actor Robert Clarke was so impressed with the money this film made that he went out and made his own monster movie, THE HIDEOUS SUN DEMON. Rumor has it that Shirley Kilpatrick gained a lot of weight in later years and became character actress Shirley Stoler of THE HONEYMOON KILLERS and PEE WEE'S PLAYHOUSE.