The Astounding She-Monster

"The Astounding She-Monster occupies a kind of nexus in the history of low-budget cinema. Made by editor-turned-director Ronnie Ashcroft on a budget of $18,000, with the guidance of Ashcroft's mentor, Poverty Row auteur Edward D. Wood Jr., the film was bought by American International Pictures honchos Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson for $60,000. That instantaneous 3-to-1 profit possessed the film's star, Robert Clarke (who had a percentage of the profits), to go into production himself with two features -- The Hideous Sun Demon, which he directed himself very nicely, and Beyond the Time Barrier, one of director Edgar G. Ulmer's more interesting late-career films. Needless to say, The Astounding She-Monster (which went out to theaters on the wrong end of a double bill with Roger Corman's Viking Women and the Sea Serpent) has a lot of history and personalities surrounding it. None of which makes it a very good movie, though there are far worse films, and one can easily visualize far less entertainment being delivered for $18,000. The story concerns a trio of gangsters holding a kidnap victim in the mountain cabin of a geologist (Robert Clarke), who cross paths with a tall, mute, voluptuous alien woman (Shirley Kilpatrick), whose body is radioactive and whose touch is deadly. Most of the movie is post-synched (the dialogue amateurishly looped), much of the exposition is carried by the narrator, and even if one overlooks the bizarre jumps in continuity and the repetitive score, the action has a very strange, other-worldly veneer -- the alien woman backs out of most of her scenes because her spandex costume had split up the back and couldn't be repaired. Coupled with her luminous appearance, she makes for a very eerie alien presence, especially when accompanied by Guenther Kauer's brass-happy score. In its defense, the movie does address the basics of the gangster movie and the hostage drama, and the dialogue at times also has the familiar loopy lunacy of an Ed Wood production, which is part of its charm. The presence of Wood alumnus Kenne Duncan, and Marilyn Harvey as an overage ""young socialite,"" also mark this as another typical Ed Wood-style production. The DVD release is transferred from a fairly clean source. There's damage on the left side of the frame in certain shots, and some interior close-ups are marred by wear on the frame. The audio is mastered at a very low level, requiring a boost in volume to about double normal listening range, although it is clear enough to give full play to Kauer's score which, 48 minutes into the movie, starts to sound a lot like a Benjamin Britten string quartet for no particular reason. And the night scenes, such as they are (they keep switching from day to night, and pitch-black to dusk), have decent contrast with a fair amount of detail in the images, enough to show the already shattered break-away window in the shot where the creature leaps through it into the cabin. They also reveal the alien being lit by searchlights rather than generating her own glow (special effects in this movie were on the level of lit matches representing flying saucers). The hour-long movie is broken down into a dozen chapters and includes a trailer that promises more than a movie of this sort could possibly deliver, including lots of chills and terrors from ""a woman whose warmth consumes."" The packaging includes an extended essay by Tom Weaver that offers a lot of familiar information and one choice new tidbit -- the rumor that Shirley Kilpatrick, the stripper who played the alien (doubled in the stunt scenes by Ashcroft's wife), later changed her name to Shirley Stoler and had a whole second career playing corpulent, malevolent females in movies like The Honeymoon Killers and Seven Beauties."