Wow! Such a good movie.

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

A different way of telling a story

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Maybe I watched a different movie than others but I liked this one quite a bit! Certainly next to Cahn's other film with Marla English, Voodoo Woman, this is a masterpiece. A good cast and atmospheric direction (setting a coastal location, mostly revolved around Tom Conway's beach house) help a great deal. The plot is a bit odd, though: hypnotist Chester Morris is obsessed with his assistant, Marla, putting her under deep so he can summon folks from the past including a lady from the 1600s and a sea creature that appears at first in a cloud before manifesting into a scaly monster that kills at his command. Morris seems to will the monster to kill either because he's an evil bastard, wants to prove himself, or a bit of both. Skeptical doctor, Lance Fuller, rivals Chester for Marla. Conway of the Val Lewton productions is an agent who sees dollar signs and sets Chester up as a star hypnotist not realizing of the danger to himself and others who live in and around his coastal community. Blaisdel's monster, rubber-suited with a lot of detail to make it aquatic and distinctive, is probably his masterwork. Cathy Downs is the elegant blond daughter of Conway hot for Fuller, while Fuller resists life amongst the aristocratic jet set. Ron Randell is the detective out to stop Chester. Marla is a stunner, much easier to take than as the wretched gold seeker in Voodoo Woman. Sexy and vulnerable, Marla offers a victim needing release from the hypnotic stranglehold of Chester. Some decent dialogue (especially from Fuller regarding the affluent folk wanting him to commiserate with them regularly and the startling ability of Chester for which his science has a hard time explaining), delightful cold-blooded and stern-faced Chester in all his villainy, and the spiritual mist that emerges from Marla which is a rather effectively done special effect to prove the hypnosis used on her are reason enough to thwart the rather negative reputation this little B-movie has against it.

As awful as The She-Creature is, it may hold some interest for the following types: Those wondering what Chester Morris would look like with black shoe polish on his hair...People who don't believe whiskey can make a 52-year old man look as if he is eighty-two -- here's what's left of Tom Conway...Serious perverts who may become excited by the sight of a female Creature from the Black Lagoon -- wow! dig those scaly 38-double-D's...Old School Catholics who need to suffer for penance during Lent. Watching this stinker is such torment, you can skip the Hail Mary's for a whole week...The usual desperate insomniacs.Others should avoid The She-Creature as if it were a two-foot tall fire ant mound.

One from "The Arkoff Library" released as R2 DVD exclusives and a film I was intrigued by after viewing its trailer in view of the theme (reincarnation-by-hypnosis inspired, as was Roger Corman's similarly fanciful THE UNDEAD [1957], by THE SEARCH FOR BRIDEY MURPHY [1956]) and the cast (led by old hands Chester Morris and Tom Conway). The former as the villainous hypnotist gets a chance to ham it up, but the latter is rather wasted as Morris' host and subsequently business manager (incidentally, their roles were originally to have been played by Edward Arnold and Peter Lorre respectively!); also involved are Ron Randell as a dour Police Lieutenant and Hollywood's idea of a comic-relief Swede, El Brendel (another relic of a by-gone era), as Conway's manservant. Apparently, Morris is able to take his subject as far back to the beginning of time where the titular creature emerged from the sea to kill(?!); of course, he cannot resist bringing it back again to do his evil bidding…that is, until the girl concerned falls for (and learns to resist his will thanks to) a rival yet much younger 'practitioner'. Actually, the design of the monster (looking a bit like the gill-man from Universal's "Creature From The Black Lagoon" series) is quite effective and the film as a whole (anticipating in its carnival/watery setting Curtis Harrington's decidedly more poetic debut feature NIGHT TIDE [1961]), though hardly essential genre fare, is somewhat more tolerable than I was expecting it to be – given a less-than-stellar reputation. Still, the constant hypnosis sessions for the benefit of Conway's would-be jaded guests do become repetitive after a while...

And now for something completely different: a woman is hypnotically regressed to reveal a former life as a seventeenth-century lass and one of the primeval sea creatures from which--didn't ya know--humanity evolved. The beast looks like a cross between Gillman and a gargoyle, but the really odd thing about it is that it emerges from the ocean as a ghostly figure and quickly materializes into a solid man-size monster that dispatches victims with a karate chop to the shoulder with a crab-like, but apparently non-prehensile, fin/claw. This female of the species goes on rampages as rapacious as any male and only once demonstrates any discrimination in the attack. It's difficult to tell what, if anything, might kill or even repel her, since the cheap sets call for such tight shots that she's on top of her prey before they scarcely begin to fight. And when the sieve of a script does try to explain anything--let alone the monster--it just causes more confusion. The slimy hypnotist who controls the latest carnation/evolution of the creature somehow does so despite her profound hatred for him and desperate resistance to trance. He's seen leaving an apparent murder scene, yet these pre-Miranda-era cops fear lack of evidence and a suit for false arrest--which of course means charging someone for something that's not a crime. As anyone knows, murder IS a crime, and the police think the large, reptilian tracks left at the death site were faked by a human being. Of course, the cops in this film also finger half the items in sight and phone the lab boys only after throwing flour all over the floor to check the footprints. Much of the plot and dialogue are just as dopey, so it can be fun to anticipate the next oddball occurrence. The acting is adequate, though Tom Conway appears to sometimes stare too obviously at cue cards. Even the (unneccessary) comic relief is rather weird. It's a loquacious Scandinavian butler who keeps losing his bow-tie.