FANTASIA OBSCURA: Murder and Deceit In Pursuit of Eternal Youth
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, though, it’s so hard to find anyone to root for…
The Leech Woman (1960)
(Dist.: Universal International; Dir.: Edward Dein)
As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one…
There is none that doeth good, no, not one…
More often than not, most audiences want to empathize with characters in the films they’re watching. Having someone we can relate to on at least some level, no matter how messed up they might be, is expected and comforting, though there are many times when a character’s ambiguous actions or skewed moral code means we can’t be entirely on board with their choices.
When done with skill and care, this sort of ambiguity will produce a work like Hamlet or And Then There Were None, where horrible people taking it out on each other taps into something that speaks to us, despite the characters’ reprehensible behavior.
But if there’s no skill, nor care, you end up with this…
To say the film was a haphazard creation would be underplaying its origin. Universal International had wanted The Brides of Dracula to be part of a double feature when the film ran in theaters in the US, and they were willing to slap anything together for that to happen. And as it turned out, they did…
Director Dien, whose main body of work before and after this film was Westerns and crime capers, most likely got the job after having directed Curse of the Undead for Universal, a horror/Western hybrid that came about after he made a joke about a bad pitch that the studio actually liked, then went on to shoot that production in only 18 days.
Figuring that he could work fast and off the cuff, he was probably at the top of Universal’s list when it came time to look for something to pair with Peter Cushing dealing with Dracula’s legacy, which is how we got here.
We open the film with an argument between the Talbots, Paul (Philip Terry) and June (Colleen Gray). He’s an endocrinologist looking for a miracle rejuvenating treatment to reverse aging, and she’s an alcoholic who got bitter when she realized that Paul likes them younger.
We’re treated to an exchange between the two of them that comes off like a middle school adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which — had the film stayed with the two of them arguing in Paul’s office — might have been more interesting to sit through.
Instead, we get a visit from Malla (Estelle Helmsley), a woman who claims to be close to 150 years old, brought over to the US as a child by slavers. She shares some of her longevity secrets with Paul and is willing to provide further secrets in exchange for money to return to Africa. (Why she waited this long to return after getting treated like crap over here through the Civil War and the Jim Crow years, we never find out, and maybe the filmmakers just didn’t care.)
What Paul sees is enough to convince him to make up with June after their fight — interrupting her as she’s drafting divorce papers with her lawyer Neil (Grant Williams) — to ask her to come with him to Africa to follow Malla.
After surviving a trek through tons and tons of stock footage deepest darkest Africa, the Talbots and their guide Bertram (John Van Dreelen) find Malla’s people. By now, Paul has confessed that he made up with June because he needed a guinea pig to test the full treatment, and maybe get his wife back — which goes over with June about as well as you can expect.
He still holds out hope for the test, even though he gets a demonstration as to how it works when Malla, at the end of the process, is now played by Kim Hamilton, but gets disappointed when the rejuvenated Malla tells her visitors that they’ll die in the morning for trespassing.
After a process that involves mixing nipe powder with pineal hormone taken from the base of a man’s brain, June gets a chance to become young again, while serving Paul good for all the crap he gave her for years. June and Bertram soon escape from Malla’s tribe, but during the flight June needs a recharge and offs Bertram as well to keep her looks before she shows up back home posing as her own niece. She starts making moves on her lawyer, Neil, who responds to her messy attempts despite being engaged — and seems willing to bend, if not break, a few ethical standards regarding attorney-client relations.
There are just too many people behaving badly on screen, and there’s not a single non-scumbag to root for among them. About the only “good” people are the police who show up in the last five minutes, and the reason they’re not on the take or behaving like the LAPD of LA Confidential is that Universal-International was following some form of the “Hays Code;” given the chance, they would have gone all in.
But with everyone trying to or having succeeded in screwing over everyone else by the finale, going that route would have turned this horror film into an absolute horror to sit through, as opposed to simply disconcerting for all the wrong reasons.
The sad thing here is we really do get issues worth examining blurred by bad choices that keep us from being engaged. The whole question of feminine aging and how women are judged by their beauty is an important subject, one that deserved better handling than this. (In fact, this subject did get a much more deserving treatment the year before, which we’ll look at later.)
The fact that we got horrible, unlikable people without any redeeming qualities to tell this tale, tied to a ham-handed use of the “Darkest Africa” trope, keeps this film form achieving anything other than disgusting the audience.
Not a single good doneth; no, not a one…
NEXT TIME: As they used to say, “That would be telling…” But we promise, we will give the answers to our first-ever contest, and explain the link of these films with our three clues we offered online:
- High School Confidential
- Sherlock Holmes
- Vanera 1
Trust us, this is one three-for that’s going to be a wild read…
