So I thought I’d mix up Monster of the Day a bit. Rather than just post a picture on Mondays, assuming I can rouse the energy, I’ll examine a monster in text.
I picked the She-Creature to kick things off because the movie is available on Amazon Prime (for the moment), and because it offers a lot to talk about.
On to our Monster of the Day. Most obviously, the Monster is a typically wonderful creation of goofy monster maker par excellence Paul Blaisdell. If you wanted an incredibly memorable monster suit and/or prop made on the (very) cheap, Blaisdell was your man. Hell, he even wore all his suites in the films so you he would save you even more money. You can see why he was the go-to guy for folks like Roger Corman.
Given that the She-Creature was a sea monster (more on that in a bit), Blaisdell gave the monster lots of fins and claws and, because of the ‘She’ part, Dolly Parton-sized monster boobs. These were detachable, allowing for the suit to be reused as a male, er, ghost in the extremely fun The Ghost of Drag Hallow.
Other details make less sense but remain memorable, including hook hands/claws, antenna, a ridge of fins that protrude Godzilla-like from her spine, large horns projecting from the knees and a enormously fanged mouth in her torso. The beastie has seaweed-like hair and, in probably the one real misstep in an extremely busy design, a thick tail that hangs lifelessly and makes the suit look like a costume. Overall, it makes no damn sense at all but man, it’s iconic.
The film’s plot relies on one of AIP’s favorite tropes, and authority figure (in this case an older male played by Chester “Boston Blackie” Morris) who uses hypnotism to turn an innocent in their thrall into a monster. The only variation on the theme here is that 95% of the time the victim was a teenager, thus appealing to AIP’s core audience.
It remained a pretty standard trope for the studio, and especially for writer/producer Herman Cohen. Possibly having filched it from this very picture, Cohen made five films in a row (!) that used the conceit. This was over a span of only three years. A few years after that he trotted it out once again for Konga, with the ‘teen’ in this case an innocent chimp also embiggened (somehow) into a gorilla. In case you’re thinking, “Wait, that’s not the same thing at all,” all I can say is that an actual alternate title for the film was I Was a Teenage Gorilla.
The She-Creature’s plot—which was lifted basically whole cloth for Cohen’s I Was a Teenage Wereworf—melded this idea with the hypnotic regression trope inspired by the then real life story of Bridey Murphy, which was a media sensation at that time. Bridey Murphy was purportedly a ‘past life’ remembered under hypnosis by an American housewife. This idea was also borrowed to fuel the plot of Roger Corman’s darkly humorously The Undead. This remains remembered mostly for the fact that all the dialogue in the Olde Timey scenes was in iambic pentameter, as well as for its atypically gruesome stinger ending.
Andrea’s regressed form, as noted, is a sea monster (because life, you know, came from the sea) as opposed to your standard ape-man missing link. I’m not sure why. However, it certainly allowed for a crazier monster suit than a Monster on the Campus/Neanderthal Man-esque beastie.
Finally, the film was one of the cluster of AIP pictures infamously remade by Larry Buchanan for ABC television. Creature of Destruction is typically awful, featuring the first use of the scuba suit with rubber scales and ping-pong ball eyes that would reappear in It’s Alive as a dinosaur (!), and then be modified for use in Curse of the Swamp Creature.
