On April 23, 1994, She, Creatures the World Forgot, Dinosaurus!, The Lost Continent, and Atlantis The Lost Continent were screened for TNT's MonsterVision's Back to B.C. marathon.
Follow for more cult, horror and genre movie reviews from AnotherBadMovie
I’ve had this DVD for donkey’s years and had all but forgotten about it untilI I saw Ursula Andress, in the twilight of her career, wearing a a headdress in The Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978) and my memory of the DVD sleeve was jogged. I didn’t know much about it other than it was a Hammer film that I later found out was not horror and as such it got swiftly put to the back of the queue.
I ended up putting this on for a change of pace, to cleanse the pallet after my cannibal double-bill. Firstly, having watched her so recently in that awful movie I was shocked when reminded just how stunning miss Andress was in her prime and here putting in a far superior performance, to boot. Fortunately for me, She had several other surprises in store.
The film opened and pretty soon there was the dreaded cliche 1960s tribal music/dance scenes and I thought oh dear it’s one of those movies but as the intro started to alternate between those sequences and the slow, scenic tracking shots with serene music I started to appreciate the neatly crafted tone and artistic flair of this movie that is what, to my mind, really sets it apart from other 60s adventure flicks.
She is a fairly simple story centring around three men in Palestine after WWI, the learned Holly (Peter Cushing), his sarcastic manservant Job (Bernard Cribbins) and the young and handsome Leo (John Richardson, who genre fans might recognise from Bava’s Black Sunday) who gets embroiled in a plot to find the reincarnation of an ancient high priest to reunite with an immortal queen, the titular She Who Must Be Obeyed, also known as Ayesha.
I’m not familiar with the source material, being based on the novel by H. Rider Haggard (author of King Soloman’s Mines) but to the film’s credit I’m tempted to check it out now as the film presents it as a rich text, well explored in a neatly adapted feature length run time. It’s a cool, if old fashioned and still fairly pulpy story, and I have to say I loved how the script bounced a long, aided by splashes of humour, fun adventure fantasy motifs and a very well balanced set of great characters (Christopher Lee turns up here too) who drive the narrative. I was also chuffed that a film from the 1960s called She, about a mystical matriarch didn’t abound with outdated attitudes towards women. It hardly passes the Bechdel test, but it was inoffensive. Don’t expect She to be your feminist icon, though.
Elements of the story might seem a bit daft by today’s standards and in this day and age I appreciate a lot of people just won’t get the appeal of the old big fake set kind of movie but watching this, matinee style, on a Sunday afternoon I have to say it hit the spot for me and I think a lot of it holds up impressively. I have the sequel knocking about somewhere too so expect a review of that shortly.
