Classic horror fans are forever grateful to the 1950s, a decade that birthed one of the greatest of all film genres: the big-bug movie.
Multitudes of giant ants, spiders, grasshoppers, shrews and scorpions all treated moviegoers to oversized terrors. Toward the end of the decade, there was a tweak to this formula when the big bug came in the body of a man/bug in the great 1958 film The Fly.
While The Fly deservedly remains in high regard today, there were other films that explored the idea of a human turned killer bug that aren’t as well remembered. These were true B-movies with very low budgets, very fast production schedules and a feminine touch.
In Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman (1959), a businesswoman goes to extremes to save her beauty empire. In Universal’s The Leech Woman (1960), a depressed wife yearns for her youth to win back her cruel husband’s love. The Snake Woman (1961) was born because snake venom was injected into her pregnant mother. The poor lass who became The Reptile (1966) was the product of a curse, courtesy of Hammer films.
While the age-old search for the fountain of youth is a theme in two of these films, it’s not the driving force in all four. It is, however, the unmistakable theme of The Leech Woman, and it is somberly put into words for viewers in a soliloquy spoken by a 152-year-old character during a secret tribal ceremony:
“For a man, old age has rewards. If he is wise his gray hairs bring dignity and he’s treated with honor and respect. But for the aged woman, there is nothing. At best, she’s pitied. More often her lot is of contempt and neglect. What woman lives who is past the prime of life that would not give her remaining years to reclaim even a few moments of joy and happiness and know the worship of men.”
That’s heavy for viewers who sat down to watch a monster movie and there are a few other moments of unexpected depth in the script by David Duncan, who had a nice run writing the screenplays for such genre films as The Black Scorpion, Monster on the Campus, The Time Machine and Fantastic Voyage. I went into The Leech Woman expecting schlock – which I got – but I also left thinking about how society continues to put an unfair emphasis on youth and beauty even today.
Middle-aged June Talbot (played by Coleen Gray) is in a loveless marriage to her cruel husband Dr. Paul Talbot (Phillip Terry). He’s 10 years younger and takes delight in ripping her apart. The more he does, the more she drinks and falls into depression.
While he’s disgusted by his wife (he’s a super mean guy), he’s also researching ways to stop the aging process for his own fame and fortune. He seeks old women for his experiments and finds the perfect one in Malla (played by Estelle Helmsley) who arrives looking like a “mummy” and tells fantastic stories of a potion and secret ceremony that can slow death and – with ingredients found only in her homeland – reverse aging.
She convinces Dr. Talbot to fund her trip to her Nando tribe in Africa where she’ll share the potion that can return her youth for one night before she dies. The doctor sees dollar signs and convinces his wife that he suddenly loves her again. Poor June is overjoyed, but her lying husband only wants to experiment on her. Joining them in Africa is a handsome jungle guide who comes in handy later.
Now we know what happens to outsiders who watch a secret ceremony – they will be killed to preserve the secret. But Malla isn’t heartless as you can tell by that poignant speech she delivers and she offers June the chance to undergo the same process and experience her youthful beauty one more time.
In a wonderful twist, the magic elixir needs a man to be sacrificed and Malla tells June to pick one guy – any guy. Yes, we’re all thinking of the same guy to be sacrificed, aren’t we?
The transformations for Malla and June are breathtaking. It’s joyful watching them as they see their younger faces in a mirror. Sadly, the effect is only temporary and while Malla is at peace with that, June wants more time.
That feeling grows after she spends a few romantic hours with the handsome jungle guide – enough time for the potion to wear off. The enticing lure of youth turns beautiful June into a murderous beast. Au revoir handsome jungle guide.
June returns to the states posing as her beautiful young niece, leaving a trail of dead men along the way. When she falls for the handsome fiancé (Grant Williams, The Incredible Shrinking Man) of her husband’s nurse (Gloria Talbott, I Married A Monster From Outer Space), she has difficulty fending off her killer urges.
Because so much of the film built up to getting to Africa and back, the end comes much too fast and we don’t get enough of the monster (something these four films have in common). But there’s plenty of scary stuff in Africa, including some of my strange phobias like man-eating lions, killer crocodiles, suffocating quicksand and other gruesome ways to die.
In 1995, Corman would produce a very different – and much sexier – remake of The Leech Woman for his Roger Corman Presents TV series.
Let’s look at the other three films.
The Wasp Woman
Janice Starlin (played by Susan Cabot) is a successful businesswoman whose company bears her name and likeness. For 16 years, her face has been the sole image of her beauty empire, Janice Starlin Enterprises, propelling it into a multimillion-dollar corporation.
She is smart, savvy and attractive. She’s also soft-spoken yet firm when it comes to her company as we see in a board meeting called to learn why her namesake business has lost 14 ½ percent in the last quarter. Only one will tell her truth: profits have plummeted since she retreated into the background, switching to an unfamiliar model in the company’s advertisements. Loyal customers don’t know or trust this new, younger person.
Why did the formerly confident Starlin back away from the public? “Not even Janice Starlin can remain a glamour girl forever,” she says.
But she still needs to save her company and will do so at any cost, even if it means becoming the title monster in Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman.
With impeccable timing, Dr. Eric Zinthrop (Michael Mark), a chemist fired from a bee farm for experimenting on wasps, is waiting in the reception room.
“I don’t have much time,” she tells him.
“It is I who give you the time … 10, maybe 15 years I give you,” he tells her in a halting accent.
His anti-aging experiments have had limited success with enzymes from the royal jelly of a queen wasp. When he injects two rabbits who turn into babies, Janice practically yells “Sold!”
The doctor’s proposal: Help him complete his research and the component can be added to Janice Starlin cosmetics if he gets full credit.
Her demand: She will be the guinea pig for the human trials so she can save her company – and herself.
There will be secrecy over what he’s doing, her employees will start skulking about for answers and Janice will be so impatient that she injects herself without the doctor’s knowledge. She’ll get great results – her secretary tells her she looks 22 – but the side effects are disastrous, even tragic. As they get worse, the doctor can’t help because he’s conveniently been hit by a car and has lost his memory.
From there, we remember the words from earlier in the film when the company chemist tells Janice not to mess around with the dangerous queen wasp, a lethal and carnivorous insect that stings, paralyzes and slowly devours its victims. Janice does the typical queen wasp one better: She may have the oversized head and furry claws of an insect, but otherwise sports a killer fashion vibe with her high heels and stylish outfit.
The Snake Woman
This film suffers the most from a low budget. At times, it does pull you in with talk of a curse, terrified villagers, mysterious deaths and a voodoo doll but it’s too dark to see much. (This is an early film from Sidney J. Furie who directed a varied slate of films including The Ipcress File, The Entity, The Boys in Company C.)
It’s 1890 Northumberland and a doctor has been injecting his wife for years with snake venom to cure her insanity. About to give birth, she’s screaming for him to stop the injections, but he won’t listen. (Another doctor with delusions of grandeur.)
The wife dies after the baby is born ice cold and without eyelids – just like a reptile. The midwife/local witch is shouting about the “devil’s offspring” and rallies a torch-wielding mob to kill the baby. The little one is temporarily hidden, but the mob kills dad and the child disappears. Fast forward 20 years when the village is terrorized by deadly snake attacks blamed on the curse of the serpent child.
A respected villager contacts his friend at Scotland Yard who sends a smug young investigator (John McCarthy) to find a scientific reason for the attacks. On the moors while playing a snake charmer’s flute, he meets a lovely young lady (Susan Travers) in a tattered dress named Atheris (the name for bush vipers). He’s smitten, she’s oddly protective of lethal snakes. This relationship clearly has no future.
Unlike the other films here, we are never treated to the image of a “snake woman.” There are snakes, there is a woman but there isn’t the snake woman of the title. However, there is a moment where we see that a “snake” has shed its skin – what it leaves behind doesn’t look like any snake we’ve ever seen. That image alone is worth watching this brief 68-minute film.
The Reptile
It’s a curse, not vanity, that turns a pretty young woman into the killer title character of Hammer’s The Reptile.
Hammer fans will relax into the studio’s familiar washed-out color, gloomy 19th century setting and a small town in the British countryside with mysterious deaths. The “Black Death” has come to Cornwall where bodies are found with black faces and white lips. It’s so commonplace that at a burial, someone asks, “Who is it this time?”
Harry Spalding (played by Ray Barrett) and his wife, Valerie (Jennifer Daniel), arrive after the unexplained death of his otherwise healthy brother. Townsfolk aren’t happy and even the friendly barkeep Tom (Michael Rippers) warns them off about moving into a quaint cottage owned by Charles. (“He died there,” the barkeep says.)
The cottage is across the moors from a large estate owned by Dr. Franklyn (Noel Willman) where strange happenings are occurring.
The Reptile moves at a leisurely pace, stringing us along with mysterious characters and lurking figures. (Love the atmospheric shots of a servant who is shown in shadow except for a light around his eyes!). It will be a while before we meet the stern doctor’s sad daughter, Anna (Jacqueline Pierce), and even longer before we see the title creature for far too little time. There is an underground cavern with bubbling sulfur springs, but even that is too little, too late.
One lesson I learned from watching these four films is that if you make a movie about women who become killer bugs, go for it. Make them strong and powerful and give us more – even if the she-bug is in high heels and jewelry.
If you want to learn more about big-bug movies of the 1950s, read my previous column for Classic Movie Hub and Monsters & Matinees, “All Bug-Eyed Over Big-Bug Movies.
– Toni Ruberto for Classic Movie Hub
You can read all of Toni’s Monsters and Matinees articles here.
Toni Ruberto, born and raised in Buffalo, N.Y., is an editor and writer at The Buffalo News. She shares her love for classic movies in her blog, Watching Forever and is a member of the Classic Movie Blog Association. Toni was the president of the former Buffalo chapter of TCM Backlot and now leads the offshoot group, Buffalo Classic Movie Buffs. She is proud to have put Buffalo and its glorious old movie palaces in the spotlight as the inaugural winner of the TCM in Your Hometown contest. You can find Toni on Twitter at @toniruberto.
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