User Reviews

In John Gilling's 1966 film "The Reptile," produced by Hammer Studios, the audience was presented with the spectacle of a young woman (the great Jacqueline Pearce) who, thanks to the ministrations of a Malaysian snake cult, could turn into a serpent at will. The film was set in the Cornwall area in the early 20th century and had been brought in at a budget of over 100,000 pounds ... and with terrific and scarifying results. But, as it turns out, this was not the first time that the Brits had given us a story about a young woman who could turn herself into a snake, and who terrorized her vicinity in the early 1900s. Five years earlier, an infinitely smaller and lesser film, nearly forgotten today, had appeared, by name of "The Snake Woman," and a recent watch has only served to impress upon this viewer what an inferior product it is, in comparison. Whereas "The Reptile" had featured sumptuous color and sets, as well as a very memorable and hideous-looking monster, "The Snake Woman," which was filmed in just six days at a cost of some 17,000 pounds, and in B&W, features none of those attributes. Still, it is a film worth seeing, if one only lowers his or her expectations going in.



"The Snake Woman" debuted in April '61 in the U.S. as part of a double feature, the other film on the menu being the superior picture "Doctor Blood's Coffin"; both films shared the same director, Sidney J. Furie. Strangely enough, "The Snake Woman" would have its premiere in the U.K. after it first appeared in the U.S., playing variously as the co-feature with such films as (the baby-boomer favorite) "The Manster" ('59) and "The Vikings" ('58). Running just 68 minutes in length, the film at least has the virtue of being a streamlined affair, wasting little time in telling its story. In it, the viewer is introduced to a herpetologist - an expert in reptiles and amphibians - named Dr. Horace Adderson (English actor John Cazabon, whose filmography extends mainly to TV work) ... and I suppose with a name like "Adderson," it was inevitable that this scientist would specialize in the study of snakes! Adderson lives in the small Northumberland village of Bellingham in the year 1890, and keeps busy by devising serums made of various snake venoms to administer to his wife Martha (Dorothy Frere, who would go on to appear in the fun horror film "It!" in '67), as a means of curing her mental illness. But the pregnant Martha turns out to be wiser than her husband, when she declares "Life is such a miraculous, delicate thing. What if this poison were to upset the balance, and instead of a normal, healthy child, ours were to be born..." Her sentence is left unfinished, but soon after, that child, a daughter, is born, and she turns out to be a strange one indeed, with no lids over her eyes and with cold blood in her veins. The midwife on the case, Aggie Harker (Elsie Wagstaff, whose filmography dates all the way back to 1937), who is deemed something of a witch, wants to kill the child out of hand, but the presiding physician, Dr. Murton (German actor Arnold Marle, whose filmography goes back to 1919!), declares that she must be kept alive for study. Problems arise, however, when Aggie runs to the local tavern to warn the populace of the evil that has descended upon them, and when the torch-bearing townsmen break into Adderson's lab to destroy it and kill the baby. Adderson is bitten by a snake and dies in the resulting conflagration, while Martha had already expired soon after childbirth. Thus, the baby is brought by Murton to the hut of a local shepherd for safekeeping, after which Murton himself departs for a trip to Africa.



After this intriguing setup, the film - with no sense of time transition whatsoever, not even an intertitle reading "Nineteen Years Later" - flashes forward 19 years. Murton, returning from his studies in Africa, learns that the child, now a grown woman, has disappeared. He also hears of the killings that have been plaguing Bellingham; of the villagers who have been slain with the bite of a king cobra on them, in an area of the world where no such creature should exist. And in the film's second half, retired Army colonel Clyde Wynborn (Geoffrey Denton, who would go on to appear mainly in TV), a resident in the area, writes to a friend in Scotland Yard with a request for help. Thus, handsome Charles Prentice (John McCarthy, who would go on to appear in small roles in two of the great films of 1964, "Goldfinger" and "Dr. Strangelove") is sent to the village, with orders to find out what is going on. Wynborn gives him a snake charmer's flute, and while tootling it on the moors one day, Prentice runs into the Adderson girl herself, whom the shepherd had named Atheris, a name he'd found in one of Adderson's books. ("Atheris," by the way, is the name of a genus of pit viper.) The young woman is indeed 19 now, and, as played by British actress Susan Travers (whose other "psychotronic films" include 1960's "Peeping Tom" and 1971's "The Abominable Dr. Phibes"), is quite the looker indeed. Atheris is strangely drawn by the sound of the flute, and when Prentice puts his arm around her, is found to be ice cold to the touch. Hmm, what's a bright young investigator from Scotland Yard to think?



The promotional poster for "The Snake Woman" declared the film to be "Weird! Supernatural! Horrifying!," but of that list, only the first word turns out to be true. The film surely is weird, in the best sense, but it is hardly a supernatural affair (Atheris' ability to change into a serpent and back to human form at will is the result of hard science, after all), and it is hardly ever horrifying. Indeed, in a film that purports to be a horror movie, there are only two scenes that might engender a chill in anyone who is not a hard-core sufferer of ophidiophobia. The first of those scenes involves Adderson forcing the venom out of the fangs of a king cobra, and it is a nerve-racking sight to behold indeed, an actual snake being used for the purpose. And in the second, we see a serpent of some kind crawling through the mouth of a human skull in Adderson's burning lab. That's it for the scares in the film. As for the rest of it, there is not a shudder to be had. The film never shows us one transformation scene, in which Atheris turns into her serpent form. We merely see the girl, then her potential victim, and then a snake crawling on the ground. Hey, I DID say the film was brought in for under 17,000 pounds, right? The victims of the Snake Woman never scream, or evince any high degree of fright either, so how can we viewers be expected to have much in the way of scares ourselves? So yes, this is a horror film with virtually no horrors to be had or seen ... unless, of course, the sight of a snake is a scarifying matter for you.



Still, there are some pleasures to be had here. "The Snake Woman" does feature some eerie atmosphere at times, especially during its dreamlike nighttime scenes on the moors, and the film's musical background, consisting mainly of that darn flute, by Buxton Orr (who had previously worked on '58's "The Haunted Strangler" and "Fiend Without a Face" and '59's "First Man Into Space" and "Suddenly, Last Summer"), goes far in creating a mood. The film's script, by Orville H. Hampton (who'd given us '59's "The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake" and "The Atomic Submarine"), is a no-nonsense and intelligent one, as far as it goes, while the cinematography by Stephen Dade (who had also worked on "Doctor Blood's Coffin," and would go on to work on the great '64 film "Zulu") is effective in creating a nice period atmosphere. As for Furie, he brings his film home as well as he might have, I suppose, being hamstrung by a small budget and his lack of an effective central monster. Furie would go on to helm such marvelous films as '65's "The Ipcress File," '72's "Lady Sings the Blues" and the truly horrifying horror film "The Entity" ('82), and thus it is somewhat difficult to realize that he had also been responsible for this much smaller and infinitely lesser picture. "The Snake Woman" is a likeable film, with its heart in the right place, but its main problem is that it just isn't scary, or suspenseful, or even all that memorable. Travers is never given anything much to do, other than stare hard into the distance and utter a few lines in monotone; for a woman with cold blood, she fails to elicit the slightest corresponding chill in the viewer. Perhaps if theatergoers had been given ONE transformation scene, or if Atheris' victims could have let loose with some bloodcurdling screams as they met their demise, things might have been different. But no. Compared to the Reptile creature that Jacqueline Pearce would become five years later, Atheris is very weak tea, indeed. At the tail end of "The Snake Woman," the Inspector at Scotland Yard, after reading Prentice's report, declares the affair to be "Amazing ... absolutely, utterly incredible." And indeed, such had indeed been the case. It's just a shame that "amazing" and "incredible" don't necessarily translate into a scary time at the movies....

1890. A doctor tries to cure his crazy wife by injecting her with snake venom. However, the wife gives birth to a freakish daughter who twenty years later grows up to become a lovely, yet lethal young woman who embarks on a killing spree in a small Northern England hamlet. Although this film suffers from sluggish pacing and an overly talky script, director Sidney J. Furie nonetheless manages to present a neat portrait of the remote village and its superstitious inhabitants, makes nice use of the bleak English moors setting, and does a sound job of crafting a spooky dark fairy tale-like atmosphere. Moreover, the alluring Susan Travers radiates a strong sense of ethereal menace as sexy serpentine siren Atheris. The capable acting by the sturdy cast holds this movie together: John McCarthy makes for a likable hero as the dashing Charles Prentice, Geoffrey Denton lends solid support as a pragmatic retired colonel, and Elsie Wagstaff has a ball with her juicy role as sinister old crone witch Aggie Harker. The interesting science versus superstition subtext gives this picture some additional depth and resonance. Stephen Dade's sharp black and white cinematography and Buxton Orr's robust score are both up to par. A rather flawed, but still enjoyable enough shocker.

In a remote English township a scientist is treating his wife's dementia with snake serum. The woman dies immediately after childbirth; it is easy to note that the baby girl is a "little different". A housekeeper, believing in witchcraft, alarms the townsfolk that the child will mature with snake-like tendencies. For the next twenty years, area citizens are dying with two puncture wounds. Suspected is a pretty teen that lives in a field full of snakes. Scotland Yard sends an inspector to investigate the mysterious deaths. A chance middle of the night meeting of the inspector and the young girl brings suspicion as deaths and suspense continues.

Starring are Susan Travers, John McCarthy, Geoffrey Denton, John Cazabon, Frances Bennett and Arnold Marle.

While this has the right look for a Gothic horror film, it really lays as flat as a snake's belly on hot cement as it tries to unleash its ridiculous plot. First of all, we are supposed to believe that a woman on her deathbed who looks like Marjorie Main is about to deliver a baby even though her equally ancient-looking husband is inserting her with snake venom to allegedly cure her of insanity. Within hours of the baby being born, the parents are both deceased and somehow, the child grows up to be a beautiful woman who somehow has the ability to kill through the kiss that dispenses snake venom. Then, there's a witch who apparently raised the child who knows how to dispense of her, and it appears that the man destined to take on that job has fallen in love with her.

While this starts in the past of where the majority of the film is set, it is still a period piece which is a good idea to keep the gothic theme going. Unfortunately, the script is slow-moving with little action other than shots of a gorgeous slithering snake (assumed to be the woman in snake form), and there isn't even an attempt at bad special effects to show the transition.

The acting is either ridiculously dull (John McCarthy and Susan Travers in the underwritten leads) or completely over the top. Elsie Wagstaff as the witch plays the role as if she has just escaped from a production of "MacBeth" and knocked off her two sisters along the way. It's unfortunate that what really could have been an enjoyable little spooky horror film ends up being like shedded reptile skin, a fascinating find at first but ultimately something that nothing can be done with.

An old-fashioned English horror/mystery. Great atmosphere, fairly good performances all around, and an interesting premise. The Snake Woman was somewhat disappointing though; it's too talky, slow-paced, and has lapses in logic.

Elsie Wagstaff's witchy character Aggie really steals the show. She's sort of a collective expression of the villager's fears. It was smart to set the film in the late Victorian/Edwardian eras, as our suspension of disbelief works better in an age when science was still regarded as a sort of modern magic.

Most of the characters are interestingly flawed. Susan Travers, as the Snake Woman Atheris, is an innocent albeit evil presence. She's sympathetic, whereas the creepy Aggie, technically a 'good' side, couldn't be more abhorrent. Dr. Adderson is certainly evil for creating the snake child/woman, yet he faces the dilemma of risking the child's mental condition if he does nothing. Dr. Murton is morally compromised to a lesser extent. He wouldn't have fled the house if he didn't think Adderson was in danger. It's not surprising, therefore, that the sheppard gets stuck with Atheris. Even the stalwart Col. Wynborn isn't blameless; he egged on the mob that sacked Adderson's house.

It's difficult to accept that a constable would condone, let alone lead a lynch mob, especially in that time when privacy was sacrosanct; i.e., that 'a man's home is his castle.' Another thing that doesn't add up is that the villagers set fire to the lab, but then it looks like the entire house burns down. In later scenes the main house has survived intact.

One cool touch in the mob scene is the snake writhing through a skull. It's fitting that Adderson is killed by one of his own snakes. Fast-forwarding twenty years makes some sense, as it allows for the child to develop into the beguiling Artheris. Given the obvious attraction that Prentice had for her, it's too bad the movie ends before this plot line is pursued.

It might've been more interesting if Prentice escapes with her. As it is their last encounter has a sort of sci-fi flavor, as though he's trying to communicate with an alien. The ultimate ending would have them together long enough to conceive another generation of snake-children.

Cool viewing experience overall; a few tweaks here and there would've made it very memorable. 6/10.