Realized I haven't watched a 40s/50s creature feature in a long time and needed to fix that really quick. I decided to watch Weird Woman because the title was alluring to me and I thought it would be in the vein of Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman. Boy was I wrong.
The movie is basically a disjointed and underdeveloped mix of 3 genres: Horror, Film Noir and, for lack of a better word, a high school teen drama. The Film Noir aspects are cool with the internal dialogue of the male main character reminding me of films like Double Indemnity. The horror aspect is lacklustre and almost non-existent with a voodoo side plot that is both forgettable and laughable while being unrealistic. And of course, I'm not asking a creature feature to be realistic, but voodoo is just lazy. we already have White Zombie. And the teen drama-esque aspect coming from the 2 characters fighting over the man and one character constantly flirting with her teacher.
The film focuses mainly on the "weird woman's" husband instead of the weird woman herself, giving her no development or complexity at all and instead demonizes her by making her a one-dimensional "evil" character. Also there are practically no thematics in this film. Cat people used the lead female character to explore themes such as sexual repression. But here, there's no real reason or underlying subtext as to why the woman is weird. It just leads back to voodoo.
The performances and costumes were very good though, but unfortunately do not raise the film above "MEH" level.
This is another example of a film that doesn't live up to its title and where I spent its entirety dreaming about how good it could have been.
Realized I haven't watched a 40s/50s creature feature in a long time and needed to fix that really quick. I decided to watch Weird Woman because the title was alluring to me and I thought it would be in the vein of Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman. Boy was I wrong.
The movie is basically a disjointed and underdeveloped mix of 3 genres: Horror, Film Noir and, for lack of a better word, a high school teen drama. The Film Noir aspects are cool with the internal dialogue of the male main character reminding me of films like Double Indemnity. The horror aspect is lacklustre and almost non-existent with a voodoo side plot that is both forgettable and laughable while being unrealistic. And of course, I'm not asking a creature feature to be realistic, but voodoo is just lazy. we already have White Zombie. And the teen drama-esque aspect coming from the 2 characters fighting over the man and one character constantly flirting with her teacher.
The film focuses mainly on the "weird woman's" husband instead of the weird woman herself, giving her no development or complexity at all and instead demonizes her by making her a one-dimensional "evil" character. Also there are practically no thematics in this film. Cat people used the lead female character to explore themes such as sexual repression. But here, there's no real reason or underlying subtext as to why the woman is weird. It just leads back to voodoo.
The performances and costumes were very good though, but unfortunately do not raise the film above "MEH" level.
This is another example of a film that doesn't live up to its title and where I spent its entirety dreaming about how good it could have been.
