Always the question: is it true?
Truth is in the mind and the mind of man varies with time and place.
The time is 1945.
The place is Asia.
Finished watching this Universal International Picture from 1955 over the weekend--took a few tries, not that it's a bad flick, but just kept starting it too late and ended up falling asleep each time--ah, the joys of getting old. I enjoyed it, having never seen it before; I've owned it on DVD for around seven years and just now got around to seeing it after putting it off for so long. The thing with a lot of these old black and white Universals are even if you have no interest in the subject matter (snake cults!?) they're at least well made and entertaining enough to hold your interest for an hour and a half and end up being the audiovisual equivalent of a warm blanket and a hot cup of tea, and after watching it you don't feel like you totally wasted your time, which I can't say about every old film I watch.
Not too heavy on fright other than the thoroughly modern horror of not ever really knowing with certainty those we love, this was almost more of a love story than a horror picture as it depicts the (then) current state of mid-century modern relationships as burly men come to fisticuffs over the affections of the fairer sex, while the woman at the heart of this weird story slinks from the bedroom of one man to another (ever so chastely, any fornication is only implied, ya dirty bastard) as she seeks revenge for the ex-soldiers' blasphemy against her alien religion.
Though there's no real onscreen woman-to-snake transformation scene to speak of until the very end, the film effectively uses the old trick of shadows on the wall to imply the shape shifting of the mythical Lamia.
All in all I found Cult of the Cobra to be a good, pulpy flick with more than a touch of Oriental exoticism and a throbbing Freudian undercurrent of unspeakably lurid sexuality.
Here's the trailer:
No comments:
Post a Comment