If you take a look at the credits of Chester Morris’s career, you’ll note he did a lot of television in the Fifties and Sixties after his Boston Blackie series came to an end. Morris was one of those players who found a lot of work in the new medium as their screen careers dried up. One of his few unfortunate ventures back to the big screen was The She-Creature.

Morris is in a cast with a whole lot of players like Cathy Downs, Tom Conway, El Brendel, and Frieda Inescourt whose careers had evaporated in film, due to blacklist and other problems. It’s sad, but this sometimes was the best work they could get.

Morris is a Svengali like hypnotist who’s gone beyond anything that Messmer ever dreamed possible. His Trilby is Marla English whose bosoms excited many a pubescent male in the drive-ins. Most of the film she’s in a trance and at a certain point in the trance, she dreams up from her past life a long extinct sea creature who looks like The Creature from the Black Lagoon’s bride. You can tell by the rack the makeup people provide so we know it’s the dreaming Marla.

This She-Creature is Morrris’s personal hit squad, killing both skeptics of his hypnotic abilities to bring out past lives and anyone else who looks longingly at English. In Lance Fuller’s case he’s both a rival and a skeptic.

What’s scary about this movie is not the content which today could be released as a comedy. The scary part is that the players I named all were in quality A films at one point in their career. Fortunately Morris got to appear in The Great White Hope before he died as a farewell performance. And I do remember him from the Fifties and Sixties showing a lot of quality acting in various television series.