B Movie Nation

Foundational Cinema

B Movie News

The Disembodied (1957)

After stumbling upon a house in the jungle, a team of explorers finds the seemingly-innocent wife of their host has connections to a local voodoo cult and tries to get away before they become part of the tribe’s ceremonies.

This was a decent and enjoyable enough effort that does have some worthwhile elements about it. One of the biggest factors here is in how this goes about handling the voodoo tribe and it’s impact on the story, keeping things a lot more grounded than a lot of other efforts to portray the subject. This is a much more logical take here on the religion without resorting to sensationalism or obscure tactics that have no basis on reality, as the use of the puppets and the several dance rituals manage to highlight quite well along with the numerous assassination attempts and the use of the zombiefied co-worker that are all far more representative of the type of real-world basis for the religion. Likewise, the final half for this one manages to get some rather fun times here with the slowly-dawning of the voodoo plot, the continuation of the attacks on the husband and finally all the activity in the campground give this a frantic and enjoyable final half but that’s about it. There’s a couple big flaws here, the most damaging matter is the fact that there’s so many flip-flopping allegiances and twists that the story is hard to keep straight, as there’s numerous attempts on the doctor yet he’s completely aware of the culprit and continually obliges their requests for company despite fully aware of the danger. It makes no sense, as does the impact of the films rather bland pace which continually features those elements numerous times over without getting anything interesting going on the in first half which makes this one quite hard to get into. The last flaw here is the low- budget which really holds it down at times. From the obvious jungle sound-stages where the entire film takes place to the rather limited amount used to depict the ceremonial altar and other aspects of the film, it all looks quite cheap and somewhat limited despite obviously going for the big mark here. Otherwise, there’s not much else to this one.