HEFILM Yes for a snake woman movie don't expect to see any transformation scenes. If you go into this with these appropriately lowered expectations you'll find a fast moving movie with an engaging music score by Buxton Orr centered around a snake charmer's theme and various serial music technique's, the score is the most worthwhile element.Mainly if you look up the writer's credits and see he later gave us THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE you'll know you're in for, silly but fast paced nonsense and overheated under thought dialogue. It's a bit shocking to see dialogue this bad in a British film and the performers are either encouraged or allowed to play it loud and big. Without fake special effects to drag the story down you have instead fake acting--from the supporting players. Should make you appreciate LEE and CUSHING who could sell this type of thing--none of these actors can. It's the type of thing where evil becomes a three syllable word.The snake woman herself, Travers, isn't allowed to do much which is too bad as she sees alluring and has a spooky music theme augmented by bells.The director doesn't show much promise--something you could argue his whole career fails to do, but in fairness this moves along at a fast pace. There is a nice shot of a shake slithering out of a skull's mouth and a couple of shots behind or through foreground objects--something he became briefly famous for after THE IPCRESS FILE. It all cuts together and seems like a movie, if only he could have controlled the actors--he may have had no control over the script.The abandoned farm location is rather impressive. This movie is fun because it's never dull. Snake attack scenes aren't very good but there is a good lab fire sequence early on. Despite budget limits the plot just lurches from one unlikely premise you have to accept to ultimately come to an equally unlikely ending. Final scene adds a, ahead of its time, government conspiracy angle.It's like but better than The Giant Leeches or Leach Woman--so I give it credit for that. I prefer the same director's other early horror film Dr. Blood's Coffin.

Woodyanders 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.

Scott LeBrun "The Snake Woman" is a brief (only 68 minutes long), painless, silly, and quite amusing British horror film with some decent atmosphere and capable performances. It's not memorable, overall, save for its sexy "snake woman", but it's entertaining stuff. It's low budget enough that the monster action is all off screen, and it's got a talky script, to boot.An early credit for Canadian born director Sidney J. Furie (whose diverse career has included things such as "The Ipcress File", "The Entity", "Iron Eagle"...and "Superman IV: The Quest for Peace"), it's not strong on story, but it has its moments. In a 19th century village, a herpetologist (John Cazabon) is treating his wife's mental illness by injecting her with snake venom (!). The result is their daughter is born with cold skin and blood, and other reptile like tendencies. A doctor (Arnold Marle) spirits the kid away and gives her to a shepherd (Stevenson Lang) to watch over. 19 years later, the doctor returns from an extended stay in Africa to find that villagers are perishing from snake bites. A Scotland Yard detective (John McCarthy) is put on the case.The highlight of the piece has to be the presence of beautiful Susan Travers, who plays our snake woman. Her appearances in the woods have just the right slightly spooky touch. McCarthy is a moderately engaging hero who of course believes in sane, routine, believable answers to questions, but realizes that there's something genuinely strange going on here. Geoffrey Denton offers likable support as the retired colonel Clyde Wynborn who asks for the Yards' help. As befitting a character of her type, Elsie Wagstaff is a hoot as the witch-like woman Aggie who knows the girl and the village are "cursed". As one can imagine, the resolution to this is rather abrupt, which prevents it from being completely satisfying.Still, one could do much worse than this and even those who dislike it won't have to put up with it for long.Six out of 10.

The_Void It's obvious that The Snake Woman was made on a shoestring budget: the production values are very low, the special effects nonexistent and the film only runs for little over an hour, but in spite of that; Sidney J. Furie's film is at least an interesting example of early sixties horror. The film proclaims itself to be based on a legend and is set somewhere out in the English countryside. The plot is rather ridiculous and unlike other horror films based on similar subjects; this one doesn't quite have enough to distract from that fact. The film opens by introducing us to a scientist and his wife. It transpires that the wife has been having some mental health problems; and her husband has been treating her using snake venom. The wife also just happens to be pregnant, and naturally the snake venom treatment has an effect on the newborn child. A local midwife/witch labels it 'evil' and pretty soon the villagers are trying to burn down the couple's house...but not before they manage to get the child to safety. We pick up the story some years later; and some of the villagers have been dying in snake related incidents.The biggest problem with this film is undoubtedly the script, which at times is just mind-bogglingly stupid. Some of the lines of dialogue are absolutely shocking and many of the characters would be strong contenders for the 'most stupid character of all time' award. It takes many of them an eternity to work out the most obvious of conundrums and it makes the plot a bit harder to swallow. The film is very short, running at just over an hour...and to be honest this is probably a good thing as I can imagine it would become tiresome if it went on for much longer. The film is without special effects for most of that duration and relies mainly on the story to pull it through. It does work fairly well; we don't really get that much information on anything (a shame, since a bit of back-story could have been really interesting!), but there's a few good ideas on display. Overall, I wouldn't really recommend that anyone goes out of their way to track this little film down - it is interesting in it's own right but in all honesty there's plenty of better examples of this sort of thing out there.