NIGHT OF THE COBRA WOMAN (1972)

During World War II, two nurses in a Philippines jungle are looking for a legendary "long life" herb. One of them, Francisca, is raped and shot by a Japanese soldier. Exploring in a cave, the other nurse, Lena, is bitten by a rare firebrand cobra. She doesn't die but instead goes through a transformation in which her face briefly becomes snake-like before she turns back to normal. She uses the snake venom to heal Francisca. Some 30 years later, the two live together on the edge of a jungle in Manila. Francisca has aged normally; Lena, thanks to being a cobra woman, hasn't aged a bit. But periodically her skin becomes scaly and she has to shed it. Also, to keep her youth, she has to have sex with young, virile men, after which the men are left pretty much dried out corpses. Joanna, a young biology intern doing anti-snake venom research, hears that Lena has one of the last firebrand cobras in the wild and heads out to investigate. She is chased away by a mutant-looking man named Lopé who turns out to be the adult son of Francisca; as Joanna notes, he looks like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Back home, Joanna masturbates to thoughts of her boyfriend Duff whom she picks up at the airport later that day. After hearing about Joanna's research, Duff immediately heads out to Lena's place where he is bitten by her snake. Lena saves him by sucking the venom out, but she then keeps him around as a kind of sex slave to keep her young (for some reason, he doesn't get old or die) and uses him as her pimp, bringing her new victims from town. Joanna returns to Lena's and steals some venom which, after Lena's snake is killed, may put an end to Lena's eternal youth. But it might not...

This is one of those crazy-ass Filipino horror films that is not really very good but is oddly watchable, if only to see what bizarre thing will happen next. I haven’t mentioned that Lopé and the soldier rapist are played by the same actor. Nor that for some reason, Duff is compelled to buy an eagle (which eventually kills Lena's snake, which is named Movini, the same one from the WWII prologue). Nor that Joanna and her mentor test an anti-venom serum on a monkey, with bad results. Nor that Lopé's strange physical and mental condition came about after Lena seduced him. Nor that Lena eventually turns into Movini (I think) and back again. Nor that Lena is driven to instant lust at one point by seeing the butt crack of a young man on the street. The rules about snake transformation and skin shedding and humping to keep her youth are very unclear, as though the movie had been mostly improvised along the way. The acting is about as bad as sub-B-movie acting gets, but even that makes for some interesting watching. Joy Bang (Joanna) seems like a 17-year old who was suddenly shoved before the cameras with no experience, or even much desire to act, and tries to make the best of her situation--she was actually 27 at the time and made several movies including, the same year, Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam. Maybe the Philippine setting addled her. Or maybe, given the equally bad performance of Roger Garrett as Duff, the director, Andrew Meyer, was at fault. Marlene Clark (Lena, pictured above) is actually pretty good; she sustained a career well into the 1980s and is known for her starring role in the Black vampire cult classic Ganja and Hess. The nicely dreamy score music by Restie Umali is pretty good, giving some of the movie a dark fairy tale feel. But make no mistake, this is only for fans of bad horror movies. [Amazon Prime]