She (1965) might have been something of a dreary slog but it stands head and shoulders above its terrible – and poorly named – sequel The Vengeance of She. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Haggard – and “she” doesn’t get or even seek vengeance of any kind – simply evoking his name and that of his character because She had been such a big hit for Hammer. It’s the classic example of a sequel that no-one wanted, and it duly sank without trace at the box office. Director Cliff Owen came to the film off the two big-screen outings for British comedy legends Morecambe and Wise (That Riviera Touch (1966) and The Magnificent Two (1967)) before finishing his career making sex comedies (No Sex Please – We’re British (1973), The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones (1976) and the uncompleted Closed Up-tight partially shot in 1975) making him a strange choice for a film like The Vengeance of She.
Carol (Olinka Berova, who does look a little like the previous film’s Ursula Andress from certain angles – at one point she wanders into the sea in her underwear, mirroring the scene of Andress emerging from the water in her white bikini in Dr No (1962)) wanders through the south of France in a daze, apparently being drawn towards the lost African city of Kuma by strange hallucinations and telepathic messages. We later learn that the ruler of Kuma, Kallikrates (John Richardson), last seen grieving the death of his true love Ayesha after himself becoming immortal at the end of She, believes Carol to be the reincarnation of She Who Must Be Obeyed. He’s assisted by Men-Hari (Derek Godfrey), one of the ancient Magi wise men who will be allowed to achieve immortality when the blue pillar of fire returns and allow Men-Hari to take over the entire world. Carol escapes an encounter with a rapacious truck driver (Dervis Ward), a scene scored to a jaunty saxophone motif from Tubby Hayes – get used to it, you’ll here it a fair few times before all this is over – before running into British psychiatrist Phillip Smith (Edward Judd) who falls head over heels for her. The couple are separated and after much meandering around, jumping off boats and getting lost in deserts, are reunited in time to finally make it to Kuma where there’s a lot of back-stabbing – literal and figurative – as the various factions struggle for power. The story stumbles to a conclusion in which the city is destroyed, apparently by some sort of divine intervention, as Carol and Smith make good their escape. And that’s your lot. Deep and thoughtful this film most certainly is not.
She may have been dull but it looked great and had a fair degree of star power with Ursula Andress, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Here we’re left with Edward Judd, usually excellent but lacking some of his usual pizzazz here, the ever-wooden John Richardson and the gorgeous but charisma- and talent-free Olinka Berova (real name Olga Schoberová). Talking to Starlog magazine in 1990, Judd said of Berova “Olinka wasn’t an actress. I don’t know what she was. Perhaps she was a model. I figured she was making it with somebody important behind the scenes. I wonder whatever became of her. She totally disappeared.” Which isn’t entirely true as she had a few more roles through to the end of the decade – mainly minor parts in very minor films – but apparently still has a cult following in her native Czechoslovakia for her role in Oldřich Lipský’s surreal western Limonádový Joe aneb Koňská opera/Lemonade Joe (1964).
The story is utterly absurd from beginning to end and is in no rush to go anywhere. It very quickly becomes clear that the reason for this is that it has nowhere particularly interesting to be. Like its heroine it wanders about aimlessly for a while in a state of vapid tedium, with a lot of mooching about on boats and buses with a few los-key hallucinations tossed in for good measure before anything approximating a plot hives into view. And then it just turns into a gender-swapped re-run of the first film, complete with a jealous handmaiden, a dash of court intrigue and the return of the blue pillar of fire.
The climax reduces some very fine British actors (Noel Willman, Derek Godfrey, André Morell, Gerald Lawson) to ludicrous chanting and pantomime villainy, though George Sewell manages the not inconsiderable trick of being drowned in a small muddy puddle deep in the middle of a desert. John Richardson is conspicuously dubbed (by the ubiquitous David de Keyser) is as stiff as ever. It would be the last Hammer appearance for both Morell and Willman who must have been more aware than most of just how low their time with the company had sunk.
Add to all this a dreadful theme song – Hammer never seemed to have a lot of luck with songs in their films – see the much-derided (quite rightly) Strange Love from Lust for a Vampire (1971) for further proof – and you’ve got a film that rates among the very worst that Hammer ever produced. Yes, there’s some lovely location photography from Wolfgang Suschitzky, father of David Cronenberg’s favourite cinematographer Peter Suschitzky but it doesn’t make up for an absurd plot that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. It’s as technically well made as any other Hamer film of the day but it’s such a dreary plod that it all counts for naught.
The Vengeance of She failed to set the box office alight the way that its predecessor had. A chart reprinted in Stephen M. Silverman’s book The Fox That Got Away: The Last Days of the Zanuck Dynasty at Twentieth Century-Fox reveals that The Vengeance of She needed to make $1,575,000 to break even in the States and couldn’t even manage that, netting just $850,000. It was probably more than it deserved.
The EOFFTV Review 