Director Roger Corman, having failed to come up with a snappy two or three word titles for his latest film, decided that going the other way would be a good idea and so Lawrence Louis Goldman’s screenplay (from a story by Irving Block), was given the wonderfully unwieldy moniker The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent. Despite the fact that it’s surprisingly descriptive, distributors AIP shortened it in the publicity material to just The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent – when Anglo Amalgamated later triple-billed it in the UK with The Astounding She-Monster (1957) – its original US screen partner – and Doris Wishman’s nudie Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1962) (retitled Back to Nature) it was shortened again, this time to simply Viking Women.

Set in a Scandinavia that looks suspiciously like California (it was shot at those staples of 50s AIP low budgeters, Iverson Ranch, Bronson Canyon and ZIV Studios among other decidedly non-European locations) it charts the adventures of the screen’s least convincing Vikings and the women who love them. A group of Viking women, led by Desir (Abby Dalton) and numbering among them Susan Cabot, June Kenney and Betsy Jones-Moreland, decide to set off in search of their men who went missing three years earlier while on an expedition. On board an insanely tiny and rickety boat, they follow in their wake, posing decorously in front of back-projected stock footage, fleeing equally borrowed footage of sharks and eventually sailing into a whirlpool where a giant sea monster awaits. With their ship wrecked, the crew wash ashore on a beach and are captured by the Grimault warrior tribe who are also holding their men as slaves. There’s a lot of talk, some romance, a bit of fighting and then everyone goes home after another run-in with the terrible papier-mâché monster.

Corman, like much of Hollywood, was aware that Richard Fleischer was working on his epic The Vikings (1958) and, as well as trying to come up with the longest title he could think of, was also hoping to get in quick and make a knock-off before Fleischer’s film even reached the screen. In effect, he invented the “mockbuster”, which The Asylum would turn into a profitable business model, cranking out cheapie lookalikes designed to capitalise on the success of far better made films.

You canit really fault Corman for ambition. Even he later admitted that trying to make a film of this type on his typically low budget of the day was a mistake. Corman had been sold on the idea when special effects men Block and Jack Rabin pitched him a script that they’d picked up from Goldman and he persuaded AIP to finance it. But they only offered him somewhere between $70,000 and $80,000, certainly nothing like the budget a film as ambitious as this required. That explains why the Viking women cram onto the world’s smallest dragon ship. And why the “monster of the vortex”, a tatty looking hand puppet, is barely there, And indeed perhaps why there are several fight scenes that neither the fight choreographer, the actors nor, at times, the sets (which were likely borrowed from other productions) were up to.

It certainly looks terribly threadbare and tatty and Corman rushed through production with even greater speed than usual, supposedly racking up no fewer than an extraordinary 77 camera set-ups at Iverson Ranch in a single day. The unseemly haste shows and Corman was reportedly ruthless (he fired actress Kipp Hamilton, who was cast as the leader of the Viking women, on the first day of shooting when she dared to ask for more money) and not overly concerned with health and safety (the Viking women had to be rescued when that ridiculous boat started sinking).

None of the cast even remotely convince one that they’re noble Nordic warriors (dialogue like “get your filthy hands off her, you big slobbering dog!” certainly doesn’t help) and Corman soon realised that the promises made by Block and Rabin weren’t going to be fulfilled – they’d estimated, hilariously, that they could pull off all the special effects on just $20,000, which is surely a textbook example of wild over-optimism. Writer Tom Weaver reports that Corman told him “I was about three days into this picture when I realized that this whole thing was a big mistake. BIG mistake. I think this experience might be what drove me to gangster films the following year.”

The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent was paired up with Ronnie Ashcroft’s awful The Astounding She-Monster for one of the worst double bills of the year. Neither film was a credit to distributors American International but they made money thanks, in no small part, to the excellent poster designs, both the work of the excellent Albert Kallis. But no-one could surely make any claims for either film to be anything other than extremely shoddy.

Crew
Directed by: Roger Corman; © MCMLVII [1957] Malibu Productions; American International Pictures [logo]. An American International picture; Executive Producers: James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff; Produced by: Roger Corman; Screenplay by: Lawrence Louis Goldman; From a Story by: Irving Block; Director of Photography: Monroe P. Askins; Film Editor: Ronald Sinclair; Music by: Albert Glasser; Wardrobe: Gwen Fitzer; Makeup: Harry Ross; Special Photographic Effects by: Jack Rabin, Louis DeWitt, Irving Block; Art Director: Bob Kinoshita

Cast
Abby Dalton (Desir); Susan Cabot (Enger); Brad Jackson (Vedric); June Kenney (Asmild); Richard Devon (King Stark); Betsy Jones-Moreland (Thyra); Jonathan Haze (Ottar); Jay Sayer (Senya); Lynn Bernay (Dagda); Sally Todd (Sanda); Gary Conway (Jarl); Mike Forrest (Zarko); Wilda Taylor (Grimolt woman dancer)

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