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Synopsis:
Shortly before shipping home at the end of World War II, six
American air-force officers explore an Asian bazaar. A snake
charmer, Daru (Leonard Strong), allows the men to take pictures of
him holding a cobra. Paul Abel (Richard Long) mentions the strange
cult of the Lamians, who worship snakes and believe that there are
people who can transform into them. Daru says quietly that, for a
price, Paul can see this happen.... That night, Daru takes the men
to the secret Lamian temple, provides them with cloaks and the
password, and impresses upon them the danger of what they are doing,
warning them that if caught, it will mean their deaths. The six go
ahead, and observe a ceremonial dance symbolising the rescue of the
Lamian people by their Cobra Goddess. As the lithe figure of the
female dancer slides back into a woven basket, the inebriated Nick
Hommel (James Dobson) disregards the warnings of Daru and takes a
photograph. The temple then erupts as the Lamians react in outrage,
and their high priest pronounces a death curse on the intruders. A
desperate struggle follows. Nick tears free of two Lamians who have
attacked him and seizes from the stage the woven basket – which now
contains a cobra – before fleeing. Daru is slain by his fellow
Lamians, while the other servicemen resort to setting the temple on
fire to effect their escape. They speed away in their jeep, only to
slam to a halt when they see Nick lying in the road, a woman
standing over him. Tom Markel (Marshall Thompson) pursues the woman,
but she evades him. He returns to Nick, who is suffering from snake
bite. As Tom tends him, Paul looks worriedly at the empty woven
basket lying in the road.... Recovering in hospital, Nick apologises
to the others for his conduct and assures them that he will be fit
to ship out the next day – but as he settles down to sleep,
something appears from the darkness and slips into his room
through an open window. As it rears up over him, Nick opens his eyes
– and screams.... Devastated by Nick’s death, his friends
must still ship out. Paul worries aloud that the high priest’s curse
may have been more than words. The others scoff, turning the
conversation to their plans for civilian life, and ribbing Tom and
Paul who, as well as being roommates, are romantic rivals for an
actress named Julia Thompson (Kathleen Hughes). This rivalry is
settled when, a fortnight after the friends’ return to New York,
Julia accepts Paul’s proposal. Tom is deeply hurt, but struggles to
be gracious. Alone at home that night, Tom is startled by a scream
coming from the apartment across the passageway. He forces his way
in, and finds a beautiful, terrified woman, Lisa Moyer (Faith
Domergue), who speaks brokenly of an intruder. Tom calms and makes
friends with her, then persuades her to spend a day with him. When
the two arrive home that evening, Tom invites Lisa into his
apartment to meet Paul. There, she shows an intense interest in a
photograph of the six friends during their service days. Later that
night, Rico Nardi (David Janssen) locks up his bowling-alley and
begins to drive home. Suddenly, in his rear-view mirror, he catches
sight of something in the back seat, something that strikes at
him.... The car swerves, crashes and flips, and Rico is killed. As a
crowd begins to gather, a breathless Lisa slips away into the
shadows....
Comments:
The horror genre was surprisingly tardy in attempting to exploit the
universal phenomenon of ophidiophobia, but it finally happened, at
least after a fashion, in 1955’s Cult Of The Cobra. In truth,
this is less a killer snake film than it is a re-working of Cat
People, although it boasts very few of that film’s unsettling
ambiguities. Cult Of The Cobra makes no attempt to disguise
either the identity of its villain or the reality of her
supernatural abilities. It moves from set-piece to set-piece with a
flatness of direction that even some beautifully moody black and
white cinematography from Russell Metty cannot entirely disguise,
and barely tries to build suspense around the fate of its
characters. Yet for all these shortcomings, Cult Of The Cobra
is by no means an entirely negligible work – although it could be
fairly said that, as far as it is interesting, it seems to be
so almost in spite of itself. This is one of those films that gives
the impression of saying rather more than its makers ever intended,
or perhaps even realised, glancing at such issues as cultural and
religious insensitivity, and the consequences of failing to take
responsibility for your actions, before taking a long hard look at
some of the psycho-sexual issues of the post-war American male, all
under the guise of asking that most poignant and unanswerable of
questions – why must I be a were-cobra in love?
Cult Of The
Cobra gets off to an unfortunate start
by – ten years after World War II, and two years after Korea –
setting its action in “Asia”; or, if you prefer the attitude taken
by the film’s advertising art, in “the Mystic East”. If we care to
give the screenwriters the benefit of the doubt here, we can suggest
that they were reluctant to identify their Lamian cult with one
particular country – although in fact, the depiction of the Lamians
in Cult Of The Cobra indicates some interesting ambivalence
on the part of the film-makers, and perhaps a little more
fair-mindedness than you might expect. On one hand, they are the
same set of faceless “foreigners” that has colourful-ed up countless
action movies from Gunga Din to The Temple Of Doom,
designated “evil” just by their difference from our supposed
identification characters. (Let’s face it: the very use of the word
“cult” is a dead giveaway, although I suppose you could claim that
here they were as much interested in the word’s alliterative aspects
as its negative implications.) The temple, the robes, the ceremony
are all familiar from a hundred films where we are encouraged to
find such practitioners either repellent or risible – exactly as the
characters of Cult Of The Cobra do, treating the Lamian
ritual as a kind of nightclub act staged for their entertainment.
(The irony here is
that the ritual is enacted by, obviously, a pair of professional
dancers, who are billed only as “The Carlssons”, and probably
were a nightclub act.)
Hidden under their
robes, the six friends watch in some bemusement a dance routine
symbolising an attack on the Lamian people, and the death of the
aggressor at the hands, or rather fangs, of the Cobra Goddess. The
latter emerges from a woven basket, a lithe figure entirely encased
in a thin, shimmering material, and does a sort of interpretative
dance that ends with her wrapped around the body of the
sword-wielding invader and “biting” his throat. (As cobra dances go,
this one has it all over Maria Montez’s effort in
Cobra Woman in terms of
credibility....but is, of course, not nearly as much fun.) The
Goddess is slithering her way back into her basket – which is, we
notice, not nearly big enough to hold an adult woman – when the
inevitable happens: a flashbulb goes off. So do the Lamians. Nick
Hommel, evidently figuring that he isn’t in nearly enough trouble
already, breaks free of two Lamians for have seized him and rushes,
not for the exit, but for the stage. There he grabs the woven
basket, which – in a moment of staggering casualness – now contains
a cobra. Nick slams down the lid and bolts. His friends, meanwhile,
are engaged in fist-fights with the Lamians, and getting off easy:
the unfortunate Daru gets a sword in his guts. The servicemen then
set fire to the hangings in the temple and under this cover make
their escape – although of course, they’re not getting off that
easy. “The Cobra Goddess will avenge herself!” shouts a rightly
outraged Lamian priest. “One by one, you will all die!”
(Alas for Cult
Of The Cobra, these days this dramatic climax is one of
unintentional hilarity: the priest is played by an unbilled Edward
Platt, whose unexpected appearance is guaranteed to provoke a
laugh.)
This curse is not
long in making itself felt. Nick Hommel is found unconscious in the
road, a snake bite on his throat and a woman standing over him – she
melting into the shadows as Tom Markel pursues her unavailingly.
Returning to his friends, Tom finds Paul staring worriedly into the
discarded basket, now empty. Tom then kneels down and “treats” Nick
in the classical movie way: by cutting the wound and sucking out the
venom.
You may, if you
please, consider the following a Community Service Announcement:
My friends, in the
event of snakebite, do not, DO NOT, do what the movies do. (Even The
Greatest Motion Picture Of All Time gets this one wrong!) Don’t
try sucking the venom out. Don’t cut the puncture marks. And
in particular don’t do it if, like Nick Hommel, the victim
has a bite mark directly over the jugular vein!!
Nick ends up in the
military hospital, where he and his friends discuss the night’s
events with a stunning lack of concern, not just treating the
experience as no more than a lark, but literally laughing
about it. “Boy, those guys at the temple really blew their top!”
comments Nick with a disbelieving shake of the head, to which Paul
replies judiciously, “Well – they had a right to be sore.”
They had a right
to be sore!!??
Let’s review, shall
we? These six men have bribed their way into a religious ceremony
forbidden to outsiders. They have photographed it. They have
disrupted the ritual. They have stolen the basket containing,
perhaps literally, the Lamians’ Cobra Goddess. They have violently
beaten up the members of the congregation who took exception to
their presence. They have set a temple on fire. They have gotten
their guide killed.
Yes, I think you
could say that the Lamians had – “a right to be sore”....
And it is here that
Cult Of The Cobra becomes rather interesting, inasmuch as it,
too, seems to consider that the Lamians had a right to be sore.
Although there is an unavoidable emotional component to this story
of six friends who, as they put it, “made it all the way through the
war without a scratch”, only to drop dead one by one on the streets
of New York, the film never really asks us to sympathise overly with
the men’s fate, or suggests that they didn’t have it coming. This
attitude is best illustrated by what, on the face of it, seems like
a most unfair distribution of snaky justice.
When you get right
down to it, everything that happens in Cult Of The Cobra is
the fault of Paul Abel – who is, I should mention at this point, a
scientist by profession. It is Paul who leaps at Daru’s offer to
smuggle the men into the ceremony, persuading his friends to go
along, even at the risk of their lives. They have no interest
in the subject, killing their boredom with alcohol as Paul,
oblivious to their disinterest, expounds at length on the various
cultures that have legends of human-animal metamorphosis. (You could
also argue that Paul should have anticipated what the combination of
alcohol and a camera fetish would lead to in the case of Nick Hommel.)
Yet of the six sinners, Paul is the only one never to be in serious
danger of the Cobra Goddess’s retribution – perhaps because, if he
is the prime transgressor, he is also the only one of the
group to accept responsibility for that transgression. It is Paul
alone who sees a dark omen in the empty basket lying by the
unconscious Nick; he alone who, after Nick’s death, is prepared to
contemplate the unthinkable: that the Lamian priest’s words were far
more than just an empty threat. (One of the touches I like best
about Cult Of The Cobra is its suggestion that it is
because Paul is a scientist that he is open-minded enough to
contemplate the reality of the curse.) The others, in contrast,
don’t want to know. Although deeply shaken by Nick’s death, they
dismiss it as a freak tragedy and scoff at Paul’s concerns. Intent
upon resuming their civilian lives, they – far too easily – banish
the events at the temple from their thoughts.
For Paul, however,
the memory of that night is never far from his mind; and after
Rico’s death, he tells Julia his fears. The language in this scene
is as revealing as its content. Although I have credited Paul with
accepting the blame for what is happening to his friends, his choice
of words indicates an ongoing reluctance to come fully to terms with
the situation. He tells Julia that he and the others “got mixed
up with a snake cult”, and that “what we saw was pretty
ugly” and that “it ended in the snake charmer’s death” – but
never at any point is there a reference to what we did.
(Paul’s evasiveness, particularly considering that he is speaking to
his fiancée, highlights the fact that on a certain level, Cult Of
The Cobra is a tale of servicemen misbehaving themselves
overseas, and of the nasty things that such men sometimes bring back
to the supposed sanctity of their civilian homes.) However, when
Julia shows a tendency to mock at the Lamians – “That’s a
religion?” she responds laughingly – Paul won’t have it:
“They’re as serious about it as we are about ours.” (Based on what
we see of the various characters, this sentiment perhaps sells the
Lamians a little short.) Critically, Paul has recognised that he and
his friends have done something really wrong, something that, were
it done to them, they would consider an intolerable offence.
And it is this
chastened frame of mind that ultimately protects Paul from his
potential fate, putting him on guard and allowing his to recognise,
when it arrives, Retribution – aka Miss Lisa Moyer.
Although as a genre
actress, Faith Domergue is probably better known for her other two
1955 efforts, This Island Earth and It Came From Beneath
The Sea, her performance in Cult Of The Cobra is the
definitive one of her career – as far as it was a
performance. At the time this film was made, Ms Domergue was going
through a painful divorce, and the strain of her personal problems
is clearly evident onscreen, in the droop of her full lips and the
weariness in her huge dark eyes. (Aware of the toll being taken on
her, Ms Domergue begged director Francis D. Lyon to avoid shooting
close-ups of her as much as possible.) Perversely, this is quite
perfect for Lisa, conveying effortlessly her growing misery of
spirit as her feelings for Tom begin to interfere with her mission.
Truth be told, Faith Domergue was not a particularly strong actress,
but her iconic value here is incalculable. She looks
serpentine. We wonder neither at Tom’s instant attraction to her,
nor at Paul’s instinctive sense that there is something profoundly
wrong about her.
As I have
indicated, the surface of Cult Of The Cobra, whatever subtext
might be lurking beneath it, is amusingly prosaic. It makes no bones
at all about Lisa, who or what she is, and what she’s there for. The
initial deaths are enacted just as baldly. In each case we see the
victim reacting in horror as a snake – or rather, its shadow – rears
up, then strikes. Thus, Rico dies when his car crashes; Carl, when
he backs away onto the balcony of his apartment, and falls off; and
Pete when, having tied Lisa to Carl’s death, he unwisely confronts
her in her apartment. If the film makes no effort to disguise Lisa’s
true nature, neither does it grant us the gratification of acting
like a “real” monster movie, and giving us a series of
transformation scenes. What we get instead are POV shots and
shadows, with occasional deployment of the subjective “lens-eye”
effect from It Came From Outer Space. The only spark of
imagination comes with the killing of Pete, where we see Lisa’s
shadow on the wall suddenly melt into the shadow of a snake. Cult
Of The Cobra does feel compelled to adhere to tradition at its
climax, however, when after Lisa is killed in her snake form, she
changes back into her human form – which was a major mistake. No
transformation story can entirely avoid the issue of Where do the
clothes go?, of course, but Cult Of The Cobra turns
tragedy into laughter by having Lisa’s post-mortem morph accompanied
not just by the reappearance of the cape she was wearing over her
evening gown, but also that of her exceedingly abundant bling.
But if Cult Of
The Cobra stumbles and bumbles its way through the conventions
of the horror film, it scores an unexpected bulls-eye in its
depiction of its central relationship – which is not the one
between its conventional romantic couple, Paul and Julia, but that
which develops between its monster and her potential victim.
Much of Cult Of
The Cobra is spent in consideration of Tom Markel, and the
psychology of these scenes is remarkably acute. We are alerted early
on to a romantic rivalry between Tom and Paul over Julia. It is Paul
whom she chooses; and when she breaks the news to Tom, he is
bitterly hurt. (Understandably – how would you like to be
thrown over for a scientist? Tom vents his feelings via the snarky
observation that, after her marriage, Julia will have to keep
working, because “Paul will never be anything more than a
research assistant!” Ooh, ouch!) That very night – while
Paul is conveniently if hurtfully out with Julia – hysterical
screams draw Tom into the apartment over the way, where he finds
Lisa, beautiful, vulnerable and apparently in need of protection.
Before he leaves her apartment, he has pressured her into spending
the day with him – overtly in order to demonstrate to her the
attractions of New York City, in truth in order to demonstrate to
his friends that he is, after all, a “real man”, despite Julia’s
preference for Paul.
What is curious
about all this is that Tom has been assigned the mental state
usually reserved for women; that is, he has been brought to consider
himself a failure as a man because he isn’t “in a relationship”. To
regain his feelings of self-esteem, he has to get himself a
“relationship”, any “relationship”, and as soon as possible;
and when it comes to Lisa, he simply will not take ‘no’ for an
answer. For all that urban myth would have us believe that the 1950s
represented the pinnacle of “home” and “marriage” and “family
values”, the plain fact is that numerous films from that era – with
genre films curiously prominent amongst them – paint a disturbing
picture of the relationship between the sexes. To modern eyes, Tom
Markel’s behaviour is horrifying. His pursuit of Lisa is unrelenting
to the point of obsession. He barges his way into her apartment on
the slightest of pretexts, constantly demanding to know where she
has been and what she has been doing. After barely hours of
acquaintance, he is presenting her to all and sundry as “my girl”.
He forces a kiss on her that she has made clear she does not want.
He punches out his friend, Carl, not so much for dancing with Lisa,
but because Lisa evidently enjoyed it – and having done so, he
seizes Lisa by the wrist and literally drags her away from the
party, presumably to find somewhere less rife with masculine
competition. When Lisa leaves her gloves in his apartment,
Tom crosses the hall to return them, and when Lisa doesn’t answer
his knock, he not merely lets himself in (she lent him the keys
earlier in the evening so that he could get some ice), but upon
finding her gone, curls up on her couch and waits for her to get
home. Time and again in Cult Of The Cobra, we are reminded
very forcibly that this film was made at a time when love meant
never having to say you’re sorry for behaving like a stalker.
The creepiness of
Tom’s behaviour is hardly mitigated by the fact that – as we
are aware, even if he is not – Lisa has put herself in his
way precisely in order to be stalked. Tom and his romantic
desperation are Lisa’s ticket to her list of victims. It is a nice
touch that she targets the more domestic Paul and Tom, rather than
the tom-catting Carl and Pete, evidently considering that she can
get close enough to the latter two without any particular effort –
and she’s right. (Rico, the only one of the group not defined by his
relationships with women, is dispatched as quickly as possible.) Of
course, looked at squarely, Lisa’s scheme for gaining access to the
doomed men does nothing but raise an endless list of unanswered
questions. How did Lisa know where to find her victims? What would
she have done had an apartment next to Paul and Tom’s not “happened”
to be vacant? – or if Tom hadn’t been so embarrassingly needy? – or
if these men, after serving in the same air force unit, had not
also turned out, not just to all live in New York, but within
walking distance of one another? Where does Lisa get her clothes? –
her jewellery? – her money? How, exactly, does a Lamian Cobra
Goddess go about applying for a passport? And above all, why
should a Lamian Cobra Goddess manifest herself in a human form
so very attractive to American men? (We see Lisa clearly enough when
Nick is attacked, and this is her “natural” form.)
Also unaddressed is
the question of why our Lamian Cobra Goddess should start to fall
for Tom – and not just because we are likely to find Tom’s conduct
repellent in the extreme. Like so many female “monsters” and
“aliens” in films of this time – I suppose, of all times –
Lisa is hampered in her mission when she finds herself struggling
with “this thing called love”. This really makes any sense only in a
Hitchcockian sort of way. (Don’t worry, I haven’t run quite mad: I
assure you that this is the only time I will mention Alfred
Hitchcock and Cult Of The Cobra in the same breath!) That is
to say, as happens in films like North By Northwest and
Vertigo, what we have here is a case of a morally ambiguous girl
falling for a man primarily out of guilt for setting him up in the
first place.
Be that as it may,
when it comes to the others on her list, Lisa wastes no time. The
circumstances of Carl’s death – falling off his balcony after the
party during which Tom decked him – attract the attention of the
police as Rico’s car crash did not. For one thing, blood was found
at the scene that did not belong to the victim, staining a broken
statuette. (Carl threw it at the snake, and now Lisa has a cut on
her arm.) Having succeeded in clearing himself of suspicion, Pete
begins to wonder what, exactly, Lisa was doing around Carl’s
apartment at the time of his death....and makes the mistake of
confronting her about it.
Paul, meanwhile,
has felt his vague apprehensions about Lisa harden into conviction;
and he tells the investigating cop all about the Lamian curse.
Remarkably, the cop neither laughs in his face nor tosses him into a
cell to sleep it off, but rather orders toxicological testing to be
done on Carl’s body. This confirms that he died of snake bite (the
puncture wounds on Carl’s throat having, we infer, escaped the
notice of the medical examiner: not very likely, with a cobra
bite). Although not accepting Paul’s story of metamorphosis, the cop
does agree to bring Lisa in for questioning, and so they go looking
for her – finding instead Pete’s dead body, fang marks on the neck.
All this is
happening, by the way, on the night of Julia’s New York debut (the
timeline of this film is fairly ludicrous), and Tom has escorted
Lisa to the theatre, where our climax plays itself out. Tom and Lisa
are separated when he is called to the phone, while she takes the
opportunity to slip up to Julia’s dressing-room, where she expects
to find Paul. Instead it is Julia who returns there during the first
intermission. Julia has had one narrow escape from Lisa, saved by
the timely delivery of Paul’s laundry after responding to his
request that she talk to Lisa and try to take a measure of her
character by stupidly blabbing on about cults and snakes and “Paul’s
theory”. Now, she finds herself caught in a confined space, with a
cobra between herself and the door....
Tom is forced by
the facts of Pete’s death to accept the truth about Lisa. Numb with
shock, he searches unavailingly for his deadly love, until he hears
screams coming from upstairs.....
Bursting into
Julia’s dressing-room, Tom has time only for one horrified stare
before he leaps to Julia’s rescue, fighting the cobra with all means
at his disposal – such as they are. Now, either Lisa in snake form
is the most ineffectual cobra ever, or – she won’t really
fight back against Tom, instead allowing herself to be simply pushed
through a window and off a balcony in a scene as embarrassing as it
is unique. At least, I’m pretty sure this is the only movie out
there in which the monster is defeated by a feathery wrap and a coat
rack.
But if the means of Lisa’s demise, and her final
transformation, are laughable, it is not these images with which
Cult Of The Cobra leaves us, but rather with sombre footage of
an emotionally shattered Tom, first kneeling over Lisa’s body with
his head clutched in his hands, then slowly, silently, wandering
away into the night.... As much as it is a horror film, Cult Of
The Cobra is a study of sexual inadequacy – or, more correctly,
of the fear of sexual inadequacy, and of the intolerable
pressures that some people feel compelled to put upon themselves in
order to live up to an artificial idea of what constitutes being “a
success”. The film’s grim final moments comprise a vivid reminder of
the fact that, despite what our culture too often has to say upon
the subject, there are many things in life far worse than simply
being single.
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