Watch Cobra Woman For Free

Great Film overall

As Good As It Gets

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

A sumptuous Technicolor weirdie from a surprisingly off-beat script by Richard Brooks and Gene Lewis, who doubtless added all the bizarre touches (the pants-sewing chimp, the sacrificial frenzy of a mad cobra-dance) to an otherwise run-of-the-mill tale of rival queens on the forbidden island. Director Robert Siodmak was later to comment that "Cobra Woman was silly but fun... Maria Montez was a great personality who believed completely in her roles. If she was playing a princess, you had to treat her like one; but if she was a slave-girl, you could kick her around anyhow. Method acting before its time, you might say." The trailer for this movie really deserves a review in itself. One of these days someone is going to write a book about trailers. Most of them were produced and distributed by National Screen Service. Their Hollywood studios were located at 7026 Santa Monica Blvd. At their peak, the Service probably employed close to a thousand people. Cobra Woman is the high camp epitome of Maria Montez's Technicolored career. The trailer is great stuff too. It even gives a few hints of the many surprises in store for lucky viewers. For instance, the announcer is careful to credit the presence not only of such luminaries as Lon Chaney, Edgar Barrier, Lois Collier and even Mary Nash, but "Koko", thus acknowledging the chimp's key role in the movie. Yes, he also concentrates on "pagan splendor and spectacle". Cobra Woman he avers, offers "all that you desire in adventure and romance: the horror of masses trapped by King Cobra, the sinuous dance of the temple beauties in their waltz of the snakes; all the fabulous wonders and dangers of the tropics!" Plus Maria Montez, "more ravishing, more bewitching, more alluring!" Plus Jon Hall at his "dynamic best", "a rascally Sabu". And all "lavishly produced in glorious Technicolor!" What more could a picturegoer ask?

This is an absolutely unashamed B-movie... and about as sophisticated as can be expected of any picture featuring a beautiful, wicked snake-priestess, human sacrifice into a volcano, good and evil twins separated in infancy, a gigantic mute assassin, a lost heir(ess), a cobra-worshipping cult and a pet ape wearing a skirt for decency! It's technicoloured in more ways than one -- this is the pulp fantasy material of boys' comic papers come to life, and wouldn't be out of place as a lost novel by Robert Howard or Rider Haggard. Just about everyone sports a bare midriff at the slightest provocation, most of the women spend the entire picture clad in a skimpy band of material round their top half, and Sabu wears next to nothing throughout thanks to a magnificent young physique.As the reader may have gathered, most of it is unabashed fun. There are a couple of suggestions that hint at something deeper: the idea that perhaps Tollea really ought to stay and improve life for her people instead of marrying her rescuer, for example (though the final outcome makes sense -- she was only ever herself a pawn in the hands of the would-be reformers, after all), and, despite the missionary upbringing of the main protagonists, an unexpected treatment of the cobra cult as a genuine religion, where offending the Powers can have consequences and people deserve to worship as they see fit.The special effects are rather better on the costume front than they are where dangerous items are concerned, although there is a brave attempt at showing an advancing lava front by merely illustrating its effects, which works surprisingly well. The dialogue veers wildly between pidgin and fluent English as spoken by the same character at different times (sometimes within the same speech) -- it would be nice to think that this reflected an attempt to show whether they are trying to communicate in English or addressing others in their own native tongue, but I suspect it wasn't thought out in that much detail! Otherwise, the main criticism I'd make is that the final fight goes on perceptibly too long and in too repetitive a way: it could, with advantage and with more credibility, have been cut by several minutes to provide a more explosive climax.But the film is thoroughly enjoyable for what it is. It has no pretensions to be anything more, and the characters generally look as if they're having a good time (when not being tortured, threatened with death, etc.) Sabu plays the hero's mischievous sidekick without a hint of embarrassment and tends to steal every scene in which he appears. Lon Chaney Jr has presence. Maria Montez plays a naive South Seas islander and a power-crazed priestess with aplomb and smoulders out of the screen (her snake dance in a scintillating costume is definitely a memorable scene).Jon Hall makes an engaging romantic lead, though the plot suggests that the character is perhaps more honest than bright: his approach is generally to walk straight into danger and hope that circumstances will work out in his favour. Occasionally they do (this is the sort of film, after all, where you can walk straight into the inner sanctums of the palace after changing clothes with a high official, and nobody so much as notices) but generally he needs rescuing from the consequences! I wouldn't actually describe this an unmissable camp classic, not because it's too bad but because it isn't. It's a perfectly good piece of entirely escapist entertainment which was never intended to be taken seriously, and while it has zero emotional depth it's easy on the eye.

This film is far beyond camp and so bad that it is bad again! There are many bad films who are at least fun to watch, but not this. Although only 70 minutes long you feel every one of it. I was watching it at Vienna's International Film Festival and regretted it heavily. Kenneth Anger presented the film and that was the only entertaining thing about it. For the rest of the time I tried to decide what was worse, the acting, the dialog, the story or the outrageous costumes and sets. Robert Siodmak must have closed his eyes and ears during shooting this and hoping for a better chance, which he got. The three main actors were easily upstaged by a chimpanzee and even that one would have had a strong rival in his colleague from the Tarzan series.Maria Montez and Jon Hall did a fine job not to look into the camera while speaking that stupid dialog without laughing but that was about it. Sabu was even worse. I had to close my eyes several times when he was on screen. I don't need to mention that his role was degradingly racist, but he did nothing to show you that he had more sense than the role demanded.If this had come from a small studio of Poverty Row I would not talk about it at all. But this was a Technicolor production by Universal Pictures during WWII with an unusual amount of outdoor scenes. A lot of money went into the sets and costumes as well. I do suspect that not only Kenneth Anger saw this film in his early days, I believe so did Stephen Spielberg. The costumes, sets and some parts of the story reminded me of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom". But Spielbergs film had a definitely better screenplay and actors as well!

Even though this movie was somewhat kind of cheesy but the reason I was watch this movie cause I can't get enough of how beautiful Maria Montez is and it's too bad that she died at such a really young age cause she was the beautiful queen of technicolor.This movie is about Tollea and her fiance Ramu (Maria Montez and Jon Hall, respectivly) who are about to get married on their wedding day and Tollea is forced to go back home to her Cobra people to stop her cruel twin sister Naja's (also done by Maria Montez) wickedness and Ramu and his young buddy Kado (Sabu) go out and try to find her and Ramu mistook Naja as Tollea and as the Cobra law against strangers, they are executed and when the fire mountain gets angry, the people are sentenced to die without question.Overall if you love old cheesy technicolor movies then you should go watch this movie cause it is a clever way to spend 75 minutes of your time and it needs to be released on video and DVD, it's much better than watching most of today's junk. 8/10 stars