She Gods of Shark Reef (1958)

• Directed by Roger Corman
• Written by Robert Hill and Victor Stoloff
• Starring
  • Bill Cord
  • Don Durant
  • Lisa Montell
  • Jeanne Gerson
  • Carol Lindsay
• Produced by Ludwig H. Gerber

We now think of Roger Corman as a mover and shaker behind B-movies old and new, a canny producer and executive producer who knows exactly how much he needs to appeal to the lowest common denominator to turn a healthy profit. Even with his most well-known outings in the director’s chair, the AIP Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, he was the equally canny director who got the powers-that-be at AIP to fund what became a successful pseudo-franchise.

But it wasn’t always that way. He started out as an independent producer in 1954, but after he started directing the next year, he interspersed his own homegrown projects with some director-for-hire assignments handed to him because he was already known for bringing in a shoot on time and under budget. In particular, he was good at amortizing a shooting budget by shooting two features in the same location back to back, and that kind of dollar-stretching exactly describes the genesis of She Gods of Shark Reef. Along with filming Naked Paradise (1957) in Hawaii, AIP had Corman throw together another production from their script, a minor effort from screenwriters Robert Hill (best known for co-writing The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956) and adapting Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962) from a novel – how’s that for a sterling resume?) and Victor Stoloff (who contributed additional dialogue and other joint screenwriting efforts to half a dozen movies over a twenty-five-year period). The result is… well, it takes up celluloid. That’s about all you can say for it.

To start with: two men swim toward a dock. One is young and brown-haired; the other is older, bearded, and turbaned, and holds a machete in his mouth. They quietly creep onto the dock and wait for the armed guard on patrol, then the brown-haired man holds him while the turbaned man runs him through with the machete. They then creep into a warehouse on the dock, where crates hold mass numbers of rifles. But then – trouble! Another guard comes along, suspicious of the first guard’s absence, and discovers first his gun and then his corpse. The turbaned man jumps into the water and leaves the brown-haired man to grapple with the guard (who has apparently forgotten that the rifle in his hands fires bullets, and instead decides to use it as a club). The brown-haired man leaps over and swims to his getaway. Boy! How exciting! Do we know what’s going on? Not remotely!

“Boomsticks! Man, I love these things!”

The next scene, thus, provides bald exposition in the form of a hand pointing to spots on a map, and a voiceover from the brown-haired man. (Corman the producer often employed voiceovers as a last-ditch “fix it in post” measure.) The speaker tells us that he got away on a boat with his brother Chris, heading for Raratu where he can hide out in the underworld. However, the boat foundered on an unseen reef, and broke up. Cue stock footage of a sailboat in a lightning storm, and also stock footage of sharks. We’re going to see a lot of the latter.

Then to original footage: On very calm water, several outrigger canoes filled with women stop over a certain point in the reef, and several jump out. Two men are apparently entangled in the seaweed at the bottom (!), and the women free them. Given the small window of opportunity for rescue once a person goes down, and the change from a dark and stormy night to a bright and clear day… Well, it becomes clear that the attitude on the other side of the camera can best be expressed as “whatever,” and thus it’s well within the audience’s rights to adopt the same attitude.

The Hieratic Head of Tangaroa.

The two men rescued are the brown-haired man, now identified as Lee (Don Durant), and his blond brother Chris (Bill Cord) who owned the boat. There was also supposed to be another crewmember named Jim whom the women couldn’t rescue. Alas, Jim, we hardly knew ye.

At first glance, the island on which Lee and Chris are rescued seems to be an example of that great male fantasy, the paradise of nubile females. However, it turns out to be one of the least fantastic iterations of that trope. The island is owned by the imaginatively-named The Island Company; the young women who all live there were brought as orphans, their room and board given in exchange for their pearl-diving efforts. They are watched over by Pua (Jeanne Gershon), the severe house mother who expounds all this to the rescued brothers. Pua is also supposed to be native, despite looking as Hawaiian as my New York-born grandmother and speaking English, as all the girls do, with a grasp of grammar that lies between that of Cookie Monster and the Incredible Hulk.

Most of the girls are native Hawaiian extras who have no lines, but the notable exception is Mahia (Lisa Montell), the one who brought Chris to the surface and has a hankering for him. (No one similarly fixates on Lee after having rescued him.) The Company’s launch is coming in ten days and Pua plans to send the two men back on it at that time, but Lee figures his description will be common knowledge by then on the bigger islands and the crew of the launch will clap him in irons, so he and Chris look around for another means off the island, and with Lee’s encouragement, Chris cozies up to Mahia (not entirely for mercenary reasons – Mahia is the only girl who wears a belt around her lava-lava to show off her hourglass figure).

“Chris teach Mahia how to play kissy-face?”

So while Lee explores for a boat they can use to leave the island, Chris and Mahia start to get close. Pua starts disapproving right off the bat when Chris breaks his lei during a dance (a dance which comes after two hula dances and a Hawaiian bellydance routine – must pad pad pad!). Then when Mahia ignores Pua’s instruction to stay away from Chris and instead spends the next day kissing him and exploring the island¹, well, there’s only one way for Pua to maintain her control: The gods are angry! Specifically the god Tangaroa, represented by a stone idol sunk in the water inside the reef and worshiped by the previous inhabitants of this island. The only way to placate him is, naturally, human sacrifice, so Mahia and two other girls (who are really getting a raw deal on this) are tied, decorated with flowers, and carted out in outriggers to be dumped over the side to drown. Fortunately Chris sees what’s going on, paddles out on a surfboard-thingie, and rescues Mahia. (No mention of the other two girls; that deal is getting rawer all the time.)

Helloooo, boom mike!

Chris is now determined to take Mahia with them on their escape, which causes something of a rift with Lee. (It also tells me that Chris really hasn’t thought the arrangement through. Does he really expect a long-term relationship in the Western world with someone who consents to human sacrifice and speaks of herself in the third person?) Lee has also gotten a larcenous gleam in his eye, because hey – pearls!

Chris also explains to Mahia why they don’t want to stick around for any police attention: Lee was caught smuggling guns. (Is that what’s going on in the first scene? Because two guys swimming don’t seem like they could lift a lot of rifles from the guarded docks.) But, as Mahia astutely points out, Chris isn’t like Lee. For one thing, Chris is the blond one, and you don’t need me to explain to you the ethical implications of that.

Eventually it all comes down to an explosion of soap-opera tensions, instant changes from “We can’t leave now” to “We have leave now,” greed and paddling and tied-up old women. And yet somehow, it’s entirely dull. Too much footage is spent on travelogue panoramas or cultural exhibitions meant to pad the inadequate script out to a minimal 63-minute running time. The actors are unsuited for this kind of melodrama; Bill Cord and Don Durant are only slightly less stilted in their line delivery than the pidgin-spouting islanders. And there’s only so much editing can do to make footage of divers and unrelated footage of sharks appear to take place together. (Yes, there are some scenes with divers and sharks, but the sharks in evidence during those scenes are about the size of dogfish.)

Fact: There is no way for two grown men to fight underwater without looking totally gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Even the mighty Roger Corman can only polish a cowflop to a limited degree. With the script, the actors, and the location handed to him, he performed as professionally as he was able. He made a movie. His contract didn’t specify that it had to be a good movie.

A Notable Quotable:

”I save your life! I bring you here as little girl! I feed you! And this is what you do to me?”
- Pua to Mahia, AFTER she has already tried to sacrifice Mahia to Tongaroa

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 4
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0

1. That’s not a euphemism.[back]