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The opening credits announce the aesthetic, golden throne plus green smoke. Lang later provides the comparison with his Indian epic, Robert Siodmak bears the vision during the war, a calm Teutonic sang-froid on pulp delirium. Native maiden (Maria Montez) moons over her Yank fiancé (Jon Hall), her twin sister presides over the death cult in the nearby island. "No drug-soaked brain could dream up the horrors of Cobra Island, lad." The subterranean temple is equipped with pits of spikes, the high priestess in her spangled gown and stiletto heels receives the phallic serpentine deity. (A volcano in the distance supplies the angry reds necessary for completing the image.) The wicked usurper (Edgar Barrier), the expiring ruler (Mary Nash), the mute bodyguard (Lon Chaney Jr.). Tropical beauty carries its own terrors ("Music-maker also murder stick"), Sabu and Koko the sarong-clad chimpanzee to the rescue. "The Cobra Sword!" "Yup, I borrowed it. Handy little thing." Ripe Technicolor surrealism, practically a Las Vegas floor show amidst back-lot foliage, gratefully received by Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith. Rosy cheeks out of the "sacred pool," generous doses of She and The Wizard of Oz season the stew. Smack in the middle of this gaudy artifice, a cinéma-vérité portrait of the inept diva blissfully playacting, a queen in her own mind. "She cries for obedience to her laws, for more human sacrifices. Two hundred will walk the thousand steps into the fire of everlasting life. I have spoken!" The hallucinatory effect can hardly be duplicated, Hodges in Flash Gordon gives it a valiant try. With Lois Collier, Samuel S. Hinds, and Moroni Olsen.
--- Fernando F. Croce |