punishmentpark This is nothing special. The premise is fun enough for a cult flick, and the story is worked out neat enough, but it's mostly amateur stuff. Marlene Clark as the Cobra Woman is a pretty spectacular dame, though, and she shows a fair amount of nudity as well. Joy Bang is also a sight for sore eyes, and yes, she bares some as well.The story is a bit like "when Nosferatu came to the Philippines in the form of a snake", and it's entertaining enough. The horror of it all (aka the gore and stuff) is essentially pretty cool, but none too overwhelming either. Someone elsewhere on the net mentioned the hunchback as a very welcome addition to the film, but I only agree partially there. The nice backdrop of the Philippino nature, the village and the city streets is something that I'm more into, and there's plenty of that.A very small 6 out of 10.

Scott LeBrun Rather obscure production from Roger Cormans' studio New World is admittedly a curio. It's far from being an unsung gem, but it's just weird, atmospheric - and sad - enough to make for mildly interesting viewing. The truth is that not that much ever happens, and the pace is pretty slow. Most of the acting is pretty underwhelming - some of these people have a hard time getting their dialogue out - and the dialogue isn't too hot. The filmmaking is crude overall, but there is something that's still compelling about this trashy and schlocky material.Sexy Marlene Clark plays Lena Aruza, a nurse during WWII who ventures inside a Filipino cave, where she's bitten by a special kind of cobra and for the next 20 plus years is able to maintain her youthful appearance - and can change into a snake as well. Then along comes a young supposed snake expert, Joanna (Joy Bang) and her boyfriend Duff (Roger Garrett). Lena and Duff are drawn to each other, but when the pet eagle that he bought on a whim kills Lena's god / companion Movini, she must find alternate methods for looking young by playing up to horny young men.Clark, who gets to show off a lot of her body, is good, but most everybody else here is dull, although it's always nice to see Filipino icon Vic Diaz, who's cast in two roles. The music by Restie Umali is actually quite nice. The makeup effects are not too bad for whatever budget this movie must have had, and there is one amusing gag involving the shedding of skin.Worth a look for B movie addicts who like discovering little known oddities like this one.Six out of 10.

Michael_Elliott Night of the Cobra Woman (1972) * (out of 4) Really bad Filipino horror movie starts off during WWII when a nurse (Marlene Clark) walks into a cave and is bitten by a special snake, which makes her live forever as long as she has its venom. Flash forward several decades and the nurse has her snake killed by a studying student (Joy Bang), which means she now needs sex to live. NIGHT OF THE COBRA WOMAN is a really, really bad movie that has a few moments that are so bad that they at least keep you mildly entertained. I'm not sure where to start on this sucker because pretty much everything here is bad. I guess the lack of a screenplay could be the biggest issue because scenes just seem to happen out of nowhere and deal with things that really aren't necessary to anything else in the movie. The movie never makes a lick of sense and it appears that the producers were just making things up as they went along. Even worse is that the special effects are going to be some of the worse you've ever witnessed but these here do get some of the biggest laughs in the picture. Just check out the transformation scenes of the woman turning into the "cobra" and have yourself a good laugh. As far as the acting goes, it's clear that most people were never trained and if you check their credits it appears most never appeared in another movie. The best thing about lead actress Joy Bang is her name. Mrs. Bang would appear in a few notable films including PLAY IT Again, SAM but this here was certainly one of her only lead roles. Clark, who appeared in a few cult movies including SWITCHBLADE SISTERS, has several nude scenes, which certainly adds some appeal. The supporting cast members are all equally bad and forgettable. The film does offer up some cheap sex scenes and nudity, which might help keep some awake but there's really no defending a movie like this. It's beyond cheap and so poorly produced that you have to wonder what the entire point was.

Woodyanders Filipino fright flicks don't get much stranger than this singularly messed-up no-budget curio which treats its hilariously absurd story with an endearingly misguided conviction that proves to be as utterly engaging as it is weirdly engrossing. Granted, we're not talking unsung overlooked classic here, but this honey's peculiar enough to warrant a viewing.The ever-adorable blonde sprite Joy Bang (who had sizable co-starring roles in the lowdown funky early 70's drug deal items "Cisco Pike" and "Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues") is a perky, kooky, constant delight as Joanna, an eager beaver college biology student who treks off into the Filipino jungle to research rare breeds of snakes. Joanna brings her scrawny, charmless drip boyfriend Stan Duff (woodenly played by insipid string-bean Roger Garrett) along to keep her company. Unfortunately, Stan falls under the lethal and alluring spell of Lena (the busty, beautiful, frequently nude Marlene Clark of "Slaughter" and "Switchblade Sisters"), a sexy, slinky, slithery black snake goddess who has to regularly make love to a huge volume of dudes in order to retain eternal youth! Naturally, said guys wind up prematurely aging after they've enjoyed a night of carnal bliss with Lena. It's up to Joanna to find an effective anecdote to Lena's deadly venom before Stan meets a most horrid fate.If one can get past the admittedly asinine story, Nonong Rasca's crude cinematography, the jarringly choppy and abrupt editing, Restie Ulami's sleep-inducing score, the mostly flat acting, a deadeningly slow pace and lots of banal dialogue ("Doctor, I've really hit the jackpot with this venom"), "Night of the Cobra Woman" makes for an enjoyably quirky piece of high camp horror dreck. Chief among its strongest assets are the commendably straight-faced mood that treats the whole ridiculous story with utmost seriousness, plenty of choice nutty moments (after having sex with a guy a freshly rejuvenated Lena peels off her old skin and stuffs it in her purse!), Marlene Clark's sexy, often undraped, roll-your-tongue-up-from-off-the-floor smoking hot beauty, and, best of all, an oddly moving performance by invaluable trash movie treasure Vic Diaz as a pathetic, deformed, imbecilic mute retard victim of the irresistibly vampy villainess Luna (Vic also briefly appears as a Japanese soldier at the start of the film). It's a genuine pity that director and co-screenwriter Andrew Meyer, an eccentric talent who started out doing experimental underground features for Andy Warhol and died in 1987, next wound up directing the cheesy Lorne Greene insert sequences for "Tidal Wave," which was Roger Corman's terrible, truncated travesty of the epic Japanese disaster stunner "The Submersion of Japan."