The Disembodied (1957)

Purely Joyful Movie!

Overrated and overhyped

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Two men and their guide, who are part of a crew filming in the jungle, rush an injured man to the nearest doctor, who just so happens to be an old white guy. The doctor reluctantly agrees to help. While the injured man recuperates one of the men, Tom (Paul Burke), becomes enamored with Tonda (Allison Hayes), the seductive young wife of the doctor. What he doesn't know is that the wife is secretly a voodoo queen. Tonda uses her powers and sexy ways to try to get Tom to kill her husband.Other reviewers say it's dull and maybe they're right. For me, I enjoy just about anything with Allison Hayes in it. As far as jungle thrillers go, it offers very little action. Wild animal attacks are referenced but never shown, for example. The natives appear to be a multicultural mix. Shapely B movie queen Allison Hayes is the whole show here. She connives and seduces her way through the picture. Cutie Eugenia Paul has the only other prominent female part. Paul Burke is forgettable. It's a nice little low-budget movie that fans of Hayes will enjoy more than most. Particularly her sexy voodoo dances.

****SPOILERS*** It's the evil but beautiful Tonda Metz, Allison Hayes, who's behind all the death and carnage in the film "The Disembodied" using her Voodood spells to get whatever she wants with the sole exception of white hunter & photographer Tom Maxwell, Paul Burke, who's on to her from the word go. Tom out on a photo shoot in the African jungle had one of those with him Joe Lawson, Robert Christopher, attacked and badly mauled by a lion who's needs medical help immediately or else he'll bleed to death. Finding a doctor in the house or jungle in Dr. Karl Metz, John E. Wengraf, Tom has him put under his care who doesn't think that Joe will survive the night. That's until Metz's wife Tonda starts to do her Voodoo on him that has Joe miraculously recover from his near fatal wounds by sunrise.Tonda who's been trying to unsuccessfully off her husband for some time sees in the handsome Tom Maxwell her ticket out of the jungle hell that she finds herself in. But as Tom soon finds out she's bad news and the kind of woman, as beautiful as she is, to keep as far away from as possible. With Tonda trying to win over Tom she uses her Voodoo to have his native guide Gogi, Paul Tompson, to be murdered by a self, no one seemed to have thrown it, inflicted flying spear as well as causing Tom's jeep to run out of gas. The biggest mistake that Tonda did was murder her helpless lover Suba, Norman Fredric, during a Voodoo ritual that his shocked wife native girl Lara, Eugenia Paul, witnessed! This in the end proved to be Tonda's undoing in finally putting her out of the Voodoo business.****SPOILERS**** It's when Dr. Metz finally discovers what his wife is up to that would almost turns out to be fatal to him. With Dr. Metz stabbed by Tonda and left for dead Tonda starts trying to frame Tom and his partners both Joe and Norman Adams, Joel Martson, for her husband's , who's in fact still alive & breathing, murder. The only thing that Tonda forgot was that the native servant Kabar, Otis Greene, witnessed the entire event and his testimony can clear them and indite her if her husband dies. It's the vindictive Lara who finally puts and end to Tonda's black magic just when she's about to use it on her rejected, by him,lover Tom. That's by breaking her spell over those in the movie the old fashion way: With a knife in her gut!P.S Check out Voodoo drum leader A.E Ukono doing his thing that's by far, in it being not more then a minute in duration, the biggest and most entertaining scene in the entire movie.

Fair jungle thriller set entirely on jungle sound stages with a native population consisting whites, blacks, Latinos and pacific islanders. The plot has something to do with the evil wife of the local doctor being a voodoo priestess and using her power to torment her husband while at the same time trying to pick up every good looking guy around. It might have been an okay film had there been any sense of realism, some decent performances or a script that at least explained why the wife was such a bitch. Mostly things just plod along at programmed rate until its appointed conclusion. Give it points for the priestess sexy dancing in dresses from Fredrick's of Hollywood, but take away more for a complete lack of caring anywhere else along the way.

This low rent dreary voodoo pic may be one of the dullest low budget horror/science fiction films from the fifties. The film is set in some nondescript jungle where a band of adventurers arrive at the remote jungle home of a "white doctor" and his native wife. The wife is always putting hexes on her doctor husband whom she hates, although the reason for her malice is never explained. The sets consists of a few cheap jungle sets, and the interior of the house. The native population is a strange polyglot mix of blacks, whites and what looks like Indonesians so often found in cheap jungle pictures. The only reason for watching this (other than if you are completest like me) is the presence of Allison Hayes, who looks gorgeous in a flower print sarong. THE DISEMBODIED is one of a handful of cheap Voodoo pictures made in the fifties. Most of these weren't any good, but some like ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU at least have a kind of campy, cockeyed charm that makes them appealing. THE DISEMBODIED is a film so dreary and uneventful that it is no wonder it is mostly forgotten today except by fans of the lovely Allison Hayes.