Spurred on by the success of ARABIAN NIGHTS (1942; see my comments below), Universal reteamed its star trio of Jon Hall, Maria Montez and Sabu (but also villainous Edgar Barrier) in a handful of other exotic adventure pictures with this one, directed by German stylist Robert Siodmak, being the best-known. The latter had just scored a success at the same studio with the atmospheric SON OF Dracula (1943) where Lon Chaney Jr. had donned the proverbial vampire cape and he engaged the horror star yet again for COBRA WOMAN as the benign giant protector of the good Montez. The latter adjective is appropriate since the actress has a dual role of twin sisters the rulers (one rightful, one usurper) of an island where the Cobra is worshipped as a deity!
Jon Hall and Sabu are adventurers who reside in the mainland and, respectively, love and have befriended the good Montez (unaware of her royal lineage). The evil sibling had been tyrannically ruling over her people with a decidedly unwelcome penchant for sacrificing a great number of her subjects to the Cobra god; this springs Chaney into action who (dressed as a blind, pipe-playing beggar) kidnaps the good Montez in order to replace the deadly queen. Hall and Sabu do not waste time in following them to the island where they witness the latest fashion in 'snakedancing'! These sequences which are aplently, despite the film's lean 71-minute duration, are both corny and embarrassing never more so than when the King Cobra (real for the close-ups and a fake and hilariously overgrown one for the long-shots) is carried in a golden platter to do the honors personally!; the rubber snake shots here are about as bad (perhaps even more so) than the similar ones in Fritz Lang's latter-day entry into the exotic sub-genre, THE Indian TOMB (1959).
The film is extremely handsome to look at and reasonably entertaining while it's on but, in hindsight, could have been a lot better and thus rather unworthy of both its director and considerable reputation as a camp classic; the late British critic Leslie Halliwell hit the nail squarely on the head, then, with his memorable assessment of it "A monument of undiluted hokum"!
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