Female Fiends (1958) User Reviews (13)

A neat idea that wasn't resolved very well.

[planktonrules · 5/10 · 18 December 2011]

The idea behind "Female Fiends" is pretty good, but unfortunately it's not nearly as good as it could be because of poor writing. Good idea--poorly written. That's pretty much the film.

Lex Barker plays a man who awakens to find he has no idea who he is. He's told that he's the rich heir to an estate and his memory lapse and injuries (he's in a cast) are the result of an accident. However, it's pretty obvious to the viewer that this is not true. But why?! Why would a bunch of people suddenly try to convince a guy he's a member of their family?! After a bit, Barker is suspicious and begins to dig. It's a nice idea--but it resolved almost immediately after Barker begins to dig!! The film is 68 minutes long and should have been at least 80 minutes. It seems quick--rushed even. And, as a result, it's only a time-passer and no more. Sad...as the idea was pretty good. Unfortunately, the film just doesn't do much with the idea.

Inferior amnesia film

[robert-temple-1 · 5/10 · 27 November 2016]

This film stars Lex Barker, who in 1949 became Tarzan in succession to Johnny Weissmuller and made a succession of Tarzan films. He was very tall, handsome, and impressive, and was in constant demand as a leading man in B films (he appeared in 81 films). He died at the age of only 54 of a heart attack in the street in Manhattan. He does very well in the lead role in this film, though the acting laurels go to Lisa Gastoni as 'Marny'. I have recently praised her as an underrated actress in my review of WRONG NUMBER (1959, see my review). Carole Mathews and Nora Swinburne do very well in their creepy roles also. As someone who likes amnesia films and tries to see all of them, I was disappointed that this one was so corny. Lex Barker lives between Nice and Cannes. He is attacked and knocked unconscious by a thief whom he picked up as a hitchhiker, and he suffers total amnesia. This is made worse by the fact that he has no identification on him as a result of the robbery. A doctor at the hospital says he knows who he is, and he takes him to a huge villa for private nursing. But this is all a scam, for Barker's amnesia is convenient in enabling the household of women there, together with the dishonest doctor, to persuade him that he is the head of their family. The motive is to pretend that he is that person in order to complete the process of inheriting a large amount of money and property. Then they would get rid of him. Barker slowly begins to realize that something is wrong, and the plot thickens. It is a pity that the film is not at all convincing, and is just a run of the mill low budget 'product' directed without a trace of inspiration by Montgomery Tully, who did a much better job the year before in directing THE HYPNOTIST (1957, see my review). In the 1950s, Tully was directing as many as ten films a year! No wonder they were not all good, as he had become a mere factory hand. He must have sleepwalked through THE STRANGE AWAKENING, without himself waking up. And I bet he had total amnesia for half the films he had made the year before. We can perhaps be forgiven for not knowing much about most of them.

Good cast but not enough tension.

[wilvram · 5/10 · 2 October 2022]

Recently read the book Puzzle For Fiends and was interested to see how this adaptation compared. The scene has been switched from southern California to the south of France, but the rich suffocating decor of the Friend's mansion is accurately conveyed and for a low-budget movie, veteran Wilfred Arnold's sets are notable. One of the characters describes the rest of the Friend family as fiends at one point, a play on words which accounts somewhat for the alternative title. Casting is excellent, but the script ignores the rivalry between the glamorous duo of Selena and Marnie and the question of who is the most devious, accounting for a considerable amount of tension in the book. And for such a wordy film the full significance of the importance of the poem reading before the hellfire cult leader for example, is not adequately put over. It's watchable, but the audience, the cast, and the art director deserved something amounting to more.

Forgettable movie about amnesia? Yes!

[secondtake · 1 August 2011]

Strange Awakening (1958)

First off: this is a bad B-movie with some fun quirks. That will thrill a few of you and chase the rest away. Good!

The plot, as improbable as it is, has some curious elements, the main one being, what would you do if you woke up and remembered nothing? And started to suspect that the people around you were creating a false history for you? And a few cracks in their story started to show? And you had two or even three attractive women loitering about? And there was a lot of money attached to it all? And your life was in danger?

Well, this movie comes at the nadir of Hollywood and British movie-making, and it's a horribly contrived formula movie that pales next to Twilight Zone and other B-movie dramas with psychological twists. Even the main character's last names are pushy: Friend and Chance, not to mention the burly Swede name Sven. The opening sequence where our hero picks up a hitchhiker and then gets whacked in the head by him is irrelevant, except for the whack. And the amnesia. Then the hospital scene, the mother (so-called) at bedside, and the realization that all is not right. But hey, there are those pretty girls, and one of them is bound to sympathize with you and fall into your arms, right?

And it's only an hour long. You might think of it as just an old t.v. episode where your expectations are different. It bustles along with mediocre acting, reasonable filming, crack editing, and some cool and brief montage effects (including an airplane propellor merging into a tabletop fan). And the original title, Female Fiends, is pretty good, though there are Male Fiends on hand, too (remember Sven).

Director Monty Tully isn't about to have a boxed set of his work, but it's great fun just to read the titles of all the movies he made this same singular year, 1958: The Diplomatic Corpse, The Electronic Monster, Female Fiends, Print of Death, Crime of Honour, The Crossroad Gallows, The Long Knife, Man with a Gun, and I Only Arsked! What a year.

Strange Awakening, here before you, isn't all bad!

But mostly. Enjoy it in proportion.

Both memorable and forgettable!

[robin-moss2 · 4/10 · 18 September 2005]

I saw this movie when it first came out and I was still a boy. As the IMDb has no information about the movie's plot or quality, I am appending a few thoughts although I remember very little about this film.

A man (Lex Barker) is driving a glamorous car in the south of France, and gives a lift to a stranger. When the stranger gets out, he does not close the car door and so the driver has to lean over to pull the door shut himself. As he does so, the hitchhiker clubs him with a cosh (or some such implement).

The man wakes up in a luxurious bed within a luxurious bedroom. A very good-looking girl (Lisa Gastoni) walks in and kisses him. He responds as any red-blooded man would but the girl pulls away, saying "That's no way to kiss your sister!" (or words to that effect). The man realises that he has lost his memory. He soon finds that he has an equally good-looking wife (Carole Matthews) and is the son of a rich man.

Although fifty years later I recall these scenes clearly, they are the only scenes I do remember about this movie, so "The Strange Awakening" is both memorable and forgettable!

(I apologise for the inadequacy of this review. If any other IMDb contributor submits a fuller appreciation, I will of course withdraw mine.)

Strange? Indeed – I woke up and found the film hadn't finished.

[getcater · 1/10 · 23 November 2009]

With films like this to his credit, it's surprising the name Montgomery Tully isn't better known. On the evidence of this and several others of his movies (Master Spy and Out of the Fog), Tully deserves to be ranked just marginally higher than the notorious Edward D. Wood. There's one important difference, though. Wood's films were so bad they're hilarious. Tully's are just bad.

Tully specialised in the cheap 'quota quickies' that did so much to damage the reputation of the British film industry, and Strange Awakening serves to illustrate exactly how that damage was done. It's dull, predictable, stagy, wordy, badly scripted and poorly realised in just about every department.

The film begins in France (oops, there goes the budget) where a man (Lex Barker) is saying his farewells to a woman in a preposterous hat (Monica Grey). Driving back from the airfield, Barker gives a lift to a hitchhiker (Richard Molinas) who subsequently attempts to steal his car. A struggle ensues and Barker rolls downhill, bumping his head on a tree and knocking himself out (this needs to be seen to be believed).

When he comes to, Barker's character is suffering from amnesia. He is in a luxurious house, where several women and a doctor (Peter Dyneley) are on hand to fill in the gaps in his missing memory. Barker is, it would appear, missing heir Gordy Friend, a well-known lush whose poet father is a leading figure in a temperance-styled society. Friend senior having recently died, 'Gordy' is required to sign a document and recite a piece of his father's intolerant verse in order to complete the transfer of the Friend estate. Ah, if only it were that simple...

To add further plot detail would be at the risk of 'spoiling' the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it (though it could be argued that Tully did a good enough job of spoiling the film himself, which consists mostly of protracted exposition and tortured plot contrivances). Whatever the merits of Hugh Wheeler's original novel (and I suspect they are few), Strange Awakening does not impress as a movie and would probably have been better left in out-of-print obscurity. Still, it's not likely to be bothering the TV schedules or DVD labels anytime soon, so you're unlikely to find your sleep disturbed by this turkey.

lousy B

[blanche-2 · 4/10 · 16 July 2019]

This British director was known for quota films, i.e., quick ones to meet the British cinema requirement. "Strange Awakening" from 1958 is one of these. But it's a British B movie and I can't resist them.

The film stars Lex "Tarzan" Barker, a tall, blond, and handsome American actor, who is attacked by a hitchhiker and wakes up in a hospital with no I.D. and no memory. He finds out that he is Gordy Friend, the ne'er-to-do-well son of a wealthy man who has just died a month earlier. He finds out that he lives in a huge mansion in the Nice/Cannes area, has a wife, a sister, and a mother.

It's a little suspicious because in the first scene, the guy's wife, Iris, leaves on a trip. So we know this is a set-up from the beginning.

It drags its way to an incomplete end. I mean, we know why he is impersonating Gordy, but that's about it. He knows his real name but does he remember who he is? And what about poor Iris? There is no indication that this character regains his memory.

The acting isn't bad - Nora Swinburne, Lisa Gastoni, and Carole Mathews acquit themselves well. Barker wasn't much of an actor. He was a popular Tarzan and later on became a huge star in Germany, where he eventually made his home. Never let it be said Arlene Dahl and Lana Turner didn't know a handsome face when they saw one - they were both married to him.

The Perfect Trap

[Equinox23 · 10/10 · 22 April 2017]

Like Gordon or rather Peter says: "There was only one fiend after all." - and it's almost too late when he discovers the truth. In retrospect it feels like she's been setting this up from the very first moment she meets him and executes it with cold precision. Definitely a wonderful little thriller even with some satirical barbs against teetotalers.

A 'B' with an ingenious and appealing plot is defeated by lacklustre writing and direction.

[jamesraeburn2003 · 1/10 · 31 August 2017]

Peter Chance (Lex Barker) is attacked and left out cold by a hitchhiker while driving in the south of France. He awakes and finds that he has amnesia and cannot remember who he is nor anything about his past. He finds himself in a palatial villa with three woman, Mrs Friend (Norma Swinburne), Selina (Carol Matthews) and Marnie (Lisa Gastoni) who claim to be his mother, wife and sister. They tell him that he is the son of meat packing tycoon and poet Charles Renton-Friend who recently died and has left him his estate worth $2,000,000. In reality, the son was a drunk who ran away when his father died of a suspected heart attack. It transpires that the father left strict conditions in his will that must be met before his estate can be passed over to his son. Selina and her lover, Dr Normand, saw the opportunity to prey on Chance's amnesia and pass him off as the missing heir to trick the executors of the will and get the money for themselves. However, when the police suspect that the father was murdered - the ensuing autopsy reveals digitalis poisoning - Chance becomes their chief suspect since it is believed he is the son. With Marnie's help, Chance sets out to clear his name by finding the real Charles Renton-Friend Jnr...

A second feature murder mystery drama with an ingenious plot, which is sadly rendered a complete dud by its completely lacklustre treatment both in direction and writing. Most of the action unravels on a single the set (the villa) so all the twists and turns of the plot are revealed in words by the actors in the manner of a dreary play with no dramatic flashbacks or action. The screenplay by J McClaren Ross, while undoubtedly having some good ideas, is far fetched and some of the plot's twists do not seem at all credible. The cast do what they can to salvage it (former Tarzan star Lex Barker is confined to a wheelchair for most of the film), but that they fail is no fault of their own. Only Philip Grindrod's camera-work and Wilfred Arnold's set design emerges with any credit with the villa giving the proceedings an elegant, exotic feel and, it must be said, more than what was necessary for a run of the mill picture like this. Director Montgomery Tully, a real stalwart of featurettes, co-features and b-pics throughout the fifties and sixties, did some impressive work with such films as the William Hartnell thriller Murder In Reverse (1945) and the excellent The Third Alibi (1960), but he could do nothing to lift this from poor to even average. Don't be fooled by the film's alternative title, Female Fiends, it is nowhere near as exciting.

I'd want to lose my memory with this family too.

[mark.waltz · 4/10 · 30 September 2022]

What kind of family takes in a man who may or may not have amnesia and try to convince him that he is the heir to their estate and was responsible for the death of the patriarch just before the accident? Lex Barker is driving on a curvy road when he picks up a hitchhiker and ends up being knocked out after a fight when The Hitchhiker attacks him while he's being dropped off.

The next thing Barker knows, he's in a gorgeous hillside mansion surrounded by a family he sure he's never met before. This clan of loons is led by stepmother Nora Swinburne (shades of Dame May Whitty in "My Name is Julia Ross"), and also includes fake wife Carole Matthews and sister Lisa Gastoni, in addition to a quack doctor, Peter Dyneley and a hunky Swedish muscle covered servant, Joe Robinson who speaks little English and can't really communicate with him even though he tries to tell Baxter the truth.

It's obvious that everybody is a mastermind of the plot, but somebody else is responsible for the deaths in the family. The plot is hokey and convoluted yet fun to watch unfold, and while the audience knows the truth about Baxter and his real life, the mystery becomes why Baxter was chosen to be involved in such a weird scheme. There are plenty of plot holes and ridiculous twists, but it's fun trash, like a dime store novel.

This could be considered a late film noir, since I've seen such stories in the classic genre going back to "Laura" and "Decoy". I certainly prefer "Strange Awakening" as the title over "Female Fiends" because that give the film a different connotation. Definitely worth a watch, but far from a good film. Put this one on the campy trash list.

Just watch the trailer

[malcolmgsw · 3/10 · 25 November 2018]

If you watch the trailer on the Network disc you will save yourselves about 77 minutes of boredom.There is so little action.When it does come it is filmed at night.Now that was fine if you were watching it in a cinema,but watching it on tv means you are peering at the screen.In any event the plot is a variation on a very old chestnut.

Combine stupid story bad acting with talkiness and you've got supreme lemon

[filmalamosa · 1/10 · 18 January 2013]

A British B or quota movie. Some of these are not too bad but this one rates a Z rather than a B.

The acting was atrocious it was wordy there were holes every where in the plot. Production values couldn't have been cheaper except for the burning house at the end which was kind of neat.

A man with amnesia is spirited out of hospital with fake casts to take the place of an alcoholic playboy so 3 women can inherit a share of their teetotaler father's 2 million dollars.

I can't think of any thing good about this thing... but as another reviewer stated it wasn't bad enough to be funny it was just boring dull and irritating. Combine bad acting and talkiness and you've got a real lemon.

DO NOT RECOMMEND

"Take It Easy, Snow White!"...

[azathothpwiggins · 8 August 2021]

Peter Chance (Lex Barker) picks up the wrong hitchhiker, winding up in an accident. Upon awakening, he suffers from amnesia.

Somehow, he's now a zillionaire named Peter Friend. He's "married" to Selena (Carole Matthews) and lives in a huge mansion with his other "family" members. Peter thinks the whole setup is fishy, but everyone else keeps trying to convince him otherwise.

THE STRANGE AWAKENING is a conspiratorial suspense thriller. Barker is good in his confused role, and the twisty finale is satisfying. Is it the best movie of its type ever made? Well, no. It is enjoyable enough though...