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 * 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."
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