If you like your camp amped, if you like your histrionics hyped, if you like your melodrama magnified, you cannot, you must not, go past the B-grade pearl of great price that is She Devil. This outré classic from the glory days of good-science-gone-bad movies, the 1950s, will have you asking that age-old question: what the hell? But there’s really no mystery about this movie. It’s a simple what if story, as in what if Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were written and directed by Liberace?
There Be Spoilers
Dr. Scott examines a drawing of a fruit fly through a microscope in his laboratory. A drawing? There must have been a miscommunication with the studio’s props department. A colleague, Dr. Bach, pays him a visit. Scott tells Bach he’s developing a serum from the fruit fly. He claims it will cure all diseases. So far it’s healed two guinea pigs of tuberculosis and mended a cat’s broken spine.
Scott injects Kyra Zelas, a terminally ill patient of Bach’s, with the serum. It cures her overnight. A nurse with the acting ability of particle board declares the healing a miracle. When Kyra receives a booster shot, Bach watches in amazement as the puncture mark vanishes before his eyes.
Bach invites Kyra to stay at his mansion. That way he and Scott can monitor the serum’s long-term effect on her. She accepts the invitation but stresses that she’s doing so only because she wants to. She then vows to get everything she’s ever desired.
The serum has just one side effect. Paranoid schizophrenia.
While browsing in a fashion boutique, Kyra sees a sugar daddy whip out a wad of cash to pay for an outfit his much younger wife wants. She demands he give her the money. Not willing to wait for a no, she grabs it and makes for the exit. He tries to stop her, but she scones him with a glass ashtray. The manager calls the cops. Kyra does what any clear-headed criminal would do given the circumstances: she hides in one of the changing rooms.
Two cops show up in world-record time. Anyone would think the police station was next door. Kyra overhears the manager describing her to them as a dark-haired woman in a cheap black dress. In an effort to disguise herself, she throws on an expensive white dress that by some remarkable coincidence has been left in the changing room. But what about her hair? As the cops bang on the changing room door, she gazes into a mirror and wills her dark locks to turn platinum blonde. Incredibly, they do. She emerges from the changing room a completely different woman. To the profoundly apologetic manager, anyway. Although to the viewer, she looks like the same ol’ Kyra, but with a dye job and a change of clothes.
Back at the mansion, Scott and Bach are amazed and aroused by Kyra’s sexy transformation. She claims she dyed her hair. Sceptical, Bach runs a test on some of her hair strands. It reveals that the color is natural pigment.
The next morning, Bach recognizes Kyra’s black dress from a photo in a newspaper report about the fashion boutique assault. He and Scott conclude that the serum has given her fantastic adaptive powers that enabled her to change her hair color to avoid being arrested. They confront her with their suspicions. She says they created her, so she’s their problem.
Later, Bach encourages Scott to create an antidote for the serum. They think they’re having a private conversation, but Kyra is eavesdropping.
Kyra approaches Scott when he’s working alone at his lab and tells him that he can forget about injecting her with an antidote. Why? Because she loves being indestructible! To prove her point, she lets a caged black panther claw her arm. Her bloody wounds vanish as Scott tends to them. Unable to contain the blazing furnace in his trousers any longer, he kisses her feverishly. They start getting it on until a censor yells “Cut!”
Bach holds a party at the mansion. He introduces Kyra to super-sleazebag Barton Kendall and his wife, Evelyn. Kendall doesn’t hide his lust for Kyra. He even makes a pass at her in the mansion’s garden, knowing full well that Evelyn is watching. Evelyn bitch slaps Kyra and calls her a trollop. She warns Kendall that she’s not going to put up with his damn philandering anymore. He wants a divorce. She says there’s no chance of her granting him one, because that would mean giving up the power and prestige that comes with being a Kendall.
Seeking payback for the slap, Kyra disguises herself by turning her hair black, then strangles Evelyn to death, somewhat unconvincingly if one were to nitpick.
Bach accuses Kyra of Evelyn’s murder. She confesses but cautions him that if he goes to the police, he and Scott will be charged as accessories to murder, since they’re to blame for her homicidal tendencies.
After thwarting an attempt by Bach and Scott to inject her with the antidote, Kyra packs her bags and leaves the mansion. The she devil is now emancipated!
The two scientists read that Kyra and Kendall are to be wed. Scott calls on Kendall and tries to talk him out of the impending nuptials, only to be scoffed at. The scoffing doesn’t let up as Kendall reckons that Scott is just jealous because he himself is madly in love with the smoldering vixen. Scott concedes that love, then storms off.
Some months into her marriage, Kyra complains to Kendall, whose blood runs amber, that she’s fed up with all the boring weekends they spend at his country retreat. He says his late wife was right about her, she is a trollop. She calls him a drunk. Furious, he pulls out a gun and plugs her in the shoulder. He immediately begs her forgiveness. Surprisingly, he gets it.
Driving Kyra to a hospital in his open-top sports car, Kendall counsels her to keep still lest her bullet wound starts bleeding again. She reveals that she has no bullet wound, then grabs the wheel and swings the car toward the edge of the mountain road they’re on. It sails backward off a cliff. The two dummies made up to look approximately like the car’s occupants earn every cent of whatever the film’s producers paid them. Kyra crawls out of the blazing wreckage, unharmed. Kendall isn’t so lucky.
Upon learning of the fatal—for Kendall—automobile accident, Bach and Scott determine to stop Kyra once and for all. They give the “grieving” widow an ultimatum. Either she lets them perform a procedure on her that will return her to normal or they’ll go to the cops with everything they have on her. She says she needs time to weigh her options.
Kyra and Scott reignite their old romance. She promises to make all his dreams come true, but only if he doesn’t give her the antidote and helps her murder Bach. Scott relays all this to Bach, who comes up with a plan to knock her out by making her stew in her own waste. No, not that kind of waste, carbon dioxide.
The plan works and they surgically remove her she-deviltry. Post-op, a heavenly glow forms around her, and her hair reverts to its original color. She regains consciousness. One foot already in heaven’s door, she murmurs to Scott that she loves him, then closes her eyes forever.
The film ends with Scott and Bach gazing at a portrait of Kyra that looks as though it were purchased from an outdoor market in Tijuana. “She was so beautiful,” Scott remarks.