The seductive and refined horror picture stars Rufus Sewell, Carla Gugino, and Gil Bellows. ‘SHE CREATURE,’ says the narrator. It is a great combination of eye-popping graphics and good, old-fashioned storytelling to create a terrifying tale of mermaids and mayhem, complete with special effects by renowned monster builder Stan Winston. She Creature is a television movie from 2001 that depicts mermaids as monsters. The film was the first of a planned trilogy called The Mermaid Chronicles.
Our protagonist mermaid is portrayed as a vicious and unnatural seductress who draws men to their graves in a particularly brutal and terrifying manner in this rendition of “She Creature” which combines traditional mermaid mythology with ancient Greek siren myths.
The image sets the tone: a gloomy castle, with an older woman gray-haired on freezing pebbles, lugging a flickering candle in a semi-artistic fashion, as it opens in black-and-white. Its aesthetic eccentricity is palpable as it uses a first-person camera angle to represent the victim being attacked with bursts of crimson color and a close-up of a bleeding eyeball.
Editing like that, which frequently uses fade-outs to move the plot or, more plainly, to avoid recording expensive sequences, is one element that gives away the low-budget, made-for-TV feel. The eventual result is a mediocrely successful film. Director Sebastian Gutierrez creates an unsettling atmosphere, despite the fact that the film is not a masterpiece.
With dramatic features and delicate cosmetic effects from the Winston studio, Rya Kihlstedt’s portrayal of the mermaid is terrifying. The plot twists and turns and the ending is suspenseful. The main issue might be Rufus Sewell’s accent, which alternates between Irish and working-class British, whereas Carla Gugino’s is far more understated.
Beautiful, Seductive And Totally Deadly – She Creature (2001)
Woolrich shows the skeptics, the young girl that he has trapped in a big tank in a rear room of his home to pique their interest. They think she’s an actor like Lily at first, but the huge chains, smooth skin, webbed appendages, and period of time she goes underneath make them believe that she’s a real mermaid.
Angus and his employee Bailey sneak back to Woolrich’s house to steal her in order to add the monster to their performance. Woolrich succumbs to a heart attack during the act of stealing. Angus, is stunned but undeterred, he continues regardless and takes his treasure and makes a ship for America, where he will introduce her to adoring audiences. However, the mermaid’s terrible powers lurk in the ship’s depths.
A carnival barker fills a tent for the circus freak revelation of a “zombie” from the West Indies, and the scene shifts to a trashy little carnival. Our zombie becomes enraged after being provoked by a protester in the audience, threatening to shoot the viewers before succumbing to the siren call emanating from another neighboring tent, where a mermaid is housed in a glassed-in tank.
Of course, it’s all a hoax, a cheap but effective bit of stagecraft again for a gullible crowd. Still, it piques the interest of an obviously drunk old man, who comes back after the carnival has shuttered down, only to discover that the “mermaid” is a fake, nothing more than a lovely English actress Lillian having to put on a sideshow.
He sobs and Lilly persuades Angus to take the bereft old man home in sympathy. That eerie cliffside house. We’re finally getting there. Capt. Woolrich, the elderly man, invites him in to explain himself, and we learn that he thought the carnival was actually hiding a genuine mermaid… and that all he wanted to do was warn them of the perils, such a creature actually represented.
Until he confesses his secret, our pair is doubtful of his stories of hazardous sea animals and the famous “Forbidden Isle” of the mermaids. He has a genuine mermaid, the one who murdered his beloved wife, locked right here in this mansion.
The mermaid is revealed to be extremely real, imprisoned in an armored half-cage/half-aquarium tank for circumstances that are never fully explained. Angus immediately sees the money signs when he learns what skipper Woolrich has, but Lilly is both enthralled and terrified by the sultry inhuman captor.
Angus proposes to purchase her so they can take her to America when he believes the sensation would make him and Lilly extremely rich. Sobering up, Woolrich says that he’ll never sell her, that all he wants to do now is watch her fade away in the tank.
Despite Lilly’s best efforts to persuade him to abandon his plans, he returns to Woolrich’s estate with several other carnies to attempt to take the mermaid. Capt. Woolrich dies as a result of a heart attack while committing the crime, but they’ve all gone too far and down that path to forsake the reward now.
So a short nighttime excursion to the harbor, a little ransom money in the proper hands, that our little circus troupe is off to America, the mermaid covertly carried onboard to the cargo area, some stupid narrative regarding Woolrich changing his stance about the purchase, and Lilly completely unaware.
As the expedition progresses, Lilly begins to think that their aquatic captive’s strange silent beauty hides more than meets the eye. She begins to experience frightening nightmares and an unexplainable increase in her libido, which has uneasy resemblances to Mrs. Woolrich’s diaries, which Angus claims to have purchased from the Captain together with his study on the mermaid tail.
In her dreams, Lilly confuses her own life with the mermaid, watching Miles’ horrifying death in a silly dream, only to then be awoken by a disturbance on board as the company arrests the mermaid attempting to flee to the sea.
She would’ve made it if she hadn’t been bizarrely inebriated. Angus manages to calm things down by striking a bargain with Captain Dunn to hold the crew in order in exchange for allowing him to keep the mermaid instead of sending her overboard to appease his men. He still feels that his riches are contingent on his reaching America and showing her to the rest of the world.
Lilly reads Mrs.Woolrich’s diary, and she discovers that she felt the mermaid was conversing with her psychically, as well as that her presence had had an unsettling reproductive impact on her, resulting in Mrs. Woolrich being pregnant at her age. Lilly discovers this to be far too true. she’s been childless because botched alley abortions went horribly wrong. Still, she soon develops morning sickness, and then all the symptoms of having unexpectedly produced a kid.
More individuals perish, and it becomes clear that the mermaid has used her mental siren powers on the crew as well, prompting Captain Dunn to change the ship’s route and head for the Forbidden Isles of the Mermaids which is their breeding waters. With the Forbidden Archipelago’s dangerous rocks ripping at the ship’s hull, she turns once more from a quivering fragile maiden to a huge scaled beast with sharp claws and has the power of ten men.
Everyone eventually dies. Our mermaid wasn’t just any ordinary siren; she was the mythical monster “Queen of the Lair,” an all-powerful matrilineal queen of the mermaids, tasked with the task of locating a suitably big number of casualties to feed our mermaids offsprings. Something along the lines of Mrs. Cthulhu, if you will. Lilly is saved at the very end for reasons that are once again hazy.
She is subsequently discovered as the sole survivor onboard the abandoned ship, amidst the chaos. Our narrative comes to a close with her voice-over, explaining to the listener that she protects their secret out of respect for the Queen, and possibly more.
“I think she ate him!” says the narrator. Despite the fact that the siren is unreliable, mysterious, and acquires elongated limbs each full moon, intuitive, and cannibals, the majority of the plot is on the beast’s mental effect over Lily, who is pushed into performing the monster’s bidding even while losing her hold on reality. The corpse count is modest, and the pacing is sluggish, but the subject material is treated with a lethal gravity that serves to obscure the plot’s simplicity.
She Creature – The Mermaid
The mermaid, portrayed by Rya Kihlstedt, is always topless, and the cameraman never seems to mind. This is probably a good thing since it provides a welcome diversion from the drab language that appears to exist only to connect special effects sequences or terrifying jump scares.
Fortunately, the gruesome sections aren’t too horrible, with the Stan Winston Studio’s stunning makeup and prosthetic work aiming for something along the lines of “Species.” With dreams of fame and fortune flashing through his mind, Angus kidnaps the mermaid and takes Lily to America aboard a boat. The mermaid, however, is not as placid as she appears, and crew members begin to inexplicably vanish.
Why should you watch She Creature?
She Creature’s premise is intriguing enough a murderous mermaid slaughters a whole crew but it’s not enough to sustain a full film. Nothing much happens for the first hour and fifteen minutes. Gugino finds herself just on the receiving end of the mermaid’s telepathic broadcasts when we learn that she can connect with anybody she wants through a psychic link.
This results in Gugino loitering about the chamber in which the mermaid is imprisoned, either casually conversing with her or pleading for her not to go kill any more people. Let’s admit it, with a name like She Creature, all we really want is a badass moment.
This one surely provides a dark and terrifying counterpoint to more romantic mermaid visions we normally see in movies. This one was a big hit with Neko. It’s a simple picture with a small budget, but it’s done well to optimise its appearance and successfully convey its tale. It’s well-made, well-acted, and oh-so-atmospheric. Only a few minor storyline flaws raise their ugly heads, but they have little bearing on the overall enjoyment of the picture.
I just hope that other films were as well-made as this one. Mermaid murdering a bunch of people. But that isn’t the case for us. She Creature,is a Cronenbergian look at horrors of a human body set at the start of the twentieth century, tells the story of a telepathic murderous monster with the unique power to procreate female humans.
Carla Gugino and Rufus Sewell act as low-rent carnies who come upon a real-life mermaid who lives with an eccentric elderly guy who enjoys making intricate mermaid mythology narratives. Sewell and his ragged circus troupe capture the mermaid and try to get her to America, but the procedure is hampered by the mermaid’s insatiable appetite and her telekinetic relationship with Gugino.
She Creature is a tasty, low-calorie snack for a mindless night in front of the television. Sewell and Gugino play it honestly, while moistened beauty Kihlstedt puts in a lot of effort in the unenviable role of the mute eponymous menace. The first hour does have a wonderful old-school Hammer Horror vibe to it.
After that, it’s just a generic monster chasing through cramped passageways. She is entertaining enough, swimming around evocatively, it could never set sail if the sailboat had as many flaws as the writing.
Sebastian Gutierrez’s exquisite, restrained directing complements the unexpectedly sharp material, and he’s helped by a fantastic cast, especially Rya Kihlstedt as the fascinating, savage, otherworldly mermaid. It’s unclear where the Creature Feature franchise goes from here, and it’s off to a fantastic start.