B-movie beauty Evelyn Ankers, so often the likeable heroine, plays the bad girl for a change, as a jealous ex-lover who doesn't take kindly to being rejected. When Professor Norman Reed (Lon Chaney Jr.) returns from a trip to the South Seas with island hottie Paula (Anne Gwynne) as his wife, college librarian Ilona Carr (Ankers) schemes to make the married couple's lives a misery, causing Norman to be blamed for the suicide of a colleague and for the accidental death of a hot-headed student. Wicked Illona also plots to scare superstitious Paula with menacing phone calls.
Part of Universal's 'Inner Sanctum' series of thrillers based on a popular radio series, Weird Woman is a fatuous piece of melodramatic hokum -- dressed up with a little voodoo and jungle magic to try and appeal to the horror crowd -- that expects the viewer to believe that Lon Chaney Jr. Is a total fanny magnet, with hot women falling at his feet. I can barely accept Chaney as an actor, let alone as the object of desire for so many babes. Even more unbelievable than Chaney's sex appeal is the final act, in which Carr is tricked into believing that she is under a voodoo curse and will die if she doesn't confess her crimes. From cool and calculating to totally irrational and fear-stricken, it's all very silly, and ends with a fitting demise for the wicked woman that suggests that supernatural powers have been in play all along, despite Norman's affirmation that magic and voodoo are pure nonsense.
Part of Universal's 'Inner Sanctum' series of thrillers based on a popular radio series, Weird Woman is a fatuous piece of melodramatic hokum -- dressed up with a little voodoo and jungle magic to try and appeal to the horror crowd -- that expects the viewer to believe that Lon Chaney Jr. Is a total fanny magnet, with hot women falling at his feet. I can barely accept Chaney as an actor, let alone as the object of desire for so many babes. Even more unbelievable than Chaney's sex appeal is the final act, in which Carr is tricked into believing that she is under a voodoo curse and will die if she doesn't confess her crimes. From cool and calculating to totally irrational and fear-stricken, it's all very silly, and ends with a fitting demise for the wicked woman that suggests that supernatural powers have been in play all along, despite Norman's affirmation that magic and voodoo are pure nonsense.