The pinnacle of Golden Age Hollywood B-movie kitsch. With her thick accent, doomed cult icon Maria Montez sashays her way through not one but two roles; one an innocent island girl (Tollea) with a mysterious resistance to cobra venom and her twin sister (Naja), the imperious ruler of nearby Cobra Island. It seems some of the oppressed islanders have kidnapped Tollea in the hopes that she will supplant her own sister as their queen. Aside from the cast of curious international players - (including Sabu, John Hall and Lon Chaney, Jr.) - highlights include Naja's hokey cobra dance and a climactic volcanic eruption; always a sign of unhappy gods. This is the kind of movie that most people will either find embarrassingly bad or so-bad-its-good, but it’s really neither; it’s an exceptional byproduct of a brief period in film history when movies could just be fun without being ironic and without apologies for their total lack of concern with realism. It’s like Disney’s Jungle Ride; the safe, silly plasticity of it all is a key to its allure and part of what makes it so enjoyable.
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