Weird Woman (1944)

The way you might feel while watching this one.

I am occasionally amazed by how bad a certain old movie can actually be. This would be one of them. While it kind of makes sense and you can follow the plot, the rest of this is pretty terrible. We start with one of those corny tropical island scenes with dancing natives that comes across as highly inaccurate and possibly politically incorrect and then it devolves completely into the most dramatic of melodramas.

Horror and thrills are pretty much nonexistent in this movie about Lon Chaney Jr. who does a couple of highly implausible things. First off, he is a professor for a university. Coming from somebody who actually knows somebody who will one day be a professor, having Chaney as one must have meant that back in those days standards were a lot lower than they are now. They make the mistake of having him attempt to have deep thoughts written down by a love smitten secretary, which not only sets up an annoying love triangle, but also comes across as kind of creepy since Chaney was at least ten years older than the girl and the girl really seems to come across strong.

This leads to the second big issue, which is that pretty much every female character in this movie not only finds Chaney to be attractive and dapper but also are all fighting over him for themselves. Chaney probably loved this movie. Who wouldn’t? But watching this movie was an entirely different matter and I hope this was the low point of this movie series because there are four more sequels and if things get worse we are in for a rough ride ahead of us with these.