This is nothing special. The premise is fun enough for a cult flick, and the story is worked out neat enough, but it's mostly amateur stuff. Marlene Clark as the Cobra Woman is a pretty spectacular dame, though, and she shows a fair amount of nudity as well. Joy Bang is also a sight for sore eyes, and yes, she bares some as well.

The story is a bit like "when Nosferatu came to the Philippines in the form of a snake", and it's entertaining enough. The horror of it all (aka the gore and stuff) is essentially pretty cool, but none too overwhelming either. Someone elsewhere on the net mentioned the hunchback as a very welcome addition to the film, but I only agree partially there. The nice backdrop of the Philippino nature, the village and the city streets is something that I'm more into, and there's plenty of that.

A very small 6 out of 10.

Filipino fright flicks don't get much stranger than this singularly messed-up no-budget curio which treats its hilariously absurd story with an endearingly misguided conviction that proves to be as utterly engaging as it is weirdly engrossing. Granted, we're not talking unsung overlooked classic here, but this honey's peculiar enough to warrant a viewing.

The ever-adorable blonde sprite Joy Bang (who had sizable co-starring roles in the lowdown funky early 70's drug deal items "Cisco Pike" and "Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues") is a perky, kooky, constant delight as Joanna, an eager beaver college biology student who treks off into the Filipino jungle to research rare breeds of snakes. Joanna brings her scrawny, charmless drip boyfriend Stan Duff (woodenly played by insipid string-bean Roger Garrett) along to keep her company. Unfortunately, Stan falls under the lethal and alluring spell of Lena (the busty, beautiful, frequently nude Marlene Clark of "Slaughter" and "Switchblade Sisters"),a sexy, slinky, slithery black snake goddess who has to regularly make love to a huge volume of dudes in order to retain eternal youth! Naturally, said guys wind up prematurely aging after they've enjoyed a night of carnal bliss with Lena. It's up to Joanna to find an effective anecdote to Lena's deadly venom before Stan meets a most horrid fate.

If one can get past the admittedly asinine story, Nonong Rasca's crude cinematography, the jarringly choppy and abrupt editing, Restie Ulami's sleep-inducing score, the mostly flat acting, a deadeningly slow pace and lots of banal dialogue ("Doctor, I've really hit the jackpot with this venom"),"Night of the Cobra Woman" makes for an enjoyably quirky piece of high camp horror dreck. Chief among its strongest assets are the commendably straight-faced mood that treats the whole ridiculous story with utmost seriousness, plenty of choice nutty moments (after having sex with a guy a freshly rejuvenated Lena peels off her old skin and stuffs it in her purse!),Marlene Clark's sexy, often undraped, roll-your-tongue-up-from-off-the-floor smoking hot beauty, and, best of all, an oddly moving performance by invaluable trash movie treasure Vic Diaz as a pathetic, deformed, imbecilic mute retard victim of the irresistibly vampy villainess Luna (Vic also briefly appears as a Japanese soldier at the start of the film). It's a genuine pity that director and co-screenwriter Andrew Meyer, an eccentric talent who started out doing experimental underground features for Andy Warhol and died in 1987, next wound up directing the cheesy Lorne Greene insert sequences for "Tidal Wave," which was Roger Corman's terrible, truncated travesty of the epic Japanese disaster stunner "The Submersion of Japan."

Meet Cobra Woman 1972, not looking "for da Cobra jewel", but facing eternal life after being bitten by the deadly firebrand snake, a supposedly extinct relative of the cobra. She's Marlene Clark, a pretty nurse whose power over the snake can bring back life yet take it away to keep her youthful and eternal. Along comes Joy Bang, a student researching rare serpents, and her venture into the Philippines jungle results in an adventure she didn't count on, especially when she encounters the hopeful immortal Clark.

Bang threatens her immortality by preventing her continued supply of venom by keeping her immortal which sets Clark and her boyfriend Roger Garrett (whom Clark has bewitched into doing her biding) on a journey to retrieve a bottle of venom which Bang took to experiment with. This leads to bizarre twists that takes this down paths that the writers of "Cobra Woman" could never dream of and into camp lover's heaven.

This outlandish mix of tropical adveture and horror is a delightfully fun if proposterous film more memorable for its wild sets and wacky minor characters (including an obvious half wit mumbling a bunch of uninteligeable nonsense while hopping around with Page's feathered hat. The colorful sets and weird situations add to how delightfully fun this is to watch, not really memorable for its acting but the presence of the gorgeous Clark is unforgettable. She is definitely influenced by the Cleopatra legend in her characterization, and is the highlight of the film's weird characters.