“The snake poison flowing through my blood… what will it do to my unborn child?!”

It’s Northumberland, 1890… although you’d never know it given all the mad accents being attempted by the cast. If not informed by the title card where (roughly) we are, I’d have been assuming this film was set in some undiscovered Narnia which shared its borders with Scotland, Manchester and the Home Counties. And had a micro weather system which makes it the perfect habitat for snakes more usually found in much hotter climes (unlike the actual Northumbria, which is generally fucking freezing). But I digress. As I feel I may yet continue to do while I take a saunter through this oddity.

Dr Horace Adderson (John Cazabon) is happily milking the venom of snakes in his laboratory and then injecting this bounty into his pregnant wife (Dorothy Frere). Why? Because she used to be mentally ill, apparently. But, and this is the clincher, what about the unborn baby? Well, thereby hangs this tale.

The milking of a snake, all on screen, has taken a considerable amount of time – certainly more than was strictly necessary, especially given the film’s short run time. It’s a warning (in case one was needed when choosing to watch a film called “The Snake Woman”) that we’re likely to get a few more of these time-filling shenanigans to pad things out a bit. Luckily, we will find that what happens in between the occasional longeurs more than makes up for it.

So, establishing that for the benefit of this story that snake venom injected directly into the patient cures mental illness and doesn’t just kill them dead, we come to the birth. To the sounds of a shepherd playing an anachronistic snake charming pipe outside (why? No idea - apart from being a major plot point later on), Martha (for tis the unfortunate mother’s name) suddenly realises that her husband’s pre-birth medical regime may leave something to be desired (“The snake poison flowing through my blood… what will it do to my unborn child?”) pops out a cold-blooded, unblinking baby, takes one look at her progeny and promptly expires.

The local medical doctor (as opposed to snake expert) Dr Murton (Arnold Marie), brought in to oversee the birth, looks on as the actor playing the midwife (Elsie Wagstaff) decides that enough is enough and she’s going to spice things up a bit with a wild-eyed performance that, to her credit, she continues for most of the rest of the film.

“It is evil!” she pontificates. “It is the devil’s offspring!”

This appears to be the point for everyone else to throw subtlety out of the window as well and start giving it the full beans, performance-wise.

As the midwife decides on an unorthodox approach to newborn care and attacks the baby with a knife before running off to the town to corral a torch-wielding mob, everyone else ignores the dead Martha and concentrates on their own problems (not the last time this plot-expedient lack of empathy over the recently deceased will be in evidence).

Dr Murton smuggles the baby past the mob and the villagers proceed to lay waste to the laboratory (as torch-wielding mobs are wont to do). It appears we may be missing a plentiful supply of energy production by ignoring snakes, because apparently they burn like billy-o.

“There’s something strange about a man consorting with wicked reptiles like these!” froths the previously quite mild-mannered publican, as the anarchy continues – at a scale which suggests a few tongues may have been in their cheeks during the production. There’s certainly a macabre sense of humour running through proceedings, alongside a definite lack of acting ability on the part of most of those involved.

Speaking of inert performances, once the destruction has finished and everyone has re-retired to the pub, Adderson (who has just lost his wife, daughter, home and collection of snakes, remember) nonchalantly surveys the still-flaming ruins, picks up a dead snake as if to check if it has any juice left in it, and then gets bitten by a still-alive one. So that’s the end of him, then.

Meanwhile, Murton has left the baby with the pipe-playing shepherd, because he “has to leave for Africa tomorrow morning” (like you do). He returns 20 years later to find that the shepherd has brought the girl up into adulthood, but has now misplaced her somehow. (Just work backwards – where did you see the cold unblinking adult woman last? That’s where you’ll find it, probably, I dunno. It’s what I do when I can’t find my keys).

The doctor is further informed that the ruins of the laboratory are now believed by the villagers to be haunted by the ghost of their dead owner, now in the form of a giant snake.

Just in case you’d missed this fact, it’s now 20 years later – and the moors around the village are positively rife with snakes which, one assumes, escaped when the villagers themselves decided to break open all the snake tanks during their ill-advised destructive rampage.

Every so often someone falls into the pub suffering from a fatal snake bite, and everyone else reacts like the moors aren’t rife with the snakes they themselves let out. In fact, everyone reacts like it’s a massive surprise that people are getting bitten at all.

But the latest death does at least prompt a visit from Scotland Yard, in the form of handsome young idealist Sgt Prentice (John McCarthy).

He pals up with local voice-of-reason Colonel Wynborn (Geoffrey Denton), who is another snake expert, having spent time abroad. And between them they begin to piece together the “facts”, first by giving a recap of the entire film thus far.

The midwife, Aggie Harker, is still around (surprisingly, given she looked about 100 two decades ago), and still turning it up to 11. She’s all about the voodoo these days, as she foams on about killing the snake woman using a doll, but also that she can’t do it herself because she was too close when the baby was born (being a midwife will do that).

Prentice, armed with gun and snake charmer’s flute, has already been out on the moors, and met the snake woman (Susan Travers), but hasn’t put two and two together and appears to have just assumed that she’s simply a bit of totty who can’t get enough of his amateurish toots on his flute (not a euphemism).

So Aggie moves the plot along a bit by using her voodoo to make the snake monster now vulnerable to three bullets (not two, or four, but three).

“There, this is done. The curse is broken by science!”

(We’ll gloss over that)

The deaths by snakebite continue, as does the general surprise that they’re happening. And Aggie reveals a hitherto-unrevealed psychic ability to know exactly where the Snake Woman is, which may have been handy earlier.

As you may have surmised from the above, The Snake Woman is an absolutely classic. If you like that kind of thing (not snake women, I’m talking about “this kind of film”, eg shit ones with a certain special something). The ending is both entirely predictable and brilliant, which I think you’ll agree is a rare triumph on the part of the filmmakers.