The Leech Woman
A mysterious old woman named Malla (Estelle Hemsley) who claims to have been brought to America 140 years ago as a slave approaches endocrinologist Dr. Paul Talbot (Terry) and promises to reveal to him the secret of eternal youth if he will fund her final trip back to Africa, so that she can be beautiful and young for one last night before she dies. Paul is unhappily married to the alcoholic June (Gray), who is 10 years his elder. Paul prefers younger women. "Old women," he says, "give me the creeps." They follow Malla to Africa and witness a secret ceremony of the Nando tribe that utilizes orchid pollen and a sacrificial male's pineal gland secretions. The secretions, extracted from the back of the neck via a special ring and mixed with the pollen, temporarily transform Malla into a young, beautiful woman (Kim Hamilton). After discovering that her conniving husband only brought her along as "a guinea pig who could talk," June takes revenge, choosing him to be sacrificed so that she can use his pineal gland extract to become young again herself, though Malla warns her that the transformation will not last long. She steals the ring and pollen, kills her jungle guide (John van Dreelen) and returns to the United States. Masquerading as her own niece, Terry Hart, she keeps herself young by picking up men and killing them for their pineal extract. But each time the potion wears off, she is older than she was before. As Terry, June quickly becomes enamored of her lawyer Neil Foster (Williams), a man half her actual age. She kills his jealous fiancée Sally Howards (Talbott), draining her pineal gland and eliminating Sally as competition. When the police come to investigate the murders that June has committed, she uses Sally's pineal gland extract but finds that it does not work because it is from a woman. Before the police can arrest her, she throws herself out her bedroom window, crashes to the ground and dies. When they see her body, it is much older and much more shriveled than ever. When a very old African woman offers an ambitious endocrinologist the secret of eternal youth, he decides to take his estranged and no-longer-young-and-beautiful wife along with him on the safari. But then she finds out the true reason for their sudden reconciliation is so that she can serve as his guinea pig.
