Sylvia Walton (Ida James) returns from Harlem to the islands to inherit a banana plantation. Her half-sister, Isabelle (Nina Mae McKinney), is none-too-happy about this and has taken to the hills and plans to scare her sister away with the use of voodoo. Sylvia is enamored with her conniving overseer (Jack Carter), but she has a second suitor in the straightforward John Lowden (Emmett ‘Babe’ Wallace). Unfortunately, Isabelle wants John, so that’s a second reason for her to get rid of her sister. Syliva also has a comic relief servant (Hamtree Harrington) from Harlem who can fill out any missing stereotypes, liking being a smalltime con-artist and loving dice.
The Devil’s Daughter is a remake, or perhaps a radical rethinking, of Ouanga (1936), and like its predecessor, it is a “race movie.” That is, it was a film with a mostly black cast and crew, intended for black segregated theaters, and produced by white-owned companies, the last insuring that the depiction of blacks was little better than in mainstream pictures. Also like Ouanga, it is cheap-looking and displays little in the way of skill from anyone involved. The shots are simplistic, the film stock’s inferior, the editing’s is crude, and the acting is amateurish.
It diverges substantially on story, enough that “inspired by” would be a more honest connection than calling it a remake. Gone is the mixed-race romance, both as a major plot point and as the motivation for action (John is black). This time it is mainly about sisters fighting over who runs a plantation. But for a horror fan, those aren’t the changes that matter. The big shift is that voodoo no longer has magic powers, so there is no curse and no zombies. Isabelle is only trying to scare her sister by pretending to have powers, and in the end, she isn’t willing to follow through and do anything drastic. That removes the horror elements, as well as any tension, though it isn’t as if Ouanga was actually tense.
There is some unintentional humor in a fistfight between John And the overseer. Of course they couldn’t afford a fight choreographer, so these guys just ran into each other and slapped and pushed and grabbed a bit. It’s close cousin is the Colin Firth/Hugh Grant fight in Bridget Jones’s Diary, but that was meant as comedy.
The one, and only thing of interest in The Devil’s Daughter is the great Ida James. No, she can’t act. She really can’t act. She is as bad as anyone I’ve ever seen on film. But she can sing. Not here, unfortunately. She was a jazz and pop singer, best remembered for working with the Count Basie Orchestra and Nat King Cole Trio. She was a familiar name to me and I was surprised to see her in this kind of dreck.