Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970)



Original movies directed by Al Adamson are bad enough, but his hodgepodge flicks, assembled from pieces of films for which Adamson bought the rights, are even worse. Sci-fi/horror embarrassment Horror of the Blood Monsters demonstrates why. To repurpose scenes from a black-and-white Filipino movie about cavemen fighting supernatural monsters, Adamson shot some new material and contrived an incoherent story about Earth sending a space vessel to a distant planet as a means of combating extraterrestrial vampires, or something like that. The picture opens with a lame vampire attack shot in a soundstage, then transitions to ground-control scenes featuring black curtains as backdrops, and eventually to spaceship sequences with the production values (and performance quality) of a high school musical. To mask the monochromatic nature of the Filipino footage, Adamson provides dialogue about mysterious radiation that changes the color spectrum, and the black-and-white stuff appears tinted green or red or whatever. The monsters in the recycled scenes are ridiculous, flying bat-winged little people, real lizards photographed in forced perspective, underwater crab creatures, and vampires whose fangs look like pieces of chalk. Adamson’s new scenes aren’t any better. John Carradine spews pointless exposition, a buxom blonde looks confused while, thanks to iffy dubbing, another actress’ voice emanates from her mouth, and so on. At one point, the technicians at ground control stop supervising the emergency space mission so they can make out and play with a color-spectrum gun, resulting in yet more tinted shots. Alternate titles for this crapfest include Creatures of the Prehistoric Planet, The Flesh Creatures, and Vampire Men of the Lost Planet.

Horror of the Blood Monsters: SQUARE

5 comments:

  1. Aw man, I remember this mess. This is as desperate as they get.

    ReplyDelete
  2. One of the joys of visiting this blog on a regular basis is seeing the movie posters, many of which I've never seen before. In this case, the poster is by comic book legend Neal Adams, a fact likely more shocking than anything that appears in the film. It's funny that the "bat demons" seem to have the same receding hairline as Batman villain Ra's al Ghul.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's why the poster looks so cool! All it lacks is a heroin addicted Speedy.

      Delete
  3. Neal's poster is definitely the only redeeming value of this flick. Speaking of the man who helped make Green Lantern meaningful (no small feat), while I can't decide whether Neal's finest moment as a movie-poster artist is "Grizzly" or "Westworld," it's shocking how many one-sheets for awful movies he did...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Neal Adams made his own film back in the early '80's, which I remember reading about in the late, lamented magazine "Cinefantastique"; I think it was called "Nannaz" or something similar to that.

    ReplyDelete