The Blood Drinkers

Marco The Vampire

The Blood Drinkers
aka Kulay dugo ang gabi
Directed by Gerardo de Leon
Philippines/USA 1964
Hemisphere Pictures/IIP/Severin
Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Spoilers rising up from the darkness.

Dr. Marco the vampire (played by Ronald Remy) is upset because his vampire lover is dying. He keeps her alive each day with transfusions from his blood machine (in addition to letting his gal bite him) until he can get her twin sister Charito (played by Amalia Fuentes), living on a nearby house in the community, away from her parents so he can kill her and put her heart in his lover. So Charito’s 'real mother' makes herself known to her, after her surrogate parents are killed by vampires (and later have big stakes driven through them by the good guys). The plot is in motion... can Charito’s new friend, who happens to also be a special police investigator, stop the eventual.. when they get around to it... butchering of his new girlfriend for her heart. Well the local priest, who also narrates the movie and sets himself up around about a third of the way into the picture as this story’s equivalent of Van Helsing, certainly hopes so.

There. That’s my quick story synopsis out of the way so you get some idea of what this film is about.

The Blood Drinkers is the second film housed in Severin’s nifty Hemisphere Horrors Blu Ray box set although, it’s actually a film made a year earlier by the same director as the first film in this set, Curse Of The Vampires (reviewed here). It’s also an even more entertaining movie and, after a brightly coloured opening credits section where blood is literally poured over the title card, we get a typical Hammer Horror style opening shot of a coach (a funeral coach in this case) being driven to through the woods to a destination... then followed by a modern automobile of the period. So it certainly invokes perhaps the spirit of the English studios but also immediately breaks away as something different.

Now, when Al Adamson’s producing partner Samuel M. Sherman, who distributed this picture through IIP, talked about this movie on one of the extras on the Curse Of The Vampires disc, he mentioned that Hemisphere had recently acquired colour film processing equipment but couldn’t afford to shoot a lot of things on expensive colour film stock... which gives rise to the curious but really most addictive quality of this movie. There are a few colour scenes scattered throughout, mostly the ones set in bright daylight. I’d say they total around 10% of the picture. The rest of the scenes such as the coach arriving from the forest trip at the start, are black and white film stock with colour tints, just like in the old silent movie days. I was trying to make sense of the colour changes as the film went through because, very occasionally you get a few seconds of purple tint in there but mostly it goes like this: The night time scenes are shot on black and white stock with a blue tint. The daylight scenes in colour. However, whenever a vampire (and there are many in the film) is shown on screen, the stock changes to a red tint on monochrome, regardless of whether it’s day or night. Later on, there are also a few colour shots of the vampires and shots of them in blue too so... I had to revise my understanding of the way colour works in this film about halfway through to... every time something ‘hostile and vampiric’ happens, it all goes red. I think. Either way, it’s a hugely entertaining use of colour and, I have to say, on the monochrome tint sections, the director manages to maintain a gothic atmosphere very well.

This is helped by a number of things but the shot compositions are similarly beautiful in this film and Severin have managed to preserve the 1:85 aspect ratio on this, really quite wonderful transfer. Throughout the director uses placement of people against cut out openings such as centre orientated open gateways with all the action taking place in the half open centre... or he’ll find other ways to create a lot of depth on screen. Such as using overlapping faces but at different sizes within a shot or use fixed sections of a shot to delineate different depths to it and have actors walking between the areas. It’s got some really great stuff in this film.

There’s no score credit but Tito Arevalo (who did Curse Of The Vampires) had a hand in this and the music is wildly enthusiastic again, like a Hollywood horror from a decade or two before. He gets really heavy handed with something that sounds a little like a high pitched theremin to denote whenever head vampire Dr. Marco is using his hypnotic mind control on people.

And Dr. Marco is great. I’d seen Ronald Remy before in one of the Blood Island pictures (reviewed here) and not really paid much attention to him but here his screen presence is quite astonishing. He really commands the screen, even when saying the corniest lines and he really looks the part too, with his bald head and dark glasses in certain shots. Some time he’s wearing a full on Dracula cape and at other times he looks more sporty in a jumper. The bald head is probably a contributing factor but, to me, he looked the dead spit of a young Telly Savalas in this.

Let me also point out Eva Montes in her role as Tanya the vampire. She is basically one of Dr. Marco’s assistants (along with a hunchback vampire and a dwarf vampire) and she doesn’t have a lot to say but she’s in a lot of scenes and she’s the epitome of a ‘tall, dark and gothic’ beauty. She really lights up the screen when she’s on, looking like a bride of either Fu Manchu or Dracula throughout the running time. She also has an interesting demise after Dr. Marco escapes to vamp again at the end but is forced to leave her behind... as she takes a lighted candle stick and stakes herself through the heart in an act of suicide. Well, technically she’s already dead so... vampicide?

Lovers of the ‘so bad it’s good’ school of film appreciation will also have a lot to love about the picture, including a cobbled together attempt at a Ken Strickfaden style machine to help the vampire blood transfusions which... well... it doesn’t come close. All in all, though, I have to say I found The Blood Drinkers to be a nicely made film which, yes, has its ridiculous moments but you can really see a lot of effort was being put into this one to make a tip top product for the Filipino audience. I’d definitely recommend it to people who like the old 1930s/1940s vampire movies and I could absolutely watch this one periodically, if I had the time. Splendid stuff.

Curse Of The Vampires

Vamp About
The House

Curse Of The Vampires
aka Blood Of The Vampires
Directed by Gerardo de Leon
Philippines/USA 1965
Hemisphere Pictures/IIP/Severin
Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Big story spoilers here...
if you’re worried about that kind of thing.

Curse Of The Vampires, aka Blood Of The Vampires, is a movie that, while it’s supposed to be set in Mexico, is actually shot in the Philippines and is one of many films in which the company Hemisphere partnered up with Samuel M. Sherman and Al Adamson’s IIP (Independent International Pictures). Indeed, for the same people, Al Adamson directed a movie especially made to look like a Filipino movie which played on double bills with this film, which was Brain Of Blood (reviewed here).

Curse Of The Vampires is the first film in a five movie boxed edition called Hemisphere Horrors, a kind of companion set to their wonderful box set, The Blood Island Collection (reviewed here). In fact, the director of Curse Of The Vampires, Gerardo de Leon, directed the first three of the Blood Island movies in that box.

Curse Of The Vampires is a simple story. Leonore and Daniel, played by Amalia Fuentes and Romeo Vasquez, are lovers. They want to get married but Leonore’s father forbids it. He is also in very poor health and when he is discussing his will, his son (Leonore’s brother) Eduardo, played by Eddie Garcia, overhears that he has changed it so that when he dies, the big mansion house he and his family live in should be burned down to the foundations. When the distressed Eduardo enquires about this, we learn the father’s secret and the reason why he worries about his daughter marrying anyone...

The father takes Eduardo through his ’special secret door’ behind a big painting of his dead wife. In the dungeon below, his wife has turned into a vampire, who sleeps in her coffin at  night. By day she tries to fulfil her blood lust, which is why the father and his faithful man-servant, one of many servants in the house who are Filipinos made up in black face, keep her chained up for her own good. He doesn’t want his daughter to marry because he assumes she will inherit the curse of vampirism. When his daughter also discovers this, she understands why she should stop seeing Daniel, who seems to stand around a lot of the time in the film just brooding and scowling at people.

Now, the inevitable happens and the mother gets free a couple of times. Eduardo is bitten by her and turned into a vampire (unknown, as yet, to the father). She nearly bites her daughter when she is asleep but, as in the traditional vampiric tales, she is afraid of the cross that Leonore wears around her neck. However, she gets loose and the father and man servant have no option but to destroy her. The manservant grabs a huge fencepost and stakes her with it (off shot but we then see this blooming, oversized fence post with the girth of about three arms sticking out of her in the next shot), before they burn her. The film is, given the pedigree of the director and some of his future films, quite bloodless, for the most part.

Eduardo, in his new vampire ways... rapes, vampires up and then marries Daniel’s sister. When his father realises he is a vampire, the shock is too much for him and his heart gives out. Daniel decides it is a good idea to kill Eduardo and gets in a fist fight with him but is held back by Leonore. A short time later, Eduardo sabotages the coach and horses that Daniel and Leonore decide to elope together in. It goes crashing over a cliff and Daniel dies from his injuries. Leonore survives and calls to Daniel, who comes to her aid a couple of times as a spirit before Leonore too is vamped up... along with almost the entire household of servants. He even gets into a sword fight with Eduardo and he definitely has the advantage because, being a ghost, he can teleport himself around the room. However, Daniel’s ghost stakes Leonore with a candlestick, freeing her from her curse. They both meet in the shadowy realm of the afterlife to be together again, while the villagers burn down the mansion and all the vampires in it.

And it’s a surprisingly watchable movie. And, like a couple of other of this director’s films, shows a certain talent for making interesting pictures which hold the attention, even though nothing much happens in them. It feels dated, though. And I don’t mean dated for now but dated for the time it was released. It’s curious the way the film handles the material in the same kind of fashion an American director would have handled it in the 1930s. It seems a little hokey and overly simplistic for 1965. The musical score by Tito Arevalo is actually quite wonderful and I would buy a CD of it in a heartbeat if it ever had a commercial release (it won’t). It has to be said, it further pushes the film into the past as the score is typical of a monster movie made in the US in either the 1940s or 1950s. It’s kind of appropriate to the material but very big and bold and, yeah, just seems a little too energetic for horror films of the period. There’s also something which sounds a lot like a theremin on the score towards the end... another reason why I’d love a recording of this, to go with my other albums which feature that particular instrument.

The films is scanned and presented by Severin from what they say are the best materials. According to the IMDB (which I’ve found is often wrong about a lot of things anyway), the film is supposed to be in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The print here is in 4:3 but, looking at the trailer which IS presented in 1.85:1, everyone looks a little too in  your face and cropped in the cinematic release ratio. I’m pretty sure this must be an open matte transfer and, to be honest, I noted how good some of the compositions in the movie were for that ratio... so I wonder if the director knew it would be cropped down for a widescreen format and made allowances or not. I’ll probably never know, I guess but, I suspect it played in 4:3 in some cinemas too.

And that’s me done with Curse Of The Vampires (which also comes with a 20 minute featurette where Samuel M. Sherman discusses his relationship with Hemisphere). The dialogue is terrible and, yeah, some of the actors are pretty bad too. But it looks great and it held my interest for way longer than a film with this kind of sparse story content should be expected to do. So, yeah, the next film in this set is The Blood Drinkers from the year before, directed by the same guy. So I’m looking forward to that one.

The Blood Island Collection

Sangre-La

The Blood Island Collection
Severin Films Blu Ray Zone A
Comprising Terror Is A Man, Brides Of Blood,
Mad Doctor Of Blood Island and Beast Of Blood

Well, I have to admit I’d never heard of the Blood Island movies until Severin released this very limited boxed edition with restored prints and transfers. However, the fact that a series of films have been made all set on the titular location and, in the case of two of the films, sharing a character or two while featuring unbelievably silly monsters mixed with brief snatches of nudity, all of which were totally unknown for me... proved too much for my curiosity. When I saw that the third movie also included a soundtrack CD of the film which you couldn’t get anywhere else, well... that was the clincher. So, I found someone in the UK who was able to import it without having to shilly shally around with those completely ridiculous US/UK postage rates and got access to these things... well, relatively inexpensively.

To be honest, judging from the trailers I’d seen, I was expecting sheer stupidity and ‘so bad it’s good’ awfulness... the kind that gives you a warm, comfortable feeling in your tummy... but, as it turns out, I was in for a bit of a surprise when I put the first disc on...


Terror Is A Man
1959 Philippines/USA
Directed by Gerardo de Leon and Eddie Romero

Okay, so Terror Is A Man is made almost ten years before the sequel (and I use the term sequel loosely here... I’ll reveal why later on) and it’s the only one shot in black and white. It started off absolutely up to my expectations for the first ten seconds or so by running a card before the movie which read thusly...

Warning
The picture you are about to see has a scene so shocking that it is necessary to forewarn you. We suggest that the squeamish and faint-hearted close their eyes at the sound of the bell and reopen them when the bell rings again.
The Management.

I love good showmanship and the silliness of this hoopla quickly brought a smile to my face. After this, the film starts off with a shot of a map showing the Isla De Sangre in relation to everywhere else and, as far as I can tell, this is the only time this map is seen throughout the four films. This is followed by a shot of a boat carrying an unconscious man pulling up to Blood Island. The guy is called William Fitzgerald, as played by Richard Derr. He is rescued by a small party of scientists on the island, including Dr. Charles Girard (played by Francis Lederer) and his wife Frances (played by Greta Thyssen) who seems to dominate the screen with prominent bosoms that threaten to pop out and endanger the rest of the cast at any moment. Indeed, when she goes to bed, she kind of sets a trend for all Blood Island women in future films... by kinda frolicking and moving in a bizarrely sexual way that suggests masturbation, even when she’s literally just trying to get to sleep. I don’t know who taught her how to do this but I must learn this trick some time.

This film is surprising in that it’s not only quite entertaining, in a story that finds Fitzgerald observing and helping out the doctor who has been operating on a panther and slowly turning it into a beast man over the years, but also quite well put together and realised a little more subtly than I was expecting. It’s quite obviously a remake/sideways adaptation of H. G. Wells’ classic novel The Island Of Dr. Moreau but I have to say, it’s actually pretty good and, easily, the best of the movies in this set. If this had been made just ten years earlier during the classic Hollywood era of films like the Universal Monsters movies and Val Lewton’s productions then this may still be celebrated as a classic to this day. It’s moody and interestingly lit and doesn’t look out of place among those other films I just mentioned.

Although sometimes it’s a little too well lit, it has to be said. There are a fair few ‘night for day’ shots which really do show up in the worst way.

That being said, musically the film is well ‘spotted’ in that it’s not wall to wall and scenes which don’t really require music are not over cooked. There’s also some skillful camera work here with some oddities such as a POV from the monster’s perspective suddenly transforming into a third person view when the creature pounces. I could, however, have done without the terrible dummy somebody suddenly transforms into when he is thrown over a cliff and ditto that bell when it finally rings to warn the audience at what is, literally, a one or two second shot of a scalpel bloodlessy attacking tissue during an operation. However, this is not a bad movie and I was surprised by the quality of this one.


Brides of Blood
1968 Philippines/USA
Directed by Gerardo de Leon and Eddie Romero

Okay, nine years later we have a ‘sequel’, Brides of Blood, which is not really promoted as such and, indeed, never once refers to the previous movie. This one proves to be a totally unsubtle experience and absolutely what I was expecting from these movies, to be honest. And that’s not a bad thing either.

Opening with a small group of scientists on a ship en route to Blood Island, we have a fairly unsympathetic leading lady (one of two female protagonists) who is shunned by her husband, the main scientist, and engages in an activity on the boat going from non-consensual rape to fully consensual sexual activity in that strange way that only old movies seem to be able to pull off as something even approaching plausibility or acceptability.

This film includes some nicely gory moments as, for instance, the local natives are taking dismembered bodies away to be thrown into the sea... somebody drops a quite realistic looking leg. When the scientists arrive to study the effects of ‘atomic bomb tests’ near the island from years earlier, they become the guests of another ‘Western’ man in his mansion on the island. Of course, atomic radiation means the writers can get away with almost anything in this film and asides from the gratuitous ripping away of young, sacrificial maidens' bikini tops at regular intervals throughout the film, we have a forest consisting of deadly, groping tentacle trees, the marvellously ridiculous looking monster whom the said young maidens are being sacrificed to and a terrible looking butterfly which bites one of the scientists, even though you can clearly see the wires on it as it flaps about the set in a supposedly deadly fashion.

We also have some scenes of midget whipping and a sexed up lady who must have studied at the same school of seduction that the lead actress in the first film did, as she sexily fondles the vertical pole of her four poster bed. And, alas, some more terrible ‘day for night’ shots in the film and, much worse, the impression that characters are wandering from one place to another at different times of day as they go somewhere and five minutes later it’s night and then day again and then back to night, as the cameraman presumably forgets to put his filter on during some sequences. Time certainly flies on this island, that’s for sure.

The film is silly, terribly made fun and finishes with a native dance ritual which, in terms of enthusiasm and length, is not unlike the one seen near the beginning of Caltiki, The Immortal Monster (reviewed here). This is an interesting ritual in which lady dancers attempt to attract a mate and then take them back into the forest to a place which I can only assume is an area called The Snogging Trees.


Mad Doctor of Blood Island
1968 Philippines/USA
Directed by Gerardo de Leon and Eddie Romero

Next we have another sequel, Mad Doctor of Blood Island, which in no way refers to the prior film in that it takes place the very next year in the same location but has an entirely different set of natives and absolutely no stories about the scientists who were staying there the year before.

In another burst of showmanship, audience members are invited to drink a vile looking green liquid and recite the ‘green blood oath’ before the opening credits so they come to no harm during the film.
Also before the credits we see a naked lady being chased by a blood island monster and, whenever it’s in the vicinity, the audience does indeed get harmed by some awfully rapid zooms in and out of random frames. And, unfortunately, this is the modus operandi of the cameraman throughout the majority of the movie... this one really made me dizzy, it has to be said.

Once the credits are done, we once again have a vessel containing strangers to the place approaching the island. This film is all about Dr. Bill Foster (played by John Ashley), Shelia Willard (played by Angelique Pettyjohn) and their acquaintances as they try and thwart the scientific curiosity of the titular ‘mad doctor’, who is once more involved with unleashing beasts on the island. In his lab he even has some of the ‘moving forest’ in what is pretty much the only echo of the former film.... although there is also another ritualistic dancing scene that could almost have been lifted from Brides Of Bloood, including ritualistic snogging, once more.

This film is... well it’s not very good and even the fear of radio signals which the creature in this one seems to demonstrate as some kind of sonically allergic reaction appears to have no real function in the final narrative. I was glad when the ‘mad doctor’ was finally burned to death in his scientific compound, to be honest. And that brings us nicely into...


Beast Of Blood
1970 Philippines/USA
Directed by Eddie Romero

The fourth film starts off with the boat carrying Dr. Foster and co away from the island in the previous movie. Yes that’s right... this is the only one of the Blood Island movies which is actually up front about being some kind of sequel to the prior movie. On the boat, a random creature who stowed away at the end of the previous adventure... and I’ve still no idea where this monster at the end of the last movie came from, by the way... attacks the crew and passengers leaving Dr. Foster, again played by John Ashley, the sole survivor. When he goes back to the island a number of months later, he has a troublesome reporter in tow by the name of Myra J. Russell, played here by Celeste Yarnall.

With some friends and acquaintances, they go on a boring but deadly chase across the island to find the location of the mad scientist from the former film, who turns out to have not burned to death after all. Indeed, the experience seems to do wonders for his health. For instance, he has a beard, some terrible scarring down half his face and an eye patch but, miraculously, he also seems to be a lot thinner and a much different age from the scientist we saw previously. I guess that the actor bearing no resemblance to the previous guy playing the role can only be a good thing then.

Although this is the least interesting or fun film in the series, it does have its moments. For instance, when Dr, Foster and a group of people are exploring the previous ‘Mad Doctor’s Lair’, things look mighty dangerous and possibly booby trapped, so he tells everyone to “Stay close”. This is apparently a call to arms for Celeste Yarnall to back away from the group completely, get as far away from them as she possibly can without even trying... and then spring a trap door. This woman has no common sense. There’s also a nice moment when the mad scientist is talking to a severed monster head he is keeping alive in a dish while he operates on its body, when he tells him, “Believe me, I know how difficult this must be for you.”

All in all, though, Beast Of Blood is the least watchable of the series, which has lots of long cat and mouse sequences where various parties are stalking each other through the forest... which makes it all seem a little like an extended 1970s Tarzan or Planet Of The Apes TV episode for a while. Just not very fun.

That being said, the whole bunch of prints from Severin are amazingly restored here (yeah, these look like they were only shot the other week) and have various extras accompanying these excellent transfers. I’m really glad that I bit the bullet on this one and picked it up because the first two movies, at least, have some replay value and I’ll probably end up rewatching all of these at some point. I haven’t listened to the soundtrack yet but The Blood Island Collection is a truly nicely put together package of some films which might have died a death had not Severin stepped in to restore them. I guess it must have paid out for them too since the box was a total sell out. Much as I hate this new business model everyone seems to be latching onto at the moment... where everything is a limited edition so you’d better get one quick... I have to say that this one was definitely worth the price of admission. Give this one a watch if you get the opportunity.