Horror Of The Blood Monsters

Crusty Asian Crustaceans

Horror Of The Blood Monsters
USA/Philippines 1970
Directed by Al Adamson
(plus various, I guess)
IIP/Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Horror Of The Blood Monsters is the next film in the wonderful Severin Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection Blu Ray boxed set I’ve been watching but, to paraphrase a great writer, this must be some strange usage of the word ‘masterpiece’ of which I was previously unaware. This film is easily one of the worst movies I’ve seen and, I can tell you, I’ve seen some real clunkers in my time.

The film stars what seems to be the magic triangle of Al Adamson’s regular cast around this time, John Carradine, Robert Dix and the lovely Vicki Volante and, out of the three of them, Carradine seems to be the only one really doing a good job of it although how, with the dialogue they have here, anybody could attempt to make this work is beyond me. Dix and Volante did a pretty great job in Five Bloody Graves (reviewed here) and you wonder how their acting took such a nose dive that they got to this. The only other member of the cast worth talking about is Joey Benson, who actually does a brilliant acting job despite a script filled with science fiction techno-babble that doesn’t in any way reflect real life. You may remember him from Psycho-A-Go-Go and its subsequent recuts as Fiend With The Electronic Brain and Blood Of Ghastly Horror (all of which I reviewed here) and it’s a shame this guy was only in a few movies because, of all the actors here, he’s the one that most deserved to go on to better things. I think.

The film itself is an Al Adamson patchwork job. He liked an unreleased Filipino movie directed by Rolf Bayer called Tagani from 1956 (goodness knows why) so he bought the rights out of his own pocket and shot a load of new footage (at least half of this movie, maybe a bit more) to add to it, creating a new storyline which is both ridiculous (that is to say, even more ridiculous) than the original and that also doesn’t really hold together that well as a single, focused through line. He also added footage from some other films as well such as Man And His Mate and Unknown Island but, well, if there was ever a case for less is more then maybe this film would go some way towards demonstrating that idea.

Okay, so somebody in distribution must have wanted a horror picture because the first five minutes of Adamson's footage is about vampires on the streets and, although the IMDB seems to have the plot summarised pretty easily, I can’t say I came away with an impression as to why it’s here at all, other than to say the vampires (one of whom is Adamson himself, in a cameo) come from another planet and are bringing their disease of blood drinking to Earth. If they’re meant to resemble any of the creatures in the spliced in footage from other films well... it would be a huge leap of faith, for sure. There are no real vampires on the planet on which our ‘intrepid crew of explorers’ end up journeying to, apart from... no, I’ll save that bit for later.

So John Carradine leads a crew, including Bishop, to another planet to inspect the Spectra Solar System he has discovered. At ‘mission control’, Robert Dix and Vicki Volante communicate with pseudo-scientific babble and keep tabs on the crew. Actually, let me tell you about mission control for a minute because, frankly, most of the time it’s a static photo of the backs of two actors' heads from another film while a television screen image of the one or other of the crew are either superimposed onto or, possibly, just showing through a TV shaped hole in the picture. This then doesn’t match in any way with the single shots of the front of Dix and Volante’s heads as they talk their space race drivel when cut to. They are both seen head and shoulders only with some kind of black drape cloth behind them and, if I said this is worse than anything you can expect to see in an Ed Wood movie then, yeah, maybe you’ll get some idea of what this movie is like. The two are never seen in the same shot at the same time in their mission control setting, which makes me think that there was only a small amount of black backdrop to go around and they both just filmed their scenes sitting on the same stool in a photo studio.

However, when a couple of completely random scenes of Dix and Volante having tame sex are inserted for, from what I can make out, absolutely no reason whatsoever, they do at least share a screen. And a bed. And also this is the one time you might get a sense that this film is supposed to be set in our future as the two have ‘future sex’, which means they roll around kissing but have electrodes fitted to their heads with bright lights and beepy sounds. At one point, one of them confesses to making love in the ‘old way’ but, honestly, I’m past caring by this stage. And if I’m not even interested in the sex scenes in a movie, well... they’ve really lost me.

Meanwhile, the heroes have reached the planet and their footage is intercut and merges seamlessly with footage about two warring tribes on a prehistoric Earth, some of whom have tusks for teeth and look just like the three beast-men Buster Crabbe fights at the end of episode one of the 1936 serial Flash Gordon (which I reviewed here). But, you know, a lot worse. And when I say seamlessly, well... there were traces of irony and sarcasm to be found in that sentence I’m afraid because... okay... so did I mention that the footage from Tagami is in black and white. So, when our crew get to the planet they are also in black and white but... drive-ins wanted colour movies for their shows so everybody on the planet (other footage included), are tinted in different colours throughout like an old silent movie... which is somehow explained (or attempted to be explained) by the fact that the atmosphere of the planet emits some kind of chromatic radiation which means everything looks like hand tinted monochrome that constantly changes from red to green to yellow etc. Um... yikes.

Anyway, our crew rescues a slave girl called Lian from one of the warring factions, played here by Jennifer Bishop and, yes, of course her footage doesn’t match up with the Filipino movie she purports to have come from. Of course, she speaks alien but, that’s okay, because John Carradine’s professor character talks in the radio from their spaceship and instructs the away team on how to do a quick bit of minor brain surgery and place a translator device directly into Lian’s head. Lian is none the worse for wear from this invasive procedure (she doesn’t even need any of her hair shaved) and can now, of course, understand and speak perfect English.

And then there’s more shenanigans including some kind of crab men, some flying bat ape men who, well they have to be seen to be believed and kind of bounce rather than fly but, yeah... I’m sorry to say that both these ridiculous beasts, along with some truly pathetic looking men-in-suit tyrannosaurs (worse than you could possibly imagine in their saggy costumes) in no way save the film and turn it into a ‘so bad it’s good’ kind of experience. They are highlights in a very weak production it’s true but, no, this film gets beyond saving very quickly and I have to wonder why this was even accepted for distribution (something like 5 years after it was in the can, to boot).

I don’t know how people like uber cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond got work with a regular studio after working on ‘filler’ material like this but, well, I guess nobody must have looked at his CV that closely and, in an age before the internet, I guess it was fairly easy to hide your involvement in projects such as this one. You know, it’s funny but every time I see a touch of promise in the films of Al Adamson like Psycho-A-Go-Go or Five Bloody Graves, he then comes out with something which is some of the most terrible rubbish I’ve ever seen, like Horror Of The Blood Monsters. Once again, though, I am grateful that Severin have made stuff like this available to us and, as usual, they’ve done their best to save this with a great transfer from what must have been a shoddy print. So, yeah, I shall continue my occasional journey through their Al Adamson box set as the weeks go on. The man worked in a lot of different genres, it would seem.

Blood Of Dracula's Castle

 

Blood Bank

Blood Of Dracula's Castle
USA 1969 Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Okay, so the next film up in my mammoth exploration of the beautifully put together Severin box set, Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection, is... Blood Of Dracula’s Castle. And, it’s a surprising one because, after Psycho-A-Go-Go (reviewed here) and Five Bloody Graves (reviewed here), I was coming around to maybe thinking that Adamson wasn’t just a director of trash and was actually an unsung genius and, you know, as I go through this set more I may find that to be the case. However, this movie is truly an argument for the opposite conclusion.

It starts of nicely enough with Vicki Volante as an unnamed character driving her open topped car through roads cut into what looks like a half desert, half forest kind of environment, to the sound of a pretty simplistic pop song. However, she turns out to be a not so intelligent character when she discovers she’s not filled her car with enough petrol and it runs out, stranding her in the 'desert forest'. So she gets out and goes to try and find help, walking slap bang into... a thuggish brute called Mango, who works for Mr and Mrs Dracula... who lease a castle just nearby. She gets chained in their cellar, along with a bunch of other young ladies, so Dracula’s butler, played by John Carradine, can slowly syphon off their blood, day by day, to pour into wine glasses for Count Dracula (played by Alexander D'Arcy) and Countess Dracula (played by Paula Raymond) to sup from. So, yeah, they have their own little blood bank in their cellar.

Immediately following the abduction of the gal by Mango, we cut to a bunch of dolphins and the two main protagonists of the movie. Here we have Glen (played by Gene Otis Shane), who is a professional photographer taking shots of his model fiancé  Liz (played by Jennifer Bishop). There are a lot of shots of Seaworld while Glen takes pictures of Liz in various costumes and poses as she cavorts with sea lions and such like. The only reason I can think all of this padding is in here is because Seaworld must have been relatively cheap to hire and so they wanted to get some substantial footage shot there. Anyway, while they’re at Seaworld, Glen gets a message handed to him because, yes, you would get a stray telegram or post handed to you while you’re out visiting Seaworld, right? Um... okay, ignoring this new rumple, the message says that Glen’s Uncles Tom has died and left him his castle in his inheritance. So Glen and Liz decide to go off to visit the remote castle to live there (because, of course a model and photographer who are living in the city where their jobs are would want to go off to some remote spot hours away from civilisation and live there). However, they are a little worried because Uncle Tom’s castle has been rented to an old couple for the past 90 years (so Tom never lived there then?). You can see where this is heading, right? When they do get there a bit later in the ‘story’, the couple don’t look as old as they expect and, that’s because they’re really hundreds of years old vampires, of course.

Meanwhile, as they make their way through the same desert/forest roads that Mr. and Mrs. Dracula’s last victim took at the start of the movie, Dracula has arranged for ‘friend of the family’ Johnny, played by Robert Dix, to be 'released' from prison where he’s serving time for being a crazy, homicidal lunatic. There’s a cameo from director John 'Bud' Cardos as the prison guard under Dracula's pay who asks Johnny to hit him over the head to make his escape look realistic. Johnny does him one better, getting to like it after the first hit and then bashing his brains in with a rock as he smiles and laughs about it. It wouldn’t really need anything else to cement this character's reputation as a psycho with the audience but the writer and director then proceed to drive the message home by showing us his long trek through the desert, pursued by prison guards.

Even though, you know, Johnny needs to make good his get away and find his way back to the castle, he suddenly comes across, in the middle of nowhere and cavorting near a small waterfall, a bikini clad gal. Who, of course, he then drowns in the water. He then comes across another guy with a car and he smacks his brains in with another rock (a fine weapon of choice), loading him and his handy shotgun into the back seat to drive back to his mates, 'The Draculas'. However, on the way he comes across a hitchhiker who he shoots through the window with his shotgun, dumping him into the back seat with the other guy and switching clothes with one of them (in the most ridiculous and less than credible manner possible, while he is still driving). He then pushes the car off the cliff with the corpses in it, knowing the cops will find his clothes on one of the men and somehow assume it’s him and stop looking for him. Bizarrely, although I was pretty sure both guys in the car were dead, as the car goes over the cliff and rolls down the rocky terrain, one of them lets out a scream. Yeah, I really don’t know what’s going on here at this point. Robert Dix was pretty good in Five Bloody Graves but, honestly, though he tries his best in this one, he just doesn’t have any decent dialogue to work with and his forced, maniacal laugh isn’t quite what the doctor ordered to be honest.

Pretty soon after Glen and Liz arrive at the castle and stay for both dinner and the night (in a guest room) but, after refusing Dracula’s offer to buy the property, they know something’s up. The next day they go to investigate the ‘toucan’ they were told was responsible for all that screaming they heard in the night and find the chained up gals. They then get chained up themselves but are all left free as they are forced to wear robes and go up a hill while John Carradine and his employees burn Vicky Volante at the stake, as a sacrifice to the great moon God Lunar (I’m not making this up, by the way). But, when they get back to their dungeon they break free and Carradine, Johnny and the Draculas are killed. However, Liz is nabbed by Mungo who takes her up a cliff. Glen follows and, though it looks like they are doomed to a dumb demise due to Mungo’s brutish strength, Glen happens to find a nearby axe just handily laying around by one of the rocks and finishes the towering man servant off. End of story and, frankly, that ending came in none too soon.

It’s easy to trash this as just a really terribly made movie... and so I have. However, I will say that Adamson’s visual flair... or eye for hiring someone with visual flair... does come into its own in a few places. The cinematographer here was a young Lazlo Kovacks and it does show from time to time. Seriously, how did Adamson get to work with so many ‘A’ list, award winning professionals in his early movies? I guess everyone has to start somewhere.

So yeah, there are some nicely done shots with vertical split sections and they manage to get a lot of depth into some of the frames. The print is in terrible shape though but Severin have, as always, done their best with the materials they have to work with. They have also included another, extended TV version of the movie where someone, probably not Adamson, has added 7 or 8 minutes of werewolf sub plot. It’s hinted that Johnny goes more than a little crazy when it’s the full moon (although I honestly don’t see how he could get to be any more of a volatile nutter than he already is in this) and so I guess he goes 'full wolfman' in this cut. I was going to watch this version so I could give a more rounded view of it here but then found out that it’s been cropped into a 4:3 aspect ratio for television and, well, I’m sure fans of cinema will forgive me if I take a pass. I’m sure some of you, like me, get stabs of pain and deep anxiety when forced to watch a film in an incorrect aspect ratio. It’s not something I would wish on anyone so, I can live without those extra minutes of lycanthrope filled footage, to be honest.

And that’s that. I don’t know why Carradine is only playing the butler here when he already played Dracula twice for Universal in the 1940s but, it’s not so much of a missed opportunity when you see how awful this film is. I can’t recommend Blood Of Dracula’s Castle in any way, shape or form but I can certainly recommend the wonderful box set it comes as part of and, again, my compliments to Severin on this one.

The Female Bunch

Sucker Bunch

The Female Bunch
USA 1971 Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Some spoilers I guess but,
you know, it’s an Al Adamson movie!

Last year I talked about ‘Blu Ray boutique label extraordinaire’ Severin’s labour of love boxed set, Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection, when I reviewed the accompanying new documentary film, Blood And Flesh - The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson (review is right here). Well, it’s finally time for me to crack open this, sadly out of print, box set of thirty two Adamson feature films with the first movie in the set (doubled up on a disc with the aforementioned documentary)... The Female Bunch. For the record, I’m going to review all of these movies in the order that they’ve been put together in the set (as opposed to both the release date order and, indeed, the production order... which is also an entirely different and more fluid thing).

The film starts off with the following warning from Severin: The Female Bunch was scanned and restored from several faded 35mm release prints of varying physical condition. The negative is believed lost. Every effort was made to use the least damaged sections of each print to ensure the best possible image quality throughout.

And they’re probably right to do that because, although it’s a nice, clean transfer, it looks like it’s in terrible shape but, frankly, with a film like this, that quality kind of adds to the whole grindhouse charm of the thing. When Tarantino and Rodriguez did their Grindhouse double bill movie, they decided to add a distressed look to their movies... here Severin get the effect for free, from the various prints actually having suffered from a heck of a lot of wear and tear. What they don’t do is give you a word of warning about how bad the movie is but, that’s okay, I was kind of expecting it anyway and, you know, it’s kind of a ‘so bad it’s good’ movie anyway.

The film starts of with a man and a woman in an open top car driving along a desert road, pursued by a bunch of women on horses (yeah, that’ll be The Female Bunch then) and a gal shooting at them from a light aircraft. Their tyres get shot out and they make a run for it, finding a cave to hide in but not before the guy is shot, receiving an energy sapping wound just below one of his shoulders. The girl removes his shirt to get a look at the wound and screws it up into a disposable bundle. She then takes off her shirt to wrap around him which, to be fair, is what all the young ladies in these kinds of movies seem get around to doing anyway. Might as well get it out there early, I guess.

Anyway, as she stands in the cave in her underwear, the guy asks her “How did you get involved in this mess?” Which is a phrase that suddenly loops around on the soundtrack about six times as the camera zooms in on her face. After almost a minute of this, maybe, I kinda got the idea that this is a framing device and indicates a flash back as the girl, Sandy (played by Nesa Renet) lapses into voice over and tells how a string of hard luck and a failed romance with a night club singer played by Don Epperson ended up with her being discovered by her friend Libby (played by Adamson’s long standing muse Regina Carrol), half passed out on her bed after taking a bunch of pills in an effort to kill herself.

So Libby does what any good pal would do... she takes her blindfolded to a ranch in the hills so she can take an initiation test of being buried in a coffin, so her half psychotic friends, The Female Bunch, can take her on as one of their own... a bunch of women who live in freedom on their ‘no men allowed’ ranch , living off the drug money that their boss, Grace (played by Jennifer Bishop) uses for their expenses. Frankly, these are an antagonistic and unsympathetic bunch and just why the heck Libby hangs out with them is anybody’s guess. And there they live at their ranch, terrorising a local Mexican while, at the same time, tripping over to the border most nights to party it up at the local Mexican bar and having ‘sexual relations’ with various guys (asides from their man-hating boss, who prefers the lady flesh).

It’s here that one of the girls gets it on with one of the film’s two, very well known actors. Russ Tamblyn plays Bill, who is given a map to how to get to the ranch and this particular girl’s room so they can get it on again later in the week. However, with Grace’s ‘no men allowed’ policy, when the two are caught, The Female Bunch rough up Tamblyn and brand his forehead with a cross.

I’d just like to say that, for a lady who has a ‘no men allowed’ on the ranch policy, it seems somewhat strange that she has a stable hand/drug stash security guy who lives on the ranch with them, in the guise of Lon Chaney Jr in the last film he ever shot. Not the last film he was in that was released (that would be Adamson’s Dracula VS Frankenstein, which I reviewed quite a while ago here) but the last film he actually shot, six months after that one (he died in 1973). This makes no sense of the ‘no men’ policy whatsoever, of course, because the last time I checked, Lon Chaney Jr was definitely a man but, oh well, artistic licence I guess. It’s a sad performance because he has a raspy voice and that’s because of the radiation treatment he was having for his throat cancer. Of course, after hearing an anecdote from one of the crew on an accompanying extra about how the film was shot in a ‘Dry State’ and how he would have to go out every day to another county to bring back Chaney Jr’s quart of vodka that he drank every day, I can’t but help think that the excessive amounts of alcohol may also have something to do with how his voice sounds in this one but... yeah, throat cancer and it’s very sad.

Grace maybe starts to question Chaney Jr’s ‘definitely a man’ status too at some point because, after he hassles her for sex once too often, she hits him on the head with a hammer and has a horse drag him into the desert to die. Then she goes on a bit of a killing spree because, Mr. Tamblyn is understandably upset with having a big cross branded onto his forehead. He gets a friend to drop him at the ranch (the same guy who is shot at the start of the movie and inspires this whole extended flashback of a story) and tries to ‘revenge rape’ Grace. For his trouble he gets a pitchfork in the back and his friend, when he comes to pick him up, gets tied up and left in a barn while the girls decide what to do with him.

Then, with almost no foreshadowing whatsoever, Sandy decides to leave the group of psychotic ladies, releases him and they do a runner, finally catching up to the story and ending the flashback, leading into the last five minutes of the movie which I won’t spoil here for you but which features the return of another character from earlier in the film in a kind of ‘deus ex machina’ rescue moment.
 

And the film is pretty interesting. There’s lots of naked boobage revealing a variety of different nipple types (if that’s what you’re into) and a bizarre propensity by the director, I felt, to shoot everyone just a bit too close up. There’s lots of rolling around in the hay and, even though it’s certainly not as explicit as most modern movies, it does feel genuinely grubby and sleazy as the movie plays out. The tone of it is a little like watching Russ Meyer’s revered classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (reviewed by me here) but with a lot more women and, somehow it's a lot less better shot. Also, I’ve complained that the art of using a zoom lens properly is something which has really gone out of style in modern motion pictures. Let me assure you though, if more directors used a zoom lens as often and as badly as Al Adamson does in this picture, then its no wonder people would want to bury the technique.

There are some bizarre things in here that are fair;y questionable. One of the girls shoots another up with heroine (or something stronger), for example and then, instead of it dulling her senses, they have trippy lesbian sex. I know it must be trippy because the director uses one of those lenses (I’ll call it a fly’s eye lens because I don’t know what I’m talking about) where the girls are in the same image in little shots combined all around the screen. So, yeah, it’s trippy and wild, man.

Another thing of note and, alas, ridicule is the ‘day for night’ sequences when the girls visit the Mexican saloon. Much as I hate those filters, I have to say that the second time they go to the place it seems like the film crew just forgot to put the filters on the camera. Oh no, wait... they did for that shot, but not for that shot... no it’s gone again. Night and day change pretty quickly in Mexico it seems (every few seconds in some cases).

The soundtrack on the film, by a guy called Jaime Mendoza-Nava, is not very good. It plays like a bad, mid-sixties American Western score and, for all I know, it might well have been one. But it does add to the bizarre atmosphere of the flick in some way... just not in a way to effectively raise the level of the imagery, is my take home from that.

Something of note is that the majority of the film was shot two years before it was released, in the Summer/Fall of 1969, at the infamous Spahn Ranch. So, yeah, it was while the Manson Family were occupying it and there’s a chilling story on an accompanying extra by one of the film crew about, well, a very lucky escape they think they possibly had with the young ladies who killed Sharon Tate.  Pretty heavy stuff. One interesting piece of trivia from one of the actresses, Leslie McRay, on a bonus feature, is that she was actually the poster girl for the iconic shot of a girl with a lizard superimposed onto her for one of the many posters for Lizard In A Woman’s Skin (movie reviewed here). I always assumed it was Florinda Bolkan who was on that poster but, no, it was this young lady... so that’s an interesting bit of trivia I’ve never been able to pick up from anywhere else.

All in all I’d have to say that, while I found a lot to ridicule in The Female Bunch, I did have a pretty good time with it and it certainly won’t be the last time I watch this one. I can only recommend this wonderful set and I’m so glad I talked myself into investing the cash. That’s one down, 31 left to go.