1970s SF film
Horror of the Blood Monsters, 1970, USA DIRECTED BY AL ADAMSON
I love demented movies such as this, the kind of films that barely hold together but somehow grow on you the more you think about them simply because they break so many of the 'rules' of filmmaking. The plot: there's been an unexplained vampire invasion of Earth, and this results in a B-movie mission to space to discover their home planet. The memorable gonzo introduction to Al Adamson's zero-budget flick bears no resemblance whatsoever to the patchwork quality that's to come, and in those opening few minutes Brother Theodore provided a demented Transylvanian rant as a vampire out for human blood while the actors (including Adamson himself) bare teeth that were no more than novelty shop plastic fangs. Despite its sheer tackiness it's also by far the most charming part of the film, yet Adamson's corner-cutting later went as far as a Mission Control bedecked with bedsheets and a toy store rocket landing in Bronson Canyon. This movie was pieced together over the space of five years and incorporated an enormous amount of footage from a black-and-white Filipino fantasy movie, Tagani, about warring tribes of vampire cavemen. Adamson was a master of cut-and-paste: the entire screenplay seems designed to show off these long caveman sequences that take up almost a third of Blood Monsters' entire running time, most of which are genuinely pretty good and which were tinted into garish colour to match the rest of the film. And if that doesn't sound patchwork enough, the Italian release a few years later reportedly crammed in some footage borrowed from - of all things - Gerry Anderson's UFO. (Now that has to be worth seeing.) The acting is of course uniformly dreadful with John Carradine completely overkilling his cranky scientist role, and as can be expected the movie lacks cohesion, with the frantic and action-packed Filipino scenes completely outplaying Adamson's intercut segments which comparatively have very little energy on show. You're in for a rough ride with this film if you can hang on to the end, and even the cheesy sex scenes are more boring than those in what's possibly the worst science fiction film ever made, Space-Thing, and that alone must be a notable achievement.
Blood Monsters sits handsomely alongside similarly disjointed classics like the absolutely timeless Mesa of Lost Women; I plan to see more of Al Adamson's films (particularly Dracula vs. Frankenstein and Blood of Ghastly Horror, with John Carradine again), though I wonder if they could possibly be as admirably bad as this.
( Cross-posted with cult_movie)