The Oath of Green Blood

Another bizarre exploitation movie promotional gimmick: getting your target teen audience to drink some dubious-looking green gel before the performance.  The film, Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968) - infamously featured the green-blooded 'Chlorophyll Monster', (who reappeared in 1970's Beast of Blood).  Rather than 'passionately affect you' the green gel was apparently more likely to make you nauseous, although that allegedly didn't stop teenagers from knocking it back before showings of the film.  These kind of stunts used to be commonplace when it came to promoting this sort of film - if it wasn't vials of green blood then it was sick bags, plastic vampire fangs or 'magic' rings (made of plastic, obviously), depending upon the film.  Sometimes, instead of these giveaway gimmicks, you got in-film stunts,  Ray Denis Steckler, for instance, had theatre staff in monster masks run through the auditorium during screenings of The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters.

While it was all very tacky and lowbrow, I have to say that I miss this sort of stuff - it died out as the seventies progressed.  Going to the cinema (when they are able to open) has become a very sterile experience, with as much fun drained from it as possible.  These days cinema chains are more interested in selling you over priced popcorn than they are entertaining you.  On top of the fact that you don't get any giveaway gimmicks, these days you only get a single film on the programme - even I can remember the days when you at least got a supporting feature (usually an older film which already had several TV showings).  Damn it, sometimes you even got a full-fledged double bill, (I well remember seeing two Mel Brooks' films - Young Frankenstein and Silent Movie - on a double bill back in the early eighties, not to mention a Ray Harryhausen revival consisting of Jason and the Argonauts and Mysterious Island a couple of years later).  To get back to the original point, I have to say that, despite the gimmick, Mad Doctor of Blood Island isn't a particularly good film. Nevertheless, despite being rather shoddily made, it proved popular on its original release.  Pretty typical of Philippines made movies of the era, it does have the distinction of being co-directed by Eddie Romero and Gerardo de Leon, two of the key figures in post-war Filipino film production.