Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970)

I guess that the films of Al Adamson are an acquired taste.  I know people who absolutely despise them, but I have a weak spot for Adamson and his patchwork quilt style of film making, constantly reshaping both his own movies and those of others, in order to achieve a constant stream of low budget mayhem.  While the films of many other ultra low budget film makers leave me cold - I mean, just how many times can you watch anything by Ed Wood, it's obvious from one viewing that they are the work of an untalented hack, while those of Andy Milligan are simply endurance tests as they grind themselves through ninety minutes of excruciating dialogue and non-existent acting - I find the oeuvre of Adamson constantly entertaining and inventive.  Which brings us to Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970), a truly crazed exercise in exploiting stock footage from old and/or obscure films.  It actually starts with some original Adamson footage, apparently shot in a badly lit barn, where various actors, (including Adamson himself and fellow low budget director Gary Graver), chase others around while wearing joke store fangs, while Brother Theodore's insanely delivered voice over tells us that the earth is in the grip of a plague of vampirism which originates on a far off planet.  Luckily, though, scientist John Carradine (who performs his entire role with the demeanour of an old man irritated that he's been abruptly awakened from his afternoon nap), and his crew are about to blast off in a spaceship to the solar system of the vampire planet in search of a cure.

With their journey provided courtesy of stock footage from David Hewett's Wizard of Mars, the ship's crew find themselves on a planet seemingly composed mainly of stock footage from Unknown Island (1948), One Million BC (1940) - which provide the dinosaurs - and a Filipino caveman movie.  Not only does the latter film provide the bulk of the footage, but it was the reason that Adamson made Horror of the Blood Monsters, apparently having enjoyed it so much on a first viewing, that he decided to build a whole new movie around it.  Now, bearing in mind that this film was in black and white (as was One Million BC) and the new footage was all in colour, you might think that this would make them incompatible.  While this might have been the case for a less inventive director than Adamson, he solved by simply tinting the planet-side sequences taken from these films into different colours.  This is then explained by a claim that the planet is subjected to 'chromatic radiation' which randomly changes everything between yellow, red and green.  The newly shot Adamson footage of the astronauts exploring the planet are likewise tinted to match them in better.  These tinted sequences are interspersed with scenes (in regular colour) of Carradine in the spaceship, barking out snarky orders on the radio, scenes back at Mission Control and even scenes in the bedroom of the two Mission Control personnel, as they have sex the futuristic way, which involves being wired up to a contraption with lots of flashing lights.  The main purpose of these latter scenes seems to be to enable the male Mission Control worker to mansplain 'chromatic radiation' to the woman.

The film's highlights, though, are undoubtedly provided by that Filipino footage, which seems to involve various prehistoric tribes at war with each other.  In the Adamson re-edit and re-dub, a tribe of normal human cavemen are being preyed on by a tribe of vampire cavemen (they all sport very long fangs, like tusks, which suggests that, perhaps, in the original film they weren't actually vampires, in fact, they seem to act more like cannibals).  There are also some 'Snake Men', who have snakes growing out of their shoulders, lurking around, as well.  The human cavemen are forced, for some reason to go on a quest for 'fire water' (oil), which involves them having to cross a river full of 'Lobster Men', sporting claws and a cave full of 'Bat Men', (who swoop down on wires).  It's amazing stuff, wildly inventive and thanks to Adamson's chopping up the footage, near incomprehensible in plot terms.  Moreover, for some reason the astronauts also need some of the oil, so follow the human cavemen to the source, accompanied by a human cave girl they've used their translation device on, so that she speaks and understands English.  Obviously, as she is an American actress, she looks nothing like the tribe she is meant to have come from.  There are also lots of flashbacks using the Filipino footage as the girl relates the background to the inter-tribal conflict.  I have to admit that by this time I'd given up any pretence of attempting to follow the film's narrative, instead just enjoying the audacious mash up of footage from four different films which, at times, verges on the utterly surreal.  The surviving astronauts get back to the ship, where Carradine grumpily goes on about the effects of the 'chromatic radiation' reduce red blood cell counts, forcing sufferers into vampirism, before they blast off back to earth, with Carradine casually noting that the rising radiation levels are soon likely to kill everyone on the planet.  I'm assuming that they found a cure for the vampire plague on earth, but by that time I'd completely lost the narrative thread.

By no stretch of the imagination could anyone ever describe Horror of the Blood Monsters as being a 'good' film.   To be sure, its component parts are, in the main, decently put together - Adamson's new footage is never going to win awards and clearly had no budget whatsoever, but it is, at least, competently shot.  Certainly, it's streets ahead of anything Ed Wood or Andy Milligan ever achieved.  The true fascination of the film lies in the way that Adamson stitches together his disparate sources to create a completely new narrative, divorced from those of the source materials.  The result is joyously barmy and hugely entertaining.  This isn't really one of those bad movies you watch simply to wallow 'ironically' in its badness, but rather it can be enjoyed for its sheer bizarreness.  Like most of Adamson's films Horror of the Blood Monsters was released numerous times during the seventies, under a plethora of different titles.  If you truly love the weird, then you really should try and watch Horror of the Blood Monsters under any of its many titles.