So intones the legendary ball of crazy that took human form for a brief span to walk among us under the name of Brother Theodore (a.k.a. Theodore Gottlieb) in the opening confusing rush and whirl of Al Adamson's glaucoma-inducing cut 'n' paste disasterpiece Horror of the Blood Monsters.
Also known under a myriad of titles including Vampire Men of the Lost Planet, The Flesh Creatures, Seven for Infinity Against the Monsters from Space and - bafflingly - in France as The Monsters of the Planet of the Apes, this is a shining early example of the Godfrey Ho method of movie-making: namely, get hold of footage from a previously unreleased film by a totally different director, and then shoot new stuff and sew it together into a brand new patchwork product. Adamson had previous form in this area, having already cannibalised his own 1965 crime thriller Psycho a Go-Go for re-release with a new sprinkle of sci-fi with John Carradine as a mad scientist for 1969's The Fiend with the Electronic Brain - and would reassemble it a third time with more new footage as 1971's Blood of Ghastly Horror. A true pioneer of the green art of recycling film stock. When crafty Al and his production partner Sam Sherman (head of Independent International Productions) acquired the rights to the 1965 Filipino sci-fi/fantasy film Tagani, only to find that it was black and white and that distributors for the drive-in market they were targeting only wanted colour by the early '70s, they quickly abandoned any plans to simply record an English language dub track and instead got creative about repurposing the footage for a new release IN LIVING COLOR [sic].
Responding to the threat of an outbreak of a plague of vampirism - represented by a what-the-actual-fuck-is-happening opening montage barrage of rapidly intercut vampire attacks (a man attacked in a warehouse by a vampire, a couple making out in a parked car wherein the girl suddenly sprouts fangs and attacks her paramour [good band, that - I used to fancy the lead singer something rotten], a john approaching a streetwalker only to find she's more creature of the night than lady of the night and he's going to get sucked in a different way than he was willing to pay for) and all this within the first three minutes, accompanied by Brother Theodore's unhinged narration - Earth in an unspecified 'near future' (i'm sure Lance Parkin will insist it's 1983 or something, despite all the space age advances on display) traces the origins of the scourge of the wampyr to a strain that arrived on Earth in the distant dawn of prehistory from the Tubatan vampire men of the far off Spectrum solar system in another galaxy.
You're taking notes, right? There'll be a quiz at the end.
Dr Rynning (John Carradine, once again reduced to slumming for a cheque whilst being one of the best things in the movie) has assembled a crack team to accompany him in his space age XB-13 rocket to find the planet of the vampires (sorry, Al 'n' Sam, but Mario Bava had got there with that title and a much better film a few years earlier) and perhaps a remedy for the sanguine thirst gripping the Earth. Mind you, he's not exactly assembled the A-Team here, he's more down among the Z-Men. We have a fairly bland bunch consisting of Commander Bryce (Bruce Powers), Bob Scott (Fred Meyers), comic relief jokester Willy (Joey Benson) who is the only crewmember with a discernible personality, and Linda (Danish-born actress Britt Semand) who pioneers the Sigourney Weaver/Gwen DeMarco/Tawny Madison Galaxy Quest look with her blonde bob cut and having her jumpsuit unzipped to cleavage-revealing level.
Presiding over the team from
When the ship is hit by space radiation (sadly failing to give anyone aboard the powers of the Fantastic Four), they have to make planetfall somewhere in the Spectrum system. Which is where they were heading for anyway, rendering the ten or fifteen minutes of faff about telemetry being lost, being knocked off course et al (their circuit's dead, there's something wrong) utterly pointless. Rynning is well keen to explore this uncharted region of space
which he discovered himself (I like to think that the Spectrum system is also home to planet Spectra, eternal enemy of G-Force and instigator of the BATTLE OF THE PLANETS). Making touchdown on the world they were aimed at in the first place, they find the atmosphere to be soaked in 'chromatic radiation', rendering everything outside the ship a uniform tinted shade of either yellow, green, blue or red depending where one is standing. This, of course, is Adamson and Sherman's brilliant idea of the 'Spectrum-X' process, which allows them to splice their crew in with black and white footage without any jarring shifts between colour and monochrome - while also lending the scenes a charming silent film feel like when movies like Murnau's Nosferatu would be tinted sepia or blue to indicate day or night.
Oh dear gods. I just compared Al Adamson to F.W. Murnau. I feel sick.
After observing some dinosaurs (courtesy of the original 1940 One Million B.C., aka Man and His Mate), the team encounter Mailian (Jennifer Bishop, who would join Carradine later in 1970 for an even worse movie - the abomination that is Robert F. Slatzer's Bigfoot) - a cavegirl cross between Raquel Welch's Loana and Linda Harrison's Nova. Mailian is being pursued by some club-wielding befanged cavemen who are soon finished off by the crew's space age weaponry (rifles and revolvers. As Simon Phoenix would say "Where are all the phaser guns?"). After a brief bit of human vivisection in which they knock her out and slice her head open to implant a translator chip in her brain (not exactly Star Trek's Universal Translator or Doctor Who's TARDIS translation matrix) they can understand each other, and Mailian tells them of her home world (Usul). This planet's inhabitants include her people, the human-like Tagani, as well as the vampiric Tubatan, the lobster men of the rivers (but not, sadly, the Lobster Man from Mars) and the bat men of the caves. It's a budget Barsoom, basically.
Mailian is on a mission on behalf of the Tagani to seek out the famed Ramir and the warriors - who sound like either a terrible band or a great Saturday morning kids' cartoon - to help them in their fight against the evil Tubatan and the traitorous Akil (a goateed Tom Savini-looking motherfucker) who has joined them and taken captive the beautiful Tagani warrioress Leela (who is as deadly in battle and as great looking in a skimpy outfit as her janis thorn wielding Who namesake). When she reveals that her other goal is to retrieve 'fire water' from the mountains and the crew figure that it must be petroleum with which they can refuel the depleted ship and ready it for take off, they resolve to join her on her quest (because, as the Bloodhound Gang so sagely advised us, Fire Water Burn).
After a number of daring quests involving encounters with the sundry creatures of this benighted world, the team (minus the late Bob and Willy, who are sad [not so sad in Bob's case, the characterless Zap Brannigan that he was] casualties of the mission) return to the ship not only with full oil cans but also a mysterious metal box they find half-buried in the ground. With Ramir having bested the Judas Akil and freed Leela, Mailian sadly watches the rocket depart and returns to her tribe. Aboard the ship, Doc Rynning (Carradine finally having something else to do, having remained aboard the entire time due to him only being hired for two days for a couple of hundred bucks) ascertains from the box that the planet once had an advanced civilisation much like our own before they developed thermonuclear warfare and bombed themselves back to the stone age. He then cheerfully announces that they are all doomed due to the radioactive atmosphere and that Mailian and her victorious people won't be lasting much longer even having overthrown the vampires. I love a happy ending.
Oh my god, we were wrong. It was a shoe-horned in Earth analogue all along. They finally made a vampire out of me.
No comments:
Post a Comment