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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
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4
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6 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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Beast
of Blood
(known as Beast of the Dead when it ran
on U.S. TV in the late 1970s) is actually a direct
follow-up to The Mad Doctor
of Blood Island, an American-Filipino co-production
from low budget independent company Hemisphere
Pictures. Aspects
of the first film are alluded to in this sequel
without much explanation. This isn't really a
problem, though, as the plot's pretty basic. Besides,
there's not the remotest possibility anyone seeing
this thing would give a damn.
Frankly, I expected more from this movie.
On paper it sounds like a cheese lover's delight...
On a remote tropical island a mad doctor conducts
nightmarish experiments on humans, resulting in
a goofy monster with slimy green skin and a severe
tartar control problem. The good guys mount a
jungle commando mission to end the villain's reign
of terror. Sounds groovy to me! Unfortunately
most of this potential is wasted with a sluggish,
yawn-inducing narrative. Having a lead actor who's
little more than a block of wood with Elvis sideburns
certainly doesn't help matters.
The
film does start out promisingly, however. A young
American doctor, Bill Foster (Beach
Blanket Bingo's John Ashley), is leaving
Blood Island by boat after the events of the first
movie —
I have no idea what those were as I haven't seen
it. Suddenly the monster appears onboard, killing
all the crewmembers with an axe. Foster battles
the creature but an accidental fire sets off an
explosion which sinks the boat, leaving him floating
in the ocean holding on to some wreckage. The
monster —
who's got huge yellow fangs and mucusy skin lathered
in what looks like guacamole, hot dog relish and
Vaseline — has also survived, washing ashore on
Blood Island. He stumbles off into the jungle
just before the animated opening credits, which
were designed by the same folks who provided title
sequences for Al Adamson's Dracula
vs. Frankenstein and Horror
of the Blood Monsters.
Unfortunately we don't see the Beast again until
halfway through the film, and by that point he's
had his head chopped off! More on that in a minute.
Immediately
after the credits we see Foster boarding another
boat, heading back to Blood Island. (Why he's
doing this isn't explained until near the end
of the film, in a throwaway line.) Onboard he
meets a reporter for a Honolulu newspaper, Myra
Russell (Celeste Yarnall, who costarred with The
King himself, Elvis, in Live
a Little, Love a Little). She wants to
do a story on the events of the previous film
(whatever those were) but Foster is noncommittal.
(In fact, Ashley's entire performance is noncommittal,
as he walks through this picture with the same
blank expression throughout, delivering his lines
in a disinterested monotone.) Along with the boat's
captain (co-writer Bev Miller), Foster and Myra
land at Blood Island and visit with some natives
the doctor knows from the first movie. They learn
that villagers have been periodically kidnapped
by "The Green Men", guys in loincloths
and covered in green skin lesions. Then Myra is
kidnapped, so Foster and a Filipino woman who's
got the hots for him set off into the jungle to
track her abductors. An attempt to help Myra escape
fails, but Foster sees that Razak (Bruno Punzalan),
the bald, monkey-eared henchman of his old nemesis
Dr. Lorca, is the leader of the armed thugs holding
her captive. Their trail is followed to a hidden
mountain encampment. As help is summoned from
the village, Myra becomes the unwilling guest
of Lorca (Eddie Garcia), the film's Dr.No-like
archvillain. (Aside from being evil he wears an
eyepatch, has a bad limp, and is burned across
part of his face.) He uses unwilling human guinea
pigs in his immoral experiments, which somehow
involve chlorophyl and which earlier produced
the slimy monster we saw in the opening sequence.
The titular Beast, by the way, has been recaptured
by Lorca and is now held in his underground laboratory.
To render it easier to control, Lorca has cut
off the monster's head, keeping both the body
and severed head alive by artificial means. Just
what he's attempting to achieve by all this is
never explained. (He does hold one-sided conversations
with the head, however.) It all culminates with
Foster, the Captain, and the village chief leading
an armed assault on Lorca's compound to free Myra;
the Beast's animated head gets final revenge on
the mad doctor as the papier-mâché
cavern crumbles around them.
Until
its final 30 minutes Beast
of Blood is just a monotonous drag. Things
pick up considerably once Dr. Lorca comes on the
scene, with some unintentionally funny dialog,
amusingly inept action sequences, and the reappearance
of the monster. There are a few fleeting
moments of Grade-A cheese, as when the Beast's
noggin (the mask-wearing actor's head stuck through
a hole cut in a table) gets to speak. Judging
by the opening mayhem, had the monster showed
up now and then before this it'd have been a livelier
picture. Instead we get a lot of 'jungle trek'
scenes with pauses here and there for Ashley to
drone a bit of dialog. The sound effects are pretty
bad but not in an amusing sense; they're just
irritating. (Regardless of where characters tread
—
be
it indoors, the jungle, or in a cave —
the
foley sounds like people stepping on discarded
peanut shells.) All the dialog was poorly looped
afterwards and the terrible music score ranges
from 'Get Smart in the Jungle' to 1920s
silent movie accompaniment. Given the potential
of the available exploitation elements, Beast
of Blood fumbles the ball when it should've
easily scored a few points. If the other Filipino-shot
horror flicks in the so-called "Blood Island
Trilogy" are this lame, I'll likely pass.
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In
its DVD presentation Image buttresses the weak main
feature with a number of at least semi-related bonus
features.
This was a good move considering that the A/V quality
of Beast of Blood is
nothing to write home about. Shown fullframe and
likely representing the best elements in existence,
there's minor but omnipresent print damage due to
wear and tear and parts of the film look pretty
dark. Of course, since it was shot in the rural
Philippines on a shoestring budget it probably never
looked that great to begin with. The disc's mono
audio track is flat but otherwise serviceable.
In
addition to the movie the DVD contains lengthy video
interviews with director Eddie Romero and star Celeste
Yarnall. The latter is conducted by low budget movie
mogul Sam Sherman at a recent convention; both are
pretty dry and don't offer much that's interesting.
There's also a promo for an old-fashioned on-stage
horror show, the kind that presumably ran bargain
basement monster movies as part of the package.
A "Blood Island Still Gallery" showcases
promotional photos, posters and lobby cards from
the Philippines-lensed Hemisphere films but inexplicably
tosses in a sizable number of items from the made-in-Mexico
schlockfest Night
of the Bloody Apes.
8
trailers are on hand, for Mad
Doctor of Blood Island, Brides
of Blood, Brain of
Blood, Blood of
the Vampires,
The Blood Drinkers,
Raiders of
the Living Dead
(which looks like it was made by a high school A/V
club) and Horror of
the Blood Monsters,
as well as the main feature. A 53-minute audio commentary
by Sam Sherman (head of Independent International
Pictures, distributor for both Hemisphere and Ad
Adamson) focuses almost exclusively on the behind
the scenes power struggle for control of Hemisphere
rather than the movie itself. It's nowhere near
as interesting a talk as the ones Sherman recorded
for the Dracula vs. Frankenstein
and Horror of
the Blood Monsters
DVDs.
11/30/02 |
| UPDATE
This DVD went OOP in 2008. In February 2010 Alpha
released a new edition, reportedly using the exact
same transfer and containing the same bonus features. |
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