Watch Horror of the Blood Monsters For Free

Let's be realistic.

Blistering performances.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The Earth is currently being over-run by space vampires. In an attempt to solve the problem at its source, a mission is launched to the distant planet that spawned the blood suckers. The team, including Dr. Rynning (John Carradine, a man who could seemingly never say "no" to a gig), Commander Steve Bryce (Bruce Powers), and comely female Linda (Britt Semand), discover a globe much like a prehistoric Earth, complete with dinosaurs, lobster-men, snake-men, bat-men, and warring caveman tribes.Even at his best, low budget filmmaker Al Adamson was still basically making schlock. This is one of his most utterly shameless, taking copious stock footage (mostly from a 60s Filipino film called "Tagani", but also cribbing from "Robot Monster" and "One Million B.C."), adding really cheesy voice-over narration (by the legendary weird performance artist Brother Theodore) and his own clunky new footage. Adamson and company take the opportunity to have lots of fun with tinting ("Tagani" was shot in black & white), and the visual schemes are priceless. Ooh, now everything's red! Now everything's green! And now it's blue! And so on. The movie is overall so ridiculous that it is quite amusing and endearing in its own stunningly awful way. One highlight: Adamson regulars Robert Dix and Vicki Volante showing how people make love in the "future".And to top it all off, the movie was re-released under a handful of other titles, all in the name of trying to maximize that profit.Al appears in the opening minutes as one of the vampires.Five out of 10.

Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970) BOMB (out of 4) Earth is being overtaken by vampire attacks so a group of astronauts travel to outer space to try and locate the source of this disease. They land on a strange planet and it doesn't take too long to locate the strange creatures. This Al Adamson disaster is also known as Vampire Men of the Lost Planet and Blood Creatures from the Prehistoric Planet but no matter what title you call this there's no denying that it's a major bomb. Apparently Adamson fell in love with a Philippines movie and bought the rights to it. The film was in B&W so drive-in owners didn't want it so Adamson shot some new footage with John Carradine and mixed the two together. The old film had tint thrown on it and this is what we see in "outer space". The film is just bad on so many levels that I couldn't even have a good time with it. The movie is slow beyond belief and there's not a single frame of the film that makes any sense. It's hard to judge the other movie being shown as there's so much editing between the two. Carradine pretty much phones his performance in from a chair so not even he can add anything positive. You know you're in trouble when not even Carradine can add a laugh or two.

This film atrocity must be seen to be believed. By comparison Plan 9 looks like Citizen Kane. Any movie that can combine vampires, space travel, lobster-men, bat-pygmies, snake-men, & cavemen into one utterly illogical, incomprehensible "plot" gets a special place in my bad movie lovin' heart to begin with. When compounded by adding tinted black & white stock footage as a plot device, a 50-cent plastic toy spaceship with a bic lighter for propulsion(I swear I'm not making this up), and a "Spectum Analyzer" that is clearly a caulk gun, it transcends the normally accepted standard of "so-bad-it's-good". The WORST of the worst.

What I liked most about this crazy movie is the late great Brother Theodore's manic narration of the intro. He did an even better job narrating the film's trailer. It makes me wish that more directors would have hired this insane genius and just let him cut loose. The infrequency of Theodore's screen appearances seemed to have been his own choice. There were plans to cast him as Dracula in Al Adamson's "Dracula vs. Frankenstein" (THAT would have been something to see!), but apparently Theodore wasn't comfortable doing material that was written by somebody other than himself. Anyway; the rest of the film was pretty cool, too. The experience of watching it is kind of like channel surfing when every station is showing a cheap science fiction film at the same time. If the way the plot is going isn't to your liking, don't worry. It'll change in a minute. The lobster man was my favorite. I also liked the stock footage from Hal Roach's "One Million B.C." Seeing the spaceship model from Roger Corman's "War of the Satellites" was a surprise. I guess special effects man David Hewitt must have kept it in his basement all those years. There was also the voice of the talented Paul Frees in a few spots. While it's true that the producers of this film were shamelessly padding an obscure foreign film into something (they thought) was releasable(and re-releasable under many other titles), they did it in an entertaining and hilarious way.