Anything directed by Al Adamson.
The Blood of Ghastly Horror and
Horror of the Blood Monsters are my favourites:
Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970) - IMDb
Blood of Ghastly Horror (1972) - IMDb
Here's a stupidly long Cut and Paste from my Film Diary:
[*]As far as I can work out, the history behind this patchwork hallucination [
The Blood of Ghastly Horror] is that in 1965, director Al Adamson produced and directed a very low budget, jewellery heist gone wrong movie called
Psycho A Go-Go which seems to have had a terrific central performance and a plot device stolen from
Night of the Hunter, and may have been intended as a comedy. It didn't sell because there were no names in it. Years later the director shot what appeared to be two sets of additional scenes, the first with John Carradine as a misguided scientist who, years before, had implanted a electronic device into a brain dead Nam vet with the inevitable consequence that he became a homicidal hoodlum - Carradine's 'confession' of this act cues great chunks of the 1965 film in flashback. (With me so far?) The homicidal hoodlum returns to the lab (new footage with the same actor) and kills his 'creator' in a laboratory featuring that staple of cheap set design, vast swathes of blackout curtain. The movie now seems to have been called
The Man with the Synthetic Brain. When this version flopped, a second set of scenes was shot. In this, a framing device is added of detectives investigating a series of on-screen murders. Shortly after receiving a colleague's head in a box through the post - a shock lessoned by it being flagged up way in advance in the opening credits - they get to deliver these great crap lines:
Chief Framing Device Detective (READING FILE)
Well I'll be a son of a bitch...
Second Framing Device Detective:
What is it Lieutenant?
Chief Framing Device Detective:
Everyone involved with the Corey case,
with one exception - is dead!
Second Framing Device Detective:
What?... Do we know who it is?
The Chief Framing Device detective stops tipping his chair back out of the frame long enough to fill in his underling on the Corey case and we flashback to the first set of added footage involving John Carradine as the mad scientist (thus neatly making Carradine's flashback that cinematic rarity, a flashback within a flashback). Further (post flashback) investigations lead the detectives to the lair of another mad scientist who turns out to be the father of the poor sap with the brain implant. Vengeful mad daddy has a nice line in vengeful zombie creation of his own (using more 'natural' voodooistic methods). The Director's wife stops by the studio long enough to get strapped to a table and have the second half of the heist movie flashbacked at her by daddy before he injects her with zombie juice. There is a short scene of constipated rampage (one mad scientist, two zombies, and three policemen, confined to a six foot square location - I think the cameraman stood on a chair) and just about everyone ends up dead. The End.
Here's the wonderfully OTT trailer:
Copy of BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR - Preview Trailer - YouTube
Horror of the Blood Monsters*- I'm going to hand over to a poster over on the IMDb for a bit here, I'm still in shock
Ya gotta love Al Adamson. Only he would (1) take footage from a 20-year-old movie about gorillas in diving helmets ("Robot Monster"), (2) combine it with clips from a 30-year-old movie about elephants with hair mats glued to their sides ("One Million B.C."), (3) throw in parts from a God-knows-how-old Filipino movie about midget cannibals, half man/half lobster monsters and beer-bellied Chinese cavemen with snakes growing out of their shoulders (all of the aforementioned footage being in black and white), (4) spend $11.43 shooting new "connecting" footage (in color, no less) with an apparently--to be charitable--confused John Carradine and a bunch of actors who have trouble remembering their lines (among them a vapid blonde who is so incompetent that all her dialogue is dubbed in by someone else and who doesn't even have the decency to make up for it by getting naked), (5) put it out under at least 10 different titles and (6) try to pass each one off as a new movie. Go, Al!
This is one brilliant movie. It so far beyond bad it comes out the other side again. I am so proud of myself for retaining control of my bladder when we saw the first shot of the spaceship landing.
.
And here it is preparing to take off.
A plastic kit model airliner and two pastry cutters! - it's genius!
There is also a brilliant piece of use of stock footage from (I think)
The Time Travellers in which the control centre on Earth is represented by an Over the Shoulders wide shot taken from the older movie intercut with two actors (costumed to look like the original actors whose backs we see) against the obligatory, No-Budget blackout curtain. Only after a few moments it becomes painfully obvious the Over the Shoulder shot is not stock footage at all. It's a stock one twenty-fourth of a foot. Its a freeze frame!
Somewhere, during the bewildering intercutting between the tinted Fillipino cavemen endlessly fighting giant bats, lobstermen, and vampires, (sometimes in flashback!), the tinted intrepid explorers almost encountering the tinted stock footage from a couple of dinosaur movies while searching the new planet (ie
Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park), and, finally, the colour footage of John Carradine back at the spaceship, talking to the rest of the crew by radio because they couldn't afford to take him on location... we suddenly get a sex scene!
Two people, with electrodes strapped to their heads, snogging on a bed while around them lights flash in upturned test tubes and groovy Future Art stands on plinthettes. I was waiting for the voice over:
Yes! f***ing in the Future will be fun! Modern science has many marvels in store for the married couples of tomorrow. The General Electric Orgasmometer for instance guarantees satisfaction every time! Even for the most frigid of women! - even on those 'difficult' days!
It turns out this scene does have something to do with the movie (or at least as much as any of the others do) when it turns out the man is our old friend from the control room, whose idea of foreplay is to irradiate his bed partner with the 'Dangerous chromatic radiation' our intrepid crew are encountering out in space in order to paste a hasty explanation for all the bizarre tinting of the rest of the movie.
Did I mention the first five minutes of this thing were a vampire movie, with people getting attacked in the same alley used by the zombie in
Blood of Ghastly Horror?
*AKA
Blood Creatures from the Prehistoric Planet, Creatures of the Prehistoric Planet, Creatures of the Red Planet, Space Mission to the Lost Planet , Vampire Men of the Lost Planet. etc.
