1970
Directed by: Al Adamson
Starring: John Carradine, Vicki Volante, Robert Dix
It galls me sometimes that people consider Ed Wood to be the worst filmmaker of all time. All I can say to these people is, "Do you get out much?" I mean, turn on Mystery Science Theater 3000 any given week and you'll more of ten than not see something pretty damn bad.
And like any horror/SF fan worth his blood and guts, I love a bad movie. As long as it's entertaining. Like, I thought Plan 9 From Outer Space was really a fun movie to watch. Whereas something like Manos: the Hands of Fate was just excrutiating to set through. Bad as in bad. Not bad as in good.
And I just loved Vampire Men of the Lost Planet. I really, really loved it. It had everything a bad movie should have. Underdeveloped, ridiculous plot, awful makeup and special FX, lousy acting (usually augmented by the appearance of at least ONE veteran actor, who's doing the movie "for the quick paycheck"), stupid-looking dinosaurs, stupi-looking cavemen and women, and somehow … SOMEHOW … throw vampires, human-bats, and giant grasshopper-lobsters into the mix … and well, MAN! You have yourself a HELL of a good time.
Yes, folks, Vampire Men has all of those things and more. Here's the story: Sometime, way long ago, the Tubaton Vampires came to Earth and they've pretty much been wiping our planet out. "Science has never been able to stop them." Somehow, we here on Earth know that these vampires came from another planet, and we seem to know where the planet IS, but we just can't seem to get there. It happens to be in one of those spooky, remote regions of space where "no one has ever come back …"
Well, John Carradine can do it. He's the eccentric, brilliant scientist chosen to go on yet another expedition to the stars, to find someway to fight the vampires.
And that's just the first three minutes of the movie. THEN, it takes a left turn somewhere and ends up God-knows-where. Somehow our fearless space-rangers get knocked around by some sort of gravity-field and they're forced to land on a planet to make repairs. They search desperately for a planet, and just so happen to land on the one they're looking for.
And, I must note, that after the opening prologue, the vampires are never mentioned in this movie again. Honestly.
The astronauts (?) find themselves on a planet "similar to Earth" except for the mysterious red-blue-purple-green-haze surrounding the planet ("And I thought Los Angeles was bad!" one pilot remarks. Har-Har.) Once they exit the ship, they encounter dinosaurs (which, of course, are only someone's pet iguanas with cardboard fins glued to their backs) and cavemen. These cavement spend the entire film beating each other up and whatnot, and we eventually discover that one of the tribes is the Tubatons; they have fangs, but they're never referred to as vampires. One of the tribes even has snakes growing out of their shoulders. That's right, SNAKES OUT OF THEIR SHOULDER.
Of course, you just KNOW that radiation probably had something to do with this. Maybe. And what's with the bat-people and grasshopper-lobsters? They seem to find cavement pretty yummy, but they pretty much look like monsters in search of another movie.
This truly is a movie you have to see to … well, maybe not believe as much as just … "get the full effect." I guarantee, if you love shitty, grade-Z movies, this is one for you. Those without sense of humor, or an appreciation for the abysmal, need not apply.
John Carradine does the best he can with the material. And the rest of the cas is just plan BAD. They never resolve anything. The "mission" these people were on, whatever it was, never comes to fruition. The "surprise" ending isn't really a surprise, because you pretty much just won't care.
This movie is also known as Horror of the Blood Monsters. In fact, I believe that's the title most of you would probably know it as. And, I did some research on it and found out that the movie itself is actually made up of footage from other movies. Most of the dinosaur footage is taken from One Million B.C. And, it's rumored that SOME of the footage is from a Phillipino horror film that never got made. My theory is that this movie was made as a SF movie and the producers wanted a vampire movie, so old Al Adamson chucked in a vampiric prologue that SOMEHOW fit with the movie he'd already filmed. The cohesion of the vampire plot with the space-adventure plot is pretty bad. But that's part of the fun. You spend the entire movie trying to figure out what the hell the vampires have to do with anything.
trust me, you have to get this movie. The video-distribution company Really Strange Video released this, and you can probably find it pretty cheap at Best Buy or somewhere. I did. In fact, I bought this movie along with Raiders of the Living Dead, which most of you will recall I DETESTED. Funny thing was, when me and my brother bought these two movies, we thought Raiders was going to be the better one.
Not so, not so …
1998, Familiar Publications.
