Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. So last week on Weird House Cinema we were taking a look at the nineteen ninety three live action Super Mario Brothers movie. I still stand by my characterization, even with a little more time to process, my characterization of it as one of the weirdest movies we've ever covered on the show, and one of the weirdest movies I have ever watched. It is still just it's bouncing like a
pinball in my head. But one of the many truly bizarre aspects of that movie was that it had in the role of the villain King Koopa, none other than the late great Dennis Hopper. Now, one of the other movies that came up when we were exploring sort of the back catalog of Dennis Hopper's work was a nineteen sixty six sci fi horror film called Queen of Blood. And now I immediately liked that title. I looked up the poster and I liked that too, So my attention
was raised. I kept digging in and I was like, well, we've got to cover this movie, and so here we are today, we're talking about Queen of Blood nineteen sixty six, starring John Saxon, Dennis Hopper, Basil Rathbone, and Florence Marley.
Yeah, and I think it would be proper to position this film within a trilogy of space vampire movies that we'll probably get around to watching all of these at
one point. Planet a Vampire from nineteen sixty five, which we have covered, the Mario Bava film Beautiful to Behold, maybe a little bit qua lutic at times and its energy, but still great, this film, which carries on the vampires space tradition, just one year later, and then eventually we're going to get to Life Force, that being the modern version of this tale of you know, just female and in the case of Planet of the Vapires, male vampires
as well, vampires of all gender coming from space wanting to consume human blood.
Now, in life Force, I don't think it's exactly blood. They just kind of generally want to suck all your life force basically your life energy out and leave you a very withered, skeletal kind of artifact. Yeah, but yes, generally I agree with this arc, and I'm going to say, of the three movies, the one we're talking about today is by far the least of them, but not without its pleasures. So we can talk about the kind of weird jigsaw puzzle that is this film. But overall, I
did enjoy it. It raises a question, though, which is that, of all the movies we've ever done on Weird House, which one do you think is comprised to the largest extent of pre existing footage. It's got to be this one.
Right, It's got to be this one by a long shot. So to explain this to anyone who's not familiar with this film, and I think most people are not familiar with this film, it includes a lot of footage, especially the effects footage from the nineteen fifty nine Soviet science fiction film Nebo Zovyacht, a film that the producer of this movie, Roger Korman, who of course you're familiar with from past episodes, had purchased the US distribution rights for.
He even roped in a young Francis Ford Coppola, who worked on some re editing. They apparently added some monster scenes for US audiences and released it as Battle Beyond the Sun. This movie also reuses footage from nineteen sixty threes Mitchta Nevstretchu A Dream Come True, another Soviet science
fiction film. So these are both I've not seen either of these in their entirety, but they are essentially big budget, prestige sci fi films from the Soviet Union, and here footed from them is reused for a low budget Roger Korman produced sci fi spectacle you know that's going to be released as part of a double feature.
Now, I was trying to think of a name for what you would call this genre of movie genre, not in terms of the not in terms of the story content, but in terms of the way it came about. And to borrow a phrase from the at least the current edition of Dungeons and Dragons, I'm going to call this an attack of opportunity film. Yeah, it is a film that comes about because you have some opportunity in terms
of production capability. Maybe you suddenly own rights to a bunch of footage and you can try to figure out how to build a movie around that footage, like we have in the case of this movie today. But there
are other such examples. There are cases where like we have a very famous actor on hand and for you know, two more days, can we do something with them that we can build the rest of a movie around later, Or maybe we have access to sets that have been used in another movie or props that have been used in another movie, and can we quickly throw something together to make use of that. It's sort of an efficiency based approach to cinematic storytelling.
Yeah, I think I've heard director Robert Rodriguez speak to this as well. You know, like seeing what you have, what do you have at your disposal that you can utilize, and using that kind of as the skeleton to build up what you're going to create, especially if you're dealing with limited budget.
What is I feel like we talked about another movie recently where there was like a big star who was already on call having filmed another movie, and they had him for like a couple more days, and so they made something that we watched. Does that ring a bell for you?
Oh? It does ring a bell? I feel like that's been the case with various actors like, well, I guess I'm going to stay in Rome for another week. Love it here, you have a movie for me to work on, you know, that sort of thing I feel like that's the specific example has come up, but I don't recall which film and which star it was.
This is how you get discount, Boris Karloff.
Yeah, but yeah.
So in the case of Queen of Blood, it's not like an actor or some sets they had access to. It was pre existing footage. So we've got a bunch of shots that are already part of another movie. But fortunately most of our audience will not have seen that movie, and the footage looks pretty dang good. So what if we can just sort of like figure out how to build a narrative around these shots we have?
Also, I think they have the same space helmets. I did some pausing of the film because I was really distracted by the differences between these two obvious lines of footage while watching the film, and I was like, are they even using the same space helmets? Or do they just get the color ride and it looks like they're the same helmets, or they are such an accurate recreation that it does matter. So I'll give them credit for that, but there's so many other things that you just can't reproduce.
I feel like I would have noticed it even if I did not read about the background of the film because number one, like the art style is totally different, Like all of the pre existing footage has a much more beautifully lusciously realized kind of character to it. The scenes that are actually shot directly for this film are much more bare bones in terms of sets and stuff. But also it's just totally different in terms of like the film grain and things, like the shots just don't
really match. But you know, it's okay. You slot them in there and you can make a movie.
And I knew this was coming. I knew this was one of the notable things about this film, but I wasn't prepared for just how much they were going to dump in. Like my mind instantly turns to a single
episode of Night Gallery from the early seventies. There's an episode called The Different Ones, or rather it's a segment from an episode called The Different Ones, and it's a science fiction story that involves characters traveling from one planet to the next, and in syndication, they had to expand its runtime a bit, so they inserted spaceship shots from nineteen seventy two Silent Running, Silent Running, Great Motion Picture.
I think we have a podcast episode pre Weird House dealing with it to some extent, but in that particular instance, you know, it was very forgivable, and you can easily gloss over it because it's like, Okay, we're exterior spaceship. Here's a shot from Silent Running. You just go with it. And I was expecting it to be more like that with this film, that like, Okay, whenever we see an exterior of a spaceship, it's going to be scenes from one of these Russian films. But that's not the case.
It's all sorts of stuff. It's just so much stock or in this case, reused footage dropped into the first hour. It's like when you let an eight year old put their own syrup on their pancakes.
Yes. Yeah, And there are a few things that you can actually especially if you have a pause button available to you. One of which is there's a scene where Basil Rathbone is giving a speech to a big assembled crowd, and then it does a cutaway to show the whole room, and I guess it's still supposed to be him speaking,
but it's not actually him in the shot. And then in this room there's a great statue of like a god or at least a muscled, nude male figure and he's holding something in his hand, and when he's holding is Sputnik the Russia the Soviet spacecraft.
Yeah, yeah, there are a lot of details like that. It's almost as if they were like, look, the kids are just going to be making out for the first hour of this movie. We don't have to stress too much about it, and ultimately, like that's how it feels. It feels like the first hour of the film. Once you press through that, you have a kind of tight, little thirty minute story to enjoy and some nice acting and so forth. But you but at least for me, I really had to press through that first hour.
I agree, yeah, that there's a lot of padding, but there are some moments in that first hour that I think are actually extremely effective, and we can explain more about those when we get into the plot. But yeah, there's a lot of Basil Rathbone talking and it's not that interesting or just like seeing rockets blast off or shoot through space. That's not that great either. But a lot of the footage from the Soviet films is beautiful and sometimes it is used to I think great effect.
I would say of the original stuff in the movie, probably the best for me was all basically Florence Marley, who plays the main alien character in the film.
Oh yeah, she doesn't say a single word, but she emotes really well with her eyes and her eyebrows especially.
Yeah, her eyes, her teeth in the corners of her mouth do more acting than most people do with one hundred lines of dialogue.
Yeah, nice space vampire smirk. All right. Well, the other fun thing about this is this is one of those movies that takes us into the future, the far future of nineteen ninety, So that that was pretty fun.
It's what the narrator actually says it. It's the first thing you hear in the film is that the year is nineteen ninety. All right.
My elevator pitch for this is pretty simple. Space Vampire sixty six. That's all you need to know. It's just nineteen sixty six, and this is a space vampire movie coming out of sixty six. Though it's also interesting that in many respects it's kind of a it feels more old fashioned than sixty six. It feels a lot of the energy of this film is maybe more in line with what we might expect from the nineteen fifties. So it's interesting to think about that. We'll discuss that as
we proceed. Let's go ahead and hear that trailer. Ween of Blood.
A tantalizing, mystifying enigma.
She's gorgeous, all her fresh blood.
She's a monster. You had a good supply of blood plasma with us. Use that defeeder and if we run out of plasma, commander.
All right, if you want to watch Queen of Blood, well, it's currently streaming. I know it's streaming on Prime. We watched it there. I think it's streaming on some other sources. It's also available on DVD from MGM's limited collection. There's also a blu ray from Kino Lurber and Scorpion Releasing, though it doesn't seem to be widely available right now, maybe out of print or something. But I wasn't able to get my hands on that one, but it looks
like it has possibly some extras on it. All right, Getting into the people behind this film, because ultimately some of the cast and crew here are what like kind of pushed the movie over the edge for me, because you know, I'm already interested in the concept and you know the time period. But then I started reading about the director and writer of this Curtis Harrington, who lived
nineteen twenty six through two thousand and seven. I wasn't familiar with it with his work prior, but Curtis Harrington was a respected Hollywood director, a film critic, an experimental filmmaker who played an important role apparently in rediscovering James Whale during the nineteen fifties. James Whale, of course, the director of such pictures as Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein.
It's hard for me to imagine that James Whale ever would have been like a forgotten filmmaker as long as I've been aware of him. I was aware of him with kind of icon status.
Yeah, I thought of it the same way. But I was reading about this in Harrington's oh bit in the Los Angeles Times. They're quoting Dennis Bartak, producer and screenwriter, who says that that Whale had been quote pretty much forgotten by everybody at this time during the last you know, decade or less of Wales's life, so fastened detail there.
So anyway back to Harrington. Following a string of experimental short films, his first feature was nineteen sixty one's Night Tide, which also starred Dennis Hopper, apparently in his first leading role, as a man who falls in love with a mysterious woman who performs as a mermaid at the local carnival. I've not seen it, but it's one of Harrington's best known films and is apparently apparently very well regarded for its sort of darkly fantastic elements. It's supposed to be
a rather retheranized film. It was a Corman production, and he followed that movie up with two features for Corman, utilizing big budget sci fi footage that Corman had gotten his hands on from the Soviet Union. Those films were Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet in sixty five and Queen of Blood in sixty six. Harrington's late sixties early seventies period contained several macabre films, including sixty seven Games with James Kahn, seventy one's What's the Matter with Helen starring
Debbie Reynolds, seventy two's Whoever Slew? Anti? Crew? I guess this is the question title period of his work. This one starred Shelley Winters. There's seventy threes The Killing Kind, and then mostly TV episodes and TV movies after that, but with some intriguing titles like seventy threes The Cat Creature and seventy eight's Devil Dog the Hound of Hell, not to be confused with nineteen seventy seven's Dracula's Dog.
Is that like, they ran out of the son of Dracula, daughter of Dracula, cousin of Dracula, and they work all the way down to Dracula's.
Dog, Dracula's Dog. And I mean, obviously they should have followed it up with Devil Dog versus Dracula's Dog, but they didn't anyway. They're also two theatrical films. In the later mix. There there's seventy seven's Ruby, a supernatural thriller starring Piper Laurie, and nineteen eighty five's Matahari, a historical
erotic melodrama starring Sylvia Crystal. Best known for the Emmanuel films, so Harrington's work is frequently explored in scholarship surrounding queer cinema, though I believe much of this is contextual, as I'm not sure that any of his films have expressly gay characters, though Harrington himself was openly gay and wrote about it. In his autobiography. But Queen of Blood, well, I can only imagine this is not the best example of his work.
But I do feel like when Harrington actually has time to build something here, again mostly in the last thirty minutes or so of the picture, it mostly works. Like he's able to make use of good actors and also effectively build a certain amount of tension.
Oh, I fully agree. I would say, on one hand, yes, this is the least of the three Space Vampire films you mentioned, But also I mean, how could it be anything other than that given the circumstances, Like this is an attack of opportunity film, It is an efficiency project. You're trying to build something mostly on the basis of stock footage or not start, you know, pre existing footage.
So it is it's a difficult task, and I think this movie, given that, actually is much better than it has any right to be.
Oh, absolutely all right. The cast of this Baby is also pretty interesting. We got John Saxon playing Alan Brynner, our lead astronaut. Saxon with nineteen thirty six through twenty twenty. He's a weird house cinema staple we've profiled on the show. I want to say, three or four times at this point. So I'm not going to go in into a lot of detail regarding Saxon, but it was a former team.
I'm trying to remember what were the other We did the Cannibal movie, but what were the other John Saxon movies?
Well, yes, there was the Cannibal movie. There was Hands of Steel, in which he's one of the villains.
Yes, hands of Steel.
Okay, there's something else.
It's okay, okay, we can move on. Sorry, I just was troubled that I couldn't remember the others. Okay, at least two. That gets me there.
Every few weeks there's at least one John Saxon film we were considering, especially from his seventies period, you know. But in any rate, Saxon's definitely come up in the show before him just blinking on some of the other ones we may have discussed him in. But Saxon was a former teen idol, and he'd been acting since the mid fifties at this point, and had already worked with Mario Bava on sixty three's The Girl who Knew Too Much and Auto Preminger on sixty three Is the Cardinal.
He'd appeared alongside a young Robert Redford in the nineteen sixty two war film War Hunt, which I've read is quite good. He plays a soldier in that who also happens to be like a serial murderer. But Saxon would really come into his own, like I say, and more than like the nineteen seventies, I think. I think most of the pictures one is drawn to for John Saxon are going to be from that period. So he's maybe
a little young here, he's not completely green. But on the other hand, he's also playing a character who feels like he's been extracted more or less from a nineteen fifty sci fi adventure. You know, he's still better in this sort of bland role than a lot of the square jaw leads that you find in those fifty sci fi films, but it still has a lot in common with that.
Yeah, I think there's not much to this role. He is the leading man, and he is, to use the term I often used to describe leading men from fifties genre movies, he's kind of a rectangle, like he's just there to be the masculine energy of rectitude according to the logic of the film.
And yet it's still is subdued compared to some of the early example like he did I don't think he ever punches anybody.
No, he doesn't. He does spend the last I don't know ten minutes of the movie arguing for the destruction of something, with everybody else being like, oh no, it's fine, we don't have to destroy it.
All right, you mentioned him already, But Basil Rathbone is in this place, Doctor Faraday. Rathbone lived I mean sorry eighteen ninety two through nineteen sixty seven. This was one of his final film performances, but he had a long career of stage and screen. He was a South African born English actor who served in the First World War and started appearing in films in the early twenties. He played Guy of Gisborne in nineteen thirty eight s The
Adventures of Robin Hood. He played Sherlock Holmes in fourteen Hollywood films. Between thirty eight and forty six. He appeared in various swashbucklers. He stayed active on the stage, won a Tony Award in nineteen forty eight for The Heiress, and he was nominated for two Oscars for nineteen thirty nine. If I were King in nineteen thirty seven's Romeo and Juliet, in which he played Tibolt opposite Leslie Howard as Romeo and Norma Shearer as Juliet. He played Baron von Wolf
in nineteen thirty nine's Son of Frankenstein. That was the third universal Frankenstein film, with Carloff and Legosi in it. But I think there's kind of a drop off after the first.
Yeah, this one was not James Whale, was it.
No, No, no.
I think Bride is definitely the peak for me.
Bride is the peak now. Rathbone definitely made his mark in horror and noir stories, especially later in his career. Just to name a few films of note here, at least fifty six The Black Sleep co starring Laun Cheney, Junior Bell, Lagosi and John Carradine. Sixty two is The Magic Sword. That's a fun fantasy film that was featured on MST three K back in the day. Roger Corman's Tales of Terror starring Vincent Price and Peter Lourie. Sixty three is the comedy of terror is starring Price, Lourie
and Carloff. Then we have sixty five Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet. This movie. There's also sixty six is the Ghost in the Invisible Bikini and nineteen sixty seven's Hillbilly's in a Haunted House.
I just had to check something real quick. But yes, the Magic Sword in sixty two was directed by Burt I.
Gordon. That's a fun one. That's fun. I would come back for that. One's got a fun cast. And now it's for the kids. It's a fairy tale movie. It's great.
Yes. Now, I will say of Basil Rathbone in this movie, I think he you know, he does what is asked of him, but this is certainly not his best work. It's kind of a monotonous exposition role. He makes a lot of bureaucratic statements on behalf of the Space Institution. Seems kind of underused to me.
Yeah, he's fun at the end. It's gonna be fun to discuss his final Yes, all right. We also have a character named Laura James played by Judy Meredith, who lived nineteen thirty six through twenty fourteen, best known for this movie, Shirley Temple's Storybook in fifty eight and Jack the Giant Killer in sixty two. Mostly a TV player, she was also the longtime wife of Gary Nelson, who lived thirty four through twenty twenty two, who directed nineteen seventy nine's The Black Hole. Now.
I was looking at Judy Meredith's twenty fourteen obituary in The Oregonian, and this had an interesting story. It said that at the age of fifteen, she briefly became a professional ice skater, participating in the Ice Follies, which was some kind of touring ice show that would sometimes feature like Olympic ice skaters, but also had various performances such as the Swiss comedy ice skating duo Frick and Frack. Do you know Frick and Frack rup?
I feel like maybe I've heard allusions to Frick and Frack, but I didn't know who they were. Like, maybe there's an old Mst. Three K joke about Frick and frag, But boy, look at them, there they are.
I had no idea there was any such thing as a comedy ice skating duo.
Which one has the mustache, which one looks like g Gordon Lyddy.
I don't know, but that's gotta be Frack. Huh No, maybe it's Frick. I really couldn't say but so I wonder I haven't seen their routine. Is it like a three stooges thing where they're poking each other in the eyes and bopping on the top of the head, but they're ice skating.
I mean one as soon. If you're in the middle of an ice skating rink and you're trying to portray comedy to the audience, it's got to be pretty broad, right.
Yeah, you got to be kind of physical.
You got to pad that butt for this act, I'm guessing.
But anyway, sorry, yes, Judy Meredith. So she briefly participated in the ice Follies until she suffered a major skiing accident, and this put an end to her ice skating career. After this, she focused on acting in theater and was apparently discovered by the comedian George Burns when she was performing at the Pasadena Playhouse. This led to a role on the half hour TV comedy show he presented with Gracie Allen, and then this in turn led to more
TV and film roles, including Queen of Blood. But it looks like a lot of you know, the kind off the sixty stuff Western.
Yes.
Now, there was a line from the obit that struck me as interesting. It said that Judy Meredith sort of created the opportunity for her husband Gary Neilson to have a directing career because she agreed to star in the TV show Have Gun Will Travel for Free, but only if Gary would be allowed to direct. That's a move.
Yeah, so without her intervention, we might not have gotten to the point of the black Hole. Who knows. Yeah, well, we may have to do black Hole at some point. I can't get my family to watch it with me, so I'm gonna have to revisit it on my own at some point, so you can make me watch it with you.
Yes, well I look forward to that. But yeah, to come back to I like shooting Meredith in this again kind of like Basil Rathbone here. I feel like she's a little bit kind of underused by the script, but she's got good spunk in her scenes. And also, like Basil Rathbone's character, it becomes fun in the last ten minutes or so, and she's kind of just like arguing with John Saxon about whether or not we should let these aliens completely drink all her blood.
I agree she doesn't have as much to do, but you see the charisma sparkling through the performance, which is nice.
And you know what, Actually, so I've said that about the last two actors, I'll also say that about Dennis Hopper. He's good in this, but kind of underused. This is the most subdued I have ever seen Dennis Hopper.
Yeah, it's interesting because this is, Yeah, this is not Dennis Hopper as a villain or a wild man. I feel like he says daddy O or something at some point and we felt like an ad lib and maybe, But aside from that, there's not a lot of what you might expect from Dennis Hopper. He plays this kind of kind and sensitive astronaut character that's like really, you know, trying to connect with the They don't know it at the time, but this alien vampire who they brought on board.
They make him a writer. So he there's a part where I don't remember exactly what he says. We can explore that later, but he he's like giving an update on the ship's log and they're like, wow, Jack Kerouac, nice work.
All right. So yeah, Dennis Hopper playing Paul Grant here he lived in nineteen thirty six to twenty ten. We profiled him last week on the Super Mario Brothers episodes. We're not going to go into all that again, but just to put it in context, Queen of Blood hits just the year before sixty seven's Cool Hand Luke and The Trip, as well as of course sixty eight heads
sixty nine's Easy Rider. So you know, it's like a lot of big stuff was about to happen for Hopper, but he'd still had over a decade's TV and film experience at this point, though mostly in smaller roles. As we mentioned earlier, Harrington gave Hopper his first starring role in nineteen sixty one's Night Tide, and Hopper apparently always spoke well of him due to that, you know, that break that film gave him, but also his experiences on
that film. He felt like Harrington like gave him the room he needed to, you know, to craft his performance, and it just overall spoke well of him as a director.
Well that's nice, and it makes me want to see that other movie. But Dennis Hopper, I'm just gonna say he's on his best behavior in this one. Yeah, okay, But so the last three actors I said, I felt kind of underused, all talented but maybe they weren't given enough attention, maybe their roles weren't given enough oomph in the script. I don't think I would say that about Florence Marley. She gets some close up time.
Oh yeah, just straight up coming at the camera with glowing eyes and that face. She doesn't actually have any lines in the movie, but it's a very physical performance. Yeah, doesn't need a line. She speaks, She's doing everything psychically. So yeah, Florence Marley playing on IMDb, its credit is Alien Queen. In the post credits for the film, it's just Florence Marley as question mark, like she doesn't given a name and the New Mysterians, Yeah she was, but
she has lived nineteen nineteen through nineteen seventy eight. Checkborn actress who made her mark in European film in the thirties and forties, in such movies as forty eight's Krakatit and forty seven's The Damned, before making the move to Hollywood after the Second World War, she appeared in such American movies as forty nine's Tokyo Joe opposite Humphrey Bogart, fifty seven's under Sea Girl. I know that was the title that got your attention, Like, what does that consist?
Is she a mermaid? Is she like in a wetsuit? I don't know, Yeah, I didn't know. She also she was on a number of TV series as well, including the original Twilight Zone. Now, like other actors of the mid twentieth century that we've discussed, she was impacted by the House on American Activities Committee's Blacklist, though it turns out that in her circumstances, it was due to a case of mistaken identity, and even though this was eventually cleared up, the damage to her career was done at
that point. This was one of the last handful of films she worked on, though she later appeared in nineteen seventy three's Doctor Death Seeker of Souls, and the nineteen seventy six film The Astrologer, which I've heard great things about. It's supposed to be kind of like a weird rediscovered classic. She also apparently, and I'm going off of various databases
and so forth for this. She apparently wrote and starred in a short film sequel of sorts to this movie titled Space Boy Yes, with an electronic score by BBA and Louis Baron of the Forbidden Plan of Forbidden Planet Fame, and this would have been in nineteen seventy three. I see various mentions of it. It's listed in the databases I can, but I find no actual footage of it anywhere. I don't see any indication that it was included as
an extra on anything or compiled anywhere. It's almost like it's listed in error, or it's a lost film entirely. I'm not sure what the story is here.
If you have spaceboy, send it to us. Upload now, give us a link. I've got to see this because I love Florence Marley in this movie of the original footage, she makes the film.
Absolutely all right. Another actor in this I wasn't even going to mention them because before we watched it, I was thinking, oh, this is the fourth crewman on the ship. He's just gonna die. He's not going to be that interesting. But I actually found the performance kind of fun. This is Robert Boone as Anders Brockman. He's like the practical older guy on the on the vessel who says things like, well, how different is it drinking blood from just enjoying a nice,
rare stake. It's not that different. We shouldn't be quick to judge that sort of thing.
This is right after the alien has drained all of Denis Hopper's blood. Yeah, this guy gives a speech about like, well, hold on, now, let's not judge.
Yeah, she's just murdered his crewmate at this point. But at any rate. This actor lived nineteen sixteen through twenty fifteen. Dutch born actor active from the late forties through the early eighties. And you look at this guy's credits. He started off playing a lot of German soldiers and so forth uncredited in war films, and I mean a lot of them. It's an impressive list of like German soldier uncredited and so forth, but eventually starts getting better parts.
He shows up on a couple episodes of the classic Twilight Zone. Same year, he's an uncredited player in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain. Mostly TV work follows, but I read that he served as a member of the Motion Picture Academy's Foreign Language Nominating Committee, So yeah, this is his most well known film. But he's also it's not just an invisible role in the movie. Like, I don't know, I
kind of like this character all right. Now, it's worth noting I didn't actually mark him in this because he would have been a bit younger, but Forrest j Ackerman plays Faraday's aid in this with nineteen sixteen through two thousand and eight. This is the father of sci fi fandom. An avid collector of sci fi memorabilia, He was also the founding editor and principal writer of the magazine Famous Monsters of Film Land, and was a literary agent for such authors as Ray Bradberry and l Ron Hubbard.
I think this is the guy Basil Rathbone is talking to when he has just gotten a radio update saying everybody on the ship is dead except for John Saxon and Judy Meredith. And then he turns to this guy and he's like, things are going very poorly on that ship.
Yes, yeah, I think that's probably him. Yeah. This is also kind of interesting. Gary Kurtz was a production manager on this picture. This is, of course, the future producer of the first two Star Wars movies, The Dark Crystal and returned to OZ. He lived nineteen forties through twenty eighteen.
Notable because if you've watched any documentaries about the making of the first two Star Wars movies or The Dark Crystal he's the guy with the whaler's beard, the kind of Abraham Lincoln beard who talks and has a very serious tone to his voice and always has some interesting things to say about the production. That's him the production manager on this movie. Wow. And then finally, the music is by Ronald Stein, who lived nineteen thirty through nineteen
eighty eight. Composer who worked on a lot of low budget films, particularly for American International Picture. His credits include It Conquered the World, Not of This Earth, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Dementia thirteen, and more, including The Rain People, Coppola's picture prior to The Godfather.
Wow, he's writing her Zone.
Yeah. He's probably come up before, and as we just don't remember him. I mean, the music in this is not completely unforgettable. It has some nice, kind of haunting little bits that have a bit of a night gallery feel to them that I liked, But in other places it's just more traditional. All right, Joe, are you ready to jump into the plot here?
Oh yes, Oh yes.
So.
One thing that I as far as I know, was not imported from the Soviet films. I think this may be original is the beautiful art behind the opening credits.
Yeah, I, as far as I know, this is original and it this is definitely was the section of the film starts off strong for me because it does feel very night Gallery skit. This looks like the kind of thing that that would be on one of the Night Gallery paintings, and the music also has that kind of eerie vibe to it, like firmly establishing that, yes, you're gonna see a lot of space stuff, but this movie is going to at heart be spooky in one way or another.
Yeah. So all of this stuff is attributed to an artist named John Klein, who I wasn't otherwise familiar with. But as the credits roll, we shuffle through kind of lightly representative but mostly abstract illustrations with a psychedelic stained glass effect, and I thought it might be fun to try to describe some of these images. First, there is a kind of a psilocybin yule lad butterfly with beard
made out of rainbow colored tumors. Then there is a two headed witch king of Agmar, but he is chained in the Jacob Marley fashion with sixteen dimensional Mardi Gras beads, and in the background there are some mountains and twin moons. After this, there is a giant pink root vegetable nostril with a wing that has bones for feathers. Then there is a scene of multicolored gravel eggs hatching into spoon plants at the base of a mountain made out of dog paws. This is when it says Dennis Hopper, by
the way. After that, it's blood volcano leaking more gravel eggs and mandl brought fissures into the air, while there are these white pale vines that reach up toward the black sun. More bone wings, more blood planets. There's one where there's sort of the top right corner of the screen kind of looks like the Punisher logo version of a bunny rabbit, but with terminator eyes, and then there's a bunch of circuit board components under the rabbit's jaw.
Backgrounds for the title of the movie, I would describe as a DMT furbie with a city skyline inside its Hairdo maybe I'll stop there. There is more, but in general I think this is all good stuff. Puts one in an alien mood, goes well with theorem, and music suggests that we may be in for sites beyond our comprehension, and as much as I love Florence Marley, I don't think the movie will be quite as psychedelic as the
credits imply. But after the credits we get a starfield eerie strings playing, and the narrator says, what did we say it was going to be? The year nineteen ninety? It says the problem of traveling to the Moon has been solved for many years. Note that this movie was in sixty six. The first human moon landing was in sixty nine, so that's you know, this comes out at a time when humans had not yet walked on the Moon.
Narrator says, space stations have been built there, and authorized personnel come and go as they wish of slight.
Note here two thousand and one, a Space Odyssey wouldn't come out for another couple of years, So I don't know. It's like I think all science fiction depicting travel within our own solar system, like near future space travel and our solar system, you almost have to judge it in terms of before two thousand and one or post two thousand and one.
Yeah, I agree, But so in these shots, we of course see the Moon, we see tiny ships zooming past and a shot of the surface with rockets posed upright in this kind of rocky, shadowy landscape, and the narrator goes on it says, but the Moon is a dead world, and the great question about space still remains. Does life exist on another planet? To seek an answer to this question, the major powers of the world have been preparing at the International Institute of Space Technology to explore the planets
Venus and Mars. And here we cut to shots of a kind of hip institutional campus with a bit of modern architecture flare. People are walking along in the sidewalks and Rob, did you notice that they're all stepping in sync with each other. It kind of makes a point of showing this, and I wondered, why.
Oh yeah, I don't know. It's just everyone's on the same page when it comes to space technology. I guess.
Yeah. Well, anyway, we cut inside and why here's John Saxon. Look at his posture, it's really good. He enters a door labeled Astro Communications, which is in a very strange font. You remember the font on the door label, it's sort of the font one would find on the record sleeve of the band.
Yes, oh yeah, yeah, it was a little weird, but it's the future. It's nineteen nine.
So John Saxon, I think his character's name is Alan Brenner, is here to pick up a lady to go to lunch. And this is Judy Meredith, playing an astronaut and communication specialist named Laura James. She's like, I don't know about lunch. I'm kind of busy. I'm picking up a radio broadcast from another planet unlike anything we've ever heard before. It may be our first confirmation of intelligent life anywhere else in the universe. But yeah, okay, let's go to lunch.
She's just like, Bill, will you record this alien broadcast for me? I'll check it out later.
I mean a pinwheel day at a cafeteria, so you gotta go. But no, it's what do they actually say they're eating it? I mean it looks disgusting. It looks
like a kind of burned waffle. But before we see them at lunch, so they leave and we're seeing like the equipment in the Earth based communications lab, and we hear the droning of the signal from the other planet, and the droning of the signal becomes louder, and we cut into space, and we zoom toward the surface of a pale green planet and then we see the surface.
We're on it. There are crashing waves in the foreground against a horizon with giant spires of rock that are taller than the top of a looming moon. Then and then we see a giant ball of wires that's maybe the thing that is sending out the signal. And inside that ball of wires, I guess it's a building. We see what must be aliens. There are humanoid bodies standing
in the shadows. It's very dark inside, and they're manipulating machinery to guide a beam of turquoise light as it sweeps across space, Like are they beaming a signal toward us? We see hands reaching out for a series of darkened orbs topped by prismatic triangles, and then cut to John Saxon and Laura having lunch.
Yeah, this the this whole segment of course, on the alien planet is all footage from the Soviet productions that are sampled here. And it was I don't know, I was distracted just thinking about like did we need to see any of this? If? Like the causation of filmmaking is kind of messed up here, because like, would you create this footage for use in the film? You know, does it actually serve an important purpose in the narrative or is it really what we have here where it's
just like, well, we have it. We should show what this other planet is, even though we're never actually going to visit it, but we should just show it to them because we have, you know, minutes worth of footage.
I agree, it is a tough question, like it removes any sense of mystery here and it doesn't really add anything narratively to the film, But particularly in one segment coming up in a few minutes, I think it does actually have a very good effect at achieving a mood. But we'll get to that. So first we're going to meet a few Earthling characters again. Alan and Laura are having lunch. Alan is complaining that the astronaut food tastes really bad. They're calling it exo biologic food, and he
likes banana splits on Earth better. And then these two guys named Tony and Paul come to sit down with them. All the dudes, by the way, are dressed the same khaki pants, yellow shirt, slightly puffy jacket with a pattern that looks like a mattress cover. And then we have Dennis Hopper here on he sits down on the left. His name is Paul. We learn from conversation that John Saxon is scheduled to travel to Mars. And then we get Dennis Hopper's first line, which is, what's the latest scuttle?
But there, Tony baby.
Yeah, yeah, Dennis Hopper lays and.
JOm, I think this is the line where you said he may have been ad libbing. I would agree, Yeah, what were we saying beforehand? It's imagining him doing the voice and the trailer saying like space man, it's a real bad trip.
That would have been That would have been a great tagline, especially if this movie had been made just like two years later.
Yeah, but we should clarify nothing about Dennis Hopper's look or performance in this movie is shaggy, dangerous hippie. Instead, he comes off very he's very clean cut and conventionally handsome.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And now I should also a couple other things. You mentioned. The uniforms I do have to drive home, these are not the uniforms in this film are not on the same level at all with Planet of the vampires. I mean, the colors match, everything has a certain uniformity to it, but high fashion is not in play. I also feel like this lunch scene that
everyone was very animated for this sequence. I don't know if they just had a lot of fun setting around, if there's a lot of cutting up in between takes, but everyone seemed really happy to be on set for this one.
I agree, yeah, spirits are high. But their lunch is interrupted by an announcement on the loudspeed. It's calling everybody to gather in Area one for an important announcement. The dudes get up and they say that means us, but the announcement literally says all personnels. I don't know why they say that. But on the way, John Zackson he's asking Laura, He's like, hey, have you ever imagined you'd be getting married on a rocket ship to Mars? So apparently, I guess they're engaged.
Zero g wedding sounds exciting.
Oh, that'd be very cool.
Yes.
So the meeting place is outdoors and the background here is a gigantic sculpture. It's bigger than the Statue of Liberty. It's huge, and it's a goddess leaping into the air with arms outstretched, and there's a ringed planet at her feet. Kind of reminds me of the winged victory of Samothrace.
But here we get an announcement from Basil Rathbone. He's playing doctor Faraday, kind of the big boss at this place, and he says, my friends and fellow workers in the Great Adventure of Space, I have the most important news to announce since our first successful landing on the Moon twenty years ago. As many of you know, for several weeks now, we've been receiving organized signals from a far galaxy. This morning, our code experts finally deciphered the message these
signals contained. It is a most extraordinary document. It's very long, and then he explains he's not going to read the whole thing, but that it means the Aliens dispatched a spaceship containing an ambassador who will come to Earth and live with us here since our atmosphere will support their form of life. Faraday says that the entire world will await the arrival of the alien ambassador with the keenest anticipation, and everybody applauds. But as the applause dies out, we
fade back to visions of the other world. So we see again the waves crashing on knights Plutonian shore, and we see the towers of rock and the beings moving about in the shadows of their weird castles filled with unrecognizable technology. There are pipes and hoses and big olds, spheres that themselves seem to contain stars. And there's no dialogue and no music, just the shrill droning of the
radio signal that's beaming out to Earth. And I actually think that these scenes of the alien planet, especially the way that they are inner cut with the scenes of brightly lit, noisy gatherings and social activity on Earth, are extremely effective. It's very moody and disconcerting, the way it goes from like the crowd at the institute to the planet, and that nobody's saying anything. They're just moving around in the shadows, manipulating technology that we can't even understand.
Yeah, I think you're right. It visually drives home this feeling that's later brought up in dialogue to some extent, like this idea of like we really don't know what these other beings consist of, like not only like their biology but also their society. Like, what is it they value, what do they want? And what does it mean that they're sending an ambassador to us?
Yeah, everything we see of them is silent, methodical, wordless, almost emotionless, just movements in the dark. So, despite the limitations imposed by relying so much on pre existing footage to construct this film, I think it is used to great effect in some sequences, and this is one of them. This part I thought was actually excellent.
Agreed, Agreed.
But then on the then we get some more kind of like launch footage, and that stuff is less interesting. But on the alien planet, we see this giant spherical ship rise up out of an underground bay and the crew rides a tram up to board it. We only see the crew members. We see the vaguely humanoid shapes, but only at the distance, so you never like get a close up. And in the distance they're kind of
waving goodbye to a crowd, again silently. There's there's no local sound, just the droning signal, and then they blast off into space.
Yeah, it's a cool looking ship. These the circuit, the spherical ship with the kind of halo around it. This is from nineteen sixty threes. Mitch to now of stretch too, So it looks good, but yeah, it's it's made by other hands.
Then back on Earth, we see a giant television ball appearing in the sky over the Institute with a dude delivering the news. He's like wearing a suit and tie. He's explaining how scientists have detected a ship approaching Earth bringing aliens from quote a distant galaxy. I don't know. Okay, As I've said before, I can always suspend disbelief, and that's this is fine. But note to sci fi wriders, if you care about being realistic at all, the space
between galaxies is immense. I think if if you want to have aliens, they should be from another star in our galaxy, now, from another galaxy.
Yeah, unless you're dealing with a far future interstellar empire sort of scenario, then you can maybe get into these distant galaxy ideas. But even then, like the galaxy is big enough, there's still room for discoveries and surprises and so forth.
Yes, Also, the guy in the TV ball, his lips are not matching the words he's saying, which makes me think this is also part of the Soviet film package. But he says astronomers have determined that an unknown object has passed the orbit of the Moon and is rapidly approaching Earth. It is not the ship itself, but a mechanical device sent ahead for reasons unknown. And then we see a metal ball bobbing in the waves, so scientists investigate this. We see Basil Rathbone and Judy Meredith like
watching a video. It seems that maybe what was sent to Earth was like a video tape from the security cameras on the alien ship, and so what happens on the video they watch? Well, in the alien ship there is the worrying of a great machine sort of tuning up, and we see two aliens again, silent in the shadows. One of them produces, in an almost ritualistic fashion, a helmet and then places it on the other one's head.
And then the ship accelerates toward a red planet. And then Basil Rathbone looks away from the screen and he says, remark arkable crash landing on Mars. And this is their sos. We're obviously in touch with beings that have a very advanced technology. So there's a big meeting in a kind of auditorium. This is the one with the giant statue holding spot Nick in his hand like Youoric Skull and Basil. Rathbon says, basically, the aliens need our help. They have
crash landed on Mars. They are stranded there. We are obliged to go help them out.
It's a pretty good setup. Actually, yeah, more in retrospect than I think in my actual experience of watching this portion of the film. I feel like there's a there's a bit of padding getting to this point, but once we get there, it's like, Okay, we've got a mission here. This sounds good. It was going to be like we meet the Space Ambassador, but the Ambassador's ship is crashed or something and we got to go check it out.
Yeah, there is a lot more padding to come, but in a way, it like the premise makes sense. So they say, there's the the spaceship Oceano, which was originally planned to go to Mars on an exploratory mission. Rathbone's like, okay, we're gonna move forward the schedule. We're going to turn this into a rescue operation. And the time is now, and obviously John Saxon must be thinking, I was not ready to eat all of this exobiologic food. I want my Earth meat loaf, I want my Earth waffles. But
they blast off. So the rescue mission is on the way. There's a bunch of footage here of rockets, you know, zooming around and landing and being sent on the Moon. Once we actually see the surface of the Moon, the footage is cooler again because I like the little model set they have this from the original films. And once they're on the Moon, Laura talks to Basil Rathbone. She says, you know, I was hoping Alan would be on my flight, but he's like, nope, no, can't do. We put you
on different flights. So Laura is going to be on the first mission, Oceano one, that is going now Alan's going to be on Oceano two, which goes later. And so there's a sad conversation about how they won't be traveling together and they embrace and then yeah, I guess they leave. So there's a launch and the crew of the first shi is Laura and then Paul that's Dennis Hopper, and then Anders who is the commander, and that does
rhyme commander and reporting for duty. I think it's Commander Alexander Anders, so they have some kind of relaxed cutting up time on the ship. We talked about the scene where Dennis Hopper is like narrating his space stuff and then Laura is saying, Wow, you know, your logs of this journey are so interesting. Maybe when you get back to Earth you can have them published. You'll be that
famous writer slash astronaut fella. But I think the scene could have used some punch up in the dialogue because I wrote down exactly what Dennis Hopper says that impresses them so much. This is it, he says, Mars is giving off a red coloring and is becoming more vivid as we approach. It suggests that there is a really deep oxidation of the planet's major substance.
Yeah, it's not great, and Hopper's character has has some better lines, but this is not one of them.
Yeah, it sounds more like they're impressed at his scientific vocabulary. They're like, wow, he knows the word oxidation. Folks, that's not what makes good writing. But come on, okay, so we're just well accepted to move on. Okay, except the premise Dennis Hopper's character has a way with words, but on the way to Mars. They get hit by a quote sunburst, which I think is supposed to be like
a solar flare or something. You know, there is a burst of activity off the surface of the Sun and their ship is damaged and they I don't know if this really changes anything. It's damaged. But then they get to Mars. They enter the orbit of Mars. Oh, they do have Dennishopper take quote oxygenator tablets, and when he takes them, he's like, oh, there's a symphony playing in
my skull and it's not Brahms. The ship lands, there are some beautiful and eerie shots of the rocky red landscape, and Anders and Paul put on their spacesuits and they go out to explore the crash landed alien ship. Now at this point there is a powerful resemblance to the later sequence in Alien of exploring the stranded ship on LV four twenty six, And I think I would not
be at all the first person to notice this. People have pointed out that in some ways aspects of Alien might have come from planet to the vampires, but aspects of alien may also have come from this.
Right, Yeah, I think I saw that that. Harrington also commented on it at one point. I mean not in a mean way or a spiteful way or anything, but I mean it's part of the legacy of sci fi horror. The threads that connect these films are stronger than in other subgenres. I think yes.
And there's good sound design in the scene, Like the scene kind of warbles and hums while Anders explores the ship and Dennis Hopper looks on from outside. Now, first of all, Anders finds a dead humanoid alien in the pilot's chair, and then we cut to a newspaper headline, which was jarring to me.
I thought it was funny.
It's like, single dead astronaut found on spacecraft, mystery deepens.
Well, you want to read the rest of the story, right, The headline served its purpose.
Yes, if a newspaper said that, I would want to read it, assuming it was not like the weekly World news. But they figure out what's going on. Basil Rathbone deduces that the other alien astronauts must have boarded a quote rescue rocket, and so they ejected from this ship before it crashed and killed the the one alien astronaut that remained on board, so Alan that's John Sackson and Tony,
remember Tony from the meal earlier. They make a case, let's go on a supplemental mission to find the rescue rocket, and they're going to land on the Martian moon Phobos. Basil says, you are either fools or very brave men, but he in the end approves and they go. So they arrive in orbit, they make contact with Dennis Hopper on the radio, and there's a lot of Oh, Alan wants to talk to Laura. Oh, she can't talk right now. Oh,
now she can talk. Okay, he's calling. So again there's a little bit of padding in this.
But around this part of the film we're getting to the point where the movie really begins. There's about an hour in Yes, I feel like everything'says coming together and it becomes comes very watchable and and pretty good in places.
I agree. So they're on the moon Phobos, and they were supposed to be just using this moon as like a sort of a launching pad to get to the planet. But out of the window of their ship, Alan and Tony see something in the distance and it is the rescue ship, the other ship from the alien ship. So they go to investigate. Inside they see a silhouette illuminated in the light from a door. It's a humanoid figure, but then she collapses, so they carry her back to
their ship and it's a woman. She's dressed in a red jumpsuit. She has green skin, and she's wearing a helmet that looks kind of like a cathedral cupola or kind of like a Zultar machine.
Also, yeah, it's a well designed spacesuit, like it feel. It's obviously a space suit, but it feels a little bit alien. It feels it has a good visual flare to it.
So there is a moment where they have to decide what to do because now it's the two of them and this alien rescuee and their ship can only carry two people. They need to launch and go meet the other earth ship, but they can only go with two people, so they flip a coin to determine who goes with the alien astronaut and who stays behind. John Saxon says, all I have is paper moon money, And the movie keeps you in suspense for a while, But who's bringing
the astronaut to the other ship. We see them walking through a dust storm on the surface of Mars, hunting down the main ship's beacon and eventually they collapse. But finally they are found. Dennis Hopper brings the alien inside and they look at her and Laura remarks, Wow, she seems so human yet not human at all, and Paul says, I know, it's uncanny. It's like what would have happened to us if we'd been in another atmosphere. And then suddenly Laura remembers to ask, wait, Paul, who brought her,
But there's no time to answer. In walks John Saxon, her space fiance. He was the one who came, so he's okay. Now there's a whole thing that's kind of a side story about confirming that Oceano two, the other ship, will be able to come back to Mars to rescue Tony, the guy who was left behind on Phobos. So actually Tony really gets the better deal here considering what happens on the main ship. So let's see. Yeah, now it's Alan, Laura, Paul Anders and the alien lady and they're all on
the ship together and they're gonna blast off. Now what comes next is I would argue the best scene in the film. It's the scene where the alien ambassador wakes up. She wakes up in the chair, and then she makes eye contact with the crew members one at a time,
starting with Dennis Hopper. She looks at him and her face goes through these subtle changes, and she smiles, and she has these little flares of expression in her eyes and this gradually inflating grin as she looks from astronaut to astronaut, except she doesn't smile when she sees Laura. She looks at Laura and then suddenly exhales kind of sharply, leaving a blast of fog on the inside of the
glass of her helmet. And ooh, this scene was chilling and very interesting, and Florence Marley is wonderful with the little tiny expressions.
Yeah. Absolutely, Like this is the point in the film where, yeah, we're really after the races. Here, we have a strong cast, we have a limited and understandable set. We know where we are and what the immediate stakes are.
Yeah. Here it kind of turns into a different movie. Where before it was like all about blasting off and landing and blasting off and discussing what to do and then blasting off and blasting off again. Now it's basically a bottle episode. It's just some character stuck in a ship with something that is acting a little strange.
Yeah, yeah, like at this point it could be like a really interesting episode of the old Twilight Zone or Outer Limits or something.
So first they put Dennis Hopper in charge of taking care of the alien lady, and he shows her how to drink water through a straw. She has some water through the straw, but she is not interested in food. Like she turns her face away from the exobiologics and anders wonders if perhaps she is used to some sort of liquid nourishment the whole time, by the way, she
is just making eyes at the earth dudes. And oh and also we see that when her helmet is off she has a sort of onion shaped troll doll hairdoo.
I couldn't help but wonder if this is a nod to Bride of Frankenstein. Certainly given Harrington's appreciation for the work of James Whale that she has tall hair.
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah I didn't put that together. But so also well, that's another performance that is wordless but relies on powerful facial expressions. Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein. But so after this, they try to take a blood sample. Anders also wants to do this to run some tests, but she will not allow it.
She smacks the needle out of the dude's hand, and then we got to Later that night, Dennis Hopper is making some notes in his audio log and he says he thinks he's noticed something about the alien that the others haven't yet. He says she has, but then he trails off and he doesn't finish the sentence, And I want to know what was Dennis Hopper going to say?
I know this. I thought this was one of my favorite acting moments in the entire movie. It was just just the fact that he trails off and he doesn't finish the thought, like it just it works so perfectly for this character and for what's about to come.
Now, He's sitting there by himself while everybody else is asleep, and he notices an open doorway and he goes to investigate, and the Alien ambassador is not in her seat anymore, so he goes wandering around alone looking for her. This kind of reminded me of the scene an Alien where like Brett is looking for the cat, and in this Hopper stumbles into the engine room and there suddenly she appears. I wasn't sure about this. I think, is she in her alien way supposed to be nude? Like you see
her back and it is green. She's not wearing her red jumpsuit, but maybe she was wearing Maybe she had like green clothes on under that, and that's what it's supposed to be. She's obviously actually wearing something in the scene, but it's the same color as her skin.
Yeah, I wasn't sure. And there's another scene where it makes it seem like maybe the back of her costume is more exposed in the front. I'm not sure on that.
Well, anyway, there she is, so something has changed about her. Now she has lights glowing in her eyes, and she seems to hypnotize Dennis Hopper and she walks up to him. She lays a hand on his chest, and her skin appears to have a shiny, almost polymerized texture, and she leans in and we see only from the perspective, like from behind her, and it's like, is she kissing him or is she biting his neck? Next morning, people wake up. They discover Paul dead. Dennis Hopper has left the building.
What a shame? What is shame such a nice character.
Yes, So his wrist has a bloody, ragged wound and he appears to have been drained of blood. And they find the alien ambassador sleeping with blood dripping out of the sides of her mouth. So there's no mystery about what happened. It's just like, oh, okay, here she is. She drank all his blood. Ander says, do you see how heavy she's breathing. She has gorged herself on blood and now she's digesting like a boa constrictor that swallowed
a whole animal. It's fascinating. And then John Sackson goes fascinating, it's horrible. We ought to destroy her right now.
And come on now and come on out, and he's just admiring her purity. That's all that's going on here.
Yeah, it's like Ian Holme. Yeah, so it's a conflict. Anders thinks, you know, she's much too precious to destroy. In fact, he does go somewhere interesting. He says, she's not even necessarily aware that she's done anything wrong. This leads to like an argument about whether or not they because they can't converse with her that she never talks, So they argue about whether they should assume that the alien knows it has done something wrong by killing a
human or not. I think that's a great question for a sci fi story. I can't recall if I've ever heard that being discussed before, Like should we hold the alien morally accountable?
Yeah, this is a movie where the mission statement does not call for a lot of philosophical pund and yet there's just a little It dips its toes in a little bit right here, and it's nice.
Anders makes some kind of interesting arguments. He says, you know, maybe this alien comes from a planet where it feeds on the blood of other organisms, and it doesn't think there's anything wrong with that, much the same way that we eat the flesh of other organisms. So is her Might she understand having drank Dennis Hopper's blood the same way we would understand eating a steak? And then Alan, so that's an interesting point, and Alan responds by saying,
but we don't feed on blood. I think the philosophical dispute is going a bit over John Saxon's head, like he doesn't understand that it's not literally what the substance is that matters.
Yeah, everyone's pissed, but everyone seems to agree. Thus far, they need to check back in with headquarters and not do anything drastic.
Right, So they come up with a workaround. Anders says, Okay, we're going to feed her from our medical supply of blood plasma, and we keep her drinking that so that she doesn't drink the blood from our bodies. And that works for a while.
Yeah, yeah, the basic understanding, it's like, if she's not hungry, she's not a threat.
They make a report to Basil Wrathbone about the blood drinking and it shows Basil Wrathbone back at mission control and he just like puts his head in his hands, which made me laugh. Then I think he walks over to the wall and he says he looks at a map of the stars and he says, one should not be shocked by anything we find out there. And I'm like, man, you could imagine so much weirder forms of life than something that drinks blood. That's like something that a lot of Earth life does.
Yeah, yeah, it shouldn't be really that shocking, But I don't know. I do kind of like it as this little flourish that puts you in the space of this you know, really kind of like an old fashioned pulpse sci fi where like the rest of the Solar system is wild, baby, you don't know what's out there, right, could be teeming with all sorts of weird life.
Life forms you can't possibly imagine. This one drinks blood, This next one has three eyes. So they hold a funeral for Dennis Hopper. They blast his body out the airlock. The funeral includes readings from the Bible, and there is a discussion between John Saxon and Anders. John Saxon says, should we tie her up? Andrew says, nah, no, We'll be safe as long as we never all fall asleep
at the same time. And John Saxon's like, well, but there was no sign of struggle, and Anders says, well, she must have gotten to him in his sleep.
Yeah. They bring up the vampire bad as an example.
Right, They say, yeah, okay, so vampire back can feed on animals without them necessarily detecting. Maybe she has something in her saliva that dulls the pain of the bite and thus you don't know when you get bitten. So they feed her a bunch of blood plasma. She drinks it through a straw until ooh, they run out of blood. Plasma. That's a problem. So next thing, there is a very creepy scene. Again, I thought this one was really effective. Anders is alone in the control room, awake while everybody
else is asleep, and he clearly is tired. But he starts looking at the door of the room and was that a silhouette there? Although it's not there anymore. Oh, but there it is again and it's back lit, but it's like it's a female silhouette and she's approaching. The eyes are glowing. He drops his ray gun and then there's another blood feast.
Yeah, it's a good sequence, a nice build up of tension, and you know, and especially I thought it worked well because you know that this guy is toast, like, he's not John Saxon's, he's not Alan, he's not Laura. He's going to get killed by the space vampire at some point, and yet it still feels it's still a tense sequence when it occurs.
Agree, I really like that, like is he seeing her or is he not? A thing that makes it tense. So now only Alan and Laura are left, and so they tie up the alien while she is asleep and digesting. They conclude that she must work by some kind of deadly hypnosis. And here is the scene I mentioned earlier where they call Basil Rathbone to be like, hey, everybody's dead, and he turns to the guy next to him and says things are going very badly on that ship, very badly.
Indeed, they are not having a good day up there.
So the alien lady wakes up discovering she is restrained. They've tied her up, and her eyes light up and she somehow turns her skin hot enough to burn through the ropes.
That was cool, Yeah, yeah, or yeah, some sort of like laser vision or her skin's heating up, but yeah, she burns through the bonds and now she's free to move around the ship and finds more of that sweet human blood.
That's right, But I think it's implied that she is only interested in man blood because we see her shadow pass over the body of sleeping Laura, but she doesn't go for it. She just walks right past. And then Laura wakes up and she looks around and the room is very still, and she doesn't he or anything, So she gets up, she walks around, and then she suddenly catches the alien in the act of drinking. John Saxon's blood. I guess he got hypnotized. Off screen. There's a brief
fight and Laura injures the alien. She like scratches her in the fight, and the alien begins bleeding green fluid, and she screams and runs away. John Saxon wakes up. He's all right, and then they go to look for the alien and she has collapsed on her bed and bled to death from only a tiny scratch. John Saxon
concludes that she suffered from hemophilia. He says, perhaps she was some sort of royalty, a queen maybe, And this is referring to royal hemophilia on Earth that I think was a heritable trait that in many ways was related to I think Queen Victoria and her husband.
M h yeah. I mean there's also some examples in the you know, the Russian royal family as well, if memory serves.
They may have been related to Queen Victoria somehow.
I think.
I'm not sure.
I think you're right.
I just looked it up. I think Czar Nicholas's wife Alexandra was Queen Victoria's granddaughter. There's a lot of oh, there you go, they're all, you know, mixing and matching European royalty at any rate.
The end result is that our Queen of Blood here is a glass cannon. The slightest little scratch is enough to cause her to bleed to death. And there she is dead on the ship, seemingly like it was kind of a freezing. Now we're done with the alien menace has been defeated.
Right, so they land back on Earth and John Saxon and Laura are waiting, I guess, to be retrieved from the capsule they're in and whoops, oh, we just discovered that the alien here left a bunch of eggs in a cabinet, pulsing slime covered eggs, very cool looking. And John Saxon concludes she was a queen, a queen bee. She came here to deposit all of her eggs so they could hatch and take over Earth. And John Saxson wants to destroy the eggs. Laura says, we can't do that.
Scientists will need to study them. She's arguing for their preservation. And then when Basil Rathbone runs in the door with all of the science dudes, John Saxon takes him aside and it's like, hey, listen, I've got something secret to tell you. We've got alien eggs all over the ship. We've got to destroy them before people find out about them. And Basil Rathbone is like, oh my dear boy, no, we must study them, not destroy them.
Yeah. He suddenly has just all the vim and vigor in the world, just just scampering unto the space ship here to check out those alien eggs. Nobody's wearing a contamination suit or anything, now, like, let's just go get them, get big handfuls of these things.
He really perks up here at the end.
With the eggs. I have to say that the eggs. When we first see the eggs, I thought they looked hokey. They looked like they look like little pulsating red balloons. But then eventually we do get a close up off them as they're being taken off the ship on a tray, and in the close up they do look really cool. They look gross and pulsating and looks like there's something inside them. You know, I'll implied there's some sort of form there that is developing. So ultimately, great job. In these eggs.
They are in a trade They're on like a quarter sheet baking pan, like there's gonna be some cookies or something.
Yeah, And that's pretty much the close of the film. That's close up on the eggs, the end ominous music, because you know, ultimately this is I mean, it's it's ultimately a darker ending than than Alien because oh, you've brought them back, and now who knows what's going to occur.
Well, I think we do get Alan and Laura. They're like, oh, we're back on Earth. I love you. You know, it's we can feel the sunshine on our faces again.
I think they say, well that that is true. They do like having the sunshine back. But I don't know how long they're gonna get to enjoy it. I don't know why. How long it takes these eggs to develop into whatever they're going to grow into.
I'd say I give Earth like twenty to thirty years, yeah, or they're the blood bags are all drained.
So there you have it, Queen of Blood. Like I say, I feel like the last thirty minutes or so of
the picture is pretty solid and pretty fun. I'm not sure I would have gotten to those last thirty minutes had I not been on a mission to watch this, you know, And I guess you have to think about the original context of the release, right, I mean, this was something that was going to be shown theatrically, the shown is part of a double feature, so you know, it's not something where you had to worry about keeping somebody on the same TV channel or keeping them you know,
watching a film on a streaming service or anything like that. So it's a different a different mission statement for this film for sure. Yeah.
I wonder if this was mostly destined for drive in theaters or not.
I imagine, so, yeah, very much a double I forget what the film it was released with as a double feature, but it was part of the double feature. I also wondered, like to what extent did they study, like how people watch these films of those double features? They did they think about things like when will the teenagers be making out?
Yeah?
And what should be going on in the screen at that time. I've never read anything on that.
Yeah, it wasn't a calculated decision to take an hour to get to Florence Marley.
Yeah, but at any rate, I will, you know, coming back to Curtis Harrington, you know, I feel like he did given the weird limitations of this film, you know, having to use all of this footage from from from Soviet cinema and so forth, obviously not having a huge budget. I feel like like the end results work amazingly well given those constraints. I feel like the cast does a great job given what they're they're given to work with.
So it is kind of an interesting exercise in in overachieving for for you a b picture like this.
Totally agree. Yes, and despite the fact that it is overused and there's too much patting, I will emphasize yet again, most of the Russian footage does look pretty beautiful. I like the aesthetic.
Yeah, it would be interesting to come back and what maybe I don't know if we would watch one of these, but there are a number of these Soviet sci fi films that I would be interesting to look at more. I think everyone called Planet a burr that may have been utilized in Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet. I think I've seen that one in full. There's like a whole
box set of these. I think they have them a videodrome here in Atlanta, and I've rented one or two of them in the past, but I don't recall them much. I think I just kind of had them on in the background. Well, let's rnd them again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, we'll go ahead and close it out there. But hey, we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on Queen of Blood, on space, vampire films, and media in general. Yeah, right in, let's
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