Les monstres de la planète des singes

Huh?

What?

Vampire cavemen? Sex replaced by flashing multi-colored light bulbs? Guys in dinosaur suits? A film half made of stock footage?

This isn't just bad, it's inexplicably bad. DO NOT WATCH THIS ALONE. Make sure to have a friend or two with whom you can swap wisecracks about this... this... HORROR OF THE BLOOD MONSTERS.

The end of this movie has nothing to do with the beginning. The middle has nothing to do with the end or the beginning. Not only does this planet change colors, but apparently at least one woman on it manages to change races, switching periodically back and forth between Filipino and Caucasian.

And remember, kids, the red radiation is the most dangerous to human life. Here, let me demonstrate with this spectrum gun.

WHAT THE HELL??????

The line above may be a very kind way of summing up Al Adamson's career, but I feel bad for the guy. When I read a few years back that he had been murdered in his house, I thought,'Who would want to murder this fella?'I have yet to find that answer, and if anyone out there know if there was a trial, or any information on the death of Al Adamson, please contact me at my address.

I have seen a few of Adamson's films, and although his taste is questionable, his movies can tend to be mesmerising. This is sometimes a good thing at 2 in the morning when you are trying to go to sleep; not knowing what to expect, and even as you watch it, you're still not sure.

This is how I saw NIGHT OF THE BLOOD MONSTERS, or whatever the hell that title was. The film contains some of the most boring dialogue scenes since Jerry Warren, and the acting is uniformly wooden. The plot is a bit hard to explain, having something to do with a vampire plague on Earth that, in flimsy exposition, started in outer space. A rocketship and crew (headed by John Carradine) land on the Vampire planet, and encounter more dialogue and tinted Filipino footage.

The Filipino footage that Adamson culled appears to have been done in black-and-white, but since Adamson was making a color film, he came up with a cheap ploy to sell the concept of the tinted portion. It is radiation, explains one of the characters, and the audience is left in total disbelief. In fact, the most unbelievable part is the sets, made up of poorly-lit backdrops and cardboard. The sex scene is hilarious.

This cheesy movie must be seen by any lover of bad cinema, and people who remember what the drive-in was like, or would like to. All others beware, this film is UNCEASINGLY BAD.

Now, if only I could find out what happened to Al Adamson, (and his wife, Regina Carrol, for that matter)...

Plot

In the near future with a intergalactic vampire plague threatening earth, an expedition is sent to a distant galaxy in hopes of discovering the plague's source. Landing on a mysterious planet they discover that Spectrum radiation has turned the atmosphere into a one-color tint. Exploring further, the group discovers living dinosaurs, a race of vampire cavemen, and other strange creatures.

Cast

Outside of John Carradine unfamiliar with anyone involved, I do find it interesting that the writer did nothing else though. Probably best.

Verdict

Horror of the Blood Monsters I assumed would be a hokey 70's creature feature of some description, within 5 minutes I assumed based on what I was watching it would be instead a goofy vampire movie with some of the most questionable looking vampires in cinema history. I was wrong on both counts, so very very very wrong.

So what is it? Well after 5 minutes of exposition about vampires and suggesting that's what the movie is going to be it suddenly becomes a very dated looking science fiction movie set on a space ship that looks like had been created by Blue Peter and then descends into a non-sensical plot that involves cave men. Yes, vampires to space ships to cavemen and that's not even the worst part.

Yes the worst elements are why this is a 1/10, I don't give 1/10's very often as that suggests the film is devoid of a single redeeming feature but this right here I can confidently say doesn't have one.

You see after the horror tease and the segway into tacky science fiction we arrive at the vast majority of the movie which is ruined by awful acting, random stock footage, a non-sensical plot and filters.....random colored filters! Everything is green, then red, then pink, then orange, it's deeply annoying and illogical oh and headache inducing!

I can't stress how bad Horror of the Blood Monsters is, because it's indescribable, unique and a flurry of random imagery that doesn't constitute as a movie at all.

Rants

Why? Just why did they think those filters were a good idea? Then again why did someone sign off on this at all? It's like a fever dream, induced by too many illegal substances and written by a child bouncing off the walls on energy drinks. Awful, just awful.

The Good

The opening scene the dated isn't awful

The Bad

Abyssal acting Those filters!

Story is a mess Teases one genre then veers into another.

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 $2.15 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 Al's masterwork, the film by which he will always be remembered. Orson Welles had "Citizen Kane," Michael Curtiz had "Casablanca," Francis Coppola had "The Godfather," Al Adamson has "Vampire Men of the Lost Planet." You're in heady company, Al. You deserve it.

A ragged, befuddling palimpsest comprised of shavings from no fewer than three pre-existing films, all shuffled together within a framework of "new" scenes(added, I suppose, to bring some degree of cohesion to the amalgamated mess at hand). Success? ....ehh....hardly. In fact, watching this crudely stitched patchwork is like staring at one of those damn squiggly-dot pictures...eventually, you might catch a fleeting image of a snow-boarder or something, but was it really worth the headache in the end?

Well, there actually is a narrative of sorts knotted up within this argy-bargy. It seems that Earth is facing a vampire plague, so a spaceship of scientists is sent to the planet from which they originate. It's also inhabited by various other predatory monstrosities, as well as a tribe of peaceful cave-people. The bizarre atmospheric conditions of this planet result in garish uniform color saturation which shifts randomly from blue to red to green and so forth(a specious means of presenting B/W footage "in color"). During a scene inside the spaceship, one of the intrepid astronauts peers into a periscope-type of device. The view presents a grid with marked north, south, east, and west coordinates. I'm certainly no science wiz, but don't those points of direction become "lost" once you have left the Earth? Hmmm...whatever.

John Carradine is in this flick. A little bit. He looks sort of embarrassed. He knows damn well that this is a petrified turd of a film, but as the patron saint of undiscriminating "any old thing for a paycheck" movie stars, he sails through the muck like an old pro. He would have stripped to a thong at your bachelorette party for fifty bucks. I guarantee it.

2.5/10.