Abominable Advent Calendar Day 19: Queen of Blood (1966)
Crapsterpiece Category: B-Movie Badness
Heads up: Look for the Forrest Ackerman cameo!
In the distant future of 1990, an alien spaceship crashes on Mars, and an American ship is sent to try to find survivors. They find one, a woman, and start back to Earth with her. They offer her food, which she refuses, and in the night one of the astronauts is drained of blood. It’s obvious the alien is the killer, and they debate about whether to kill her, but decide she’s a valuable scientific specimen, so they feed her on blood plasma. Eventually she takes another astronaut. When she tries for a third, there’s a fight that decides the fate of the remaining crew, and maybe humanity.
Queen of Blood was made on a tight budget, so it borrows footage from a couple of Soviet films, and the visuals are actually beautiful given the cost of the film. The performances, including those from Dennis Hopper, Basil Rathbone, John Saxon, Judi Meredith, and Florence Marly as the incredibly creepy Queen of Blood herself are quite good. The script, however, is clunky and in places hilariously bad, and parts of the film are extremely campy, particularly the first half hour or so. Yet it does build a sense of dread, and there’s no denying that Florence Marly is unnerving, no matter how much they tried to make her look like a feral, oversexed CindyLou Who.
