Search - Night of the Blood Beast on DVD

Night of the Bargain Basement Beast

cookieman108 | Inside the jar... | 02/20/2004

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Co-written and produced by Gene Corman, with Roger Corman as the executive producer, Night of the Blood Beast (1958) is a good representation of the Z grade science fiction movies of the late 50's.Directed by Bernard L. Kowalski, who also helmed Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), the movie stars, among others, John Baer, Angela Greene, and Ed Nelson, from Teenage Caveman (1958), The Brain Eaters (1959), and TV's Peyton Place (1964).The movie starts off proper with an astronaut in a small capsule supposedly returning to Earth after a brief orbit. Something goes wrong, and after much techno babble, "The negative, cross-indexed hyper dyne ion chamber is reading 8 million psi!", "The multi-functional thyroid chronometer is unfunctional!", the small capsule crashes to Earth. Two individuals find the capsule (not much of a rescue party) and discover their space-traveling colleague is no longing among the living. They radio the rest of their small group, who soon arrive, and then they document everything and take the body back to some dinky, remote radar station they are using for a base. What they don't realize is that their chum didn't come back from space alone...oooooh...(cue creepy music)A cursory analysis of the dead man reveals he is dead, but he isn't. The older scientist keeps saying, "That's impossible" every time they find another indication that the dead man may not really be dead. Soon after stuff starts happening...the radio goes kaput, the lights no longer light, vehicles no longer run...seems a magnetic field is playing havoc with just about everything. And to top things off, there's a space thingy running around, which makes it's appearance known by breaking some windows. The dead man comes back to life, and we find out a rather disturbing fact in that the man, who was once dead and is now seemingly alive, has wee, little aliens growing inside his body. Oh yes, the man with the alien babies also develops some kind of telepathic link with the alien, who is now hiding out in one of Hollywood's more famously filmed spots, the Bronson Caves, used for, among other things, the scenes from the 60's Batman TV show where the Batmobile came barreling out whenever the characters left the Batcave.So what happens next? Realizing that their friend and colleague's survival is linked to the alien, do they make nicey nice with the alien? Or do they destroy the abomination? And what about those alien babies? Is a satisfactory conclusion forthcoming? Watch and find out. (Don't hold your breath)I have to say, I thought the element of the man carrying aliens inside him was interesting, and the subsequent story, although a bit talky, kept me interested. The biggest thing working against this movie was the budget. The space creature was completely funky, looking like giant, sickly sloth with google eyes wearing dirty trash bags. This may have been better received at the time, but now seems like a dusty relic. The movie certainly doesn't hold up to others of the time, but is worth checking out if you enjoy clunky, cheaply made science fiction films of the 50's. The dialogue, as I said, got rather clunky, but the direction seemed to movie things along pretty well, along with a 65 minute running time. Short and sweet, that's the way to make a movie like this. I was just really happy they didn't try to pad things out with a lot of stock footage, as was a common practice with a lot of these low budget features.The picture quality of the movie on this disc is not all that great, being washed out and showing many flaws and lacking clarity and the audio drops out briefly a couple of times, but I guess that is to be expected. I am not too familiar with Retromedia and their other releases, so I don't know if they try to use the best possible prints or whatever they have on hand. This release seems shoddy, especially for the asking price. The only extra feature is a really poor copy of the trailer for the movie. There is a nice, lengthy piece on the back of the case about the movie, written by someone from a book I never heard of...Cookieman108"