by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Mars movie night (http://marsmovieguide.com/) — held on the
fourth Friday of the month instead of the usual third Friday to avoid competing
with Comic-Con — consisted of two mid-1960’s cheapies, Queen of Blood and The War of the Planets, though the screening’s Web site advertised the
latter with its alternate title The Deadly Diaphonoids. Both were pretty dreadful movies, but both were also
in the frustrating category of bad movies with potentially good movies inside
them struggling to get out. Queen of Blood apparently began live in 1963 as a Soviet sci-fi film called Mechte
navstrechu, which means A Dream
Come True, though sources differ as to
whether Queen of Blood was a
remake of the Soviet film or just plundered a lot of its stock footage for a
different story. It was also shown in a dreadful print, with bizarre color
values that gave a yellow cast to virtually everything — though the accidental
psychedelic effects of the deterioration of the film’s color scheme may have
actually made it more entertaining than a correctly color-balanced version
would have been. The story consists of the U.S.’s first manned mission to Mars
— the year is 1990 and humans first landed on the moon 20 years earlier (that
part they got right!) and since then they have been industriously colonizing it
to prepare for a mission to Mars. Only they get a distress signal from a
spacecraft from a planet in another solar system, which has crash-landed on
Mars and is asking for their crew to be rescued by Earthlings.
Rather than land
on Earth themselves, they send a drone containing a recording with this
information, and accordingly the international space program headed by Dr.
Farraday (Basil Rathbone, billed second and lending a well-appreciated bit of gravitas to the proceedings) decides to launch their Mars
rocket six months ahead of schedule to pick up the aliens and bring them back
to Earth. The Earth rocket to Mars contains a small crew, including astronauts
Laurie James (Jeri Meredith), who’s understandably put out that her fellow
astronaut and boyfriend Allan Brenner (John Saxon, top-billed) isn’t coming
until the next Mars flight,
scheduled for a week hence, and Paul Grant (Dennis Hopper, who looks like he
wants to go to Mars because he’s heard you can score some really killer
hallucinogens there), and they land not on Mars itself but on the Martian moon
of Phobos. The shuttlecraft (or whatever they called it) that carried Grant and
a fellow crew member to Phobos to effect the rescue can only carry two people,
so Grant’s co-pilot agrees to stay on Phobos for the next week and Grant brings
back the alien (Florence Marly in a quite clingy and very revealing all-red jumpsuit) to the main ship. They
set off back for Earth, only — remember the title? — the alien turns out to be
a vampire, sucking the blood out of the body of one of the crew members (she
doesn’t bother with little puncture wounds on the neck; she goes straight for
the arm and rips open the appropriate vein). The survivors reason (if you can
call it that) that on her home planet they feed on some lower form of animal —
“It’s not that different from eating a rare steak,” one of them says (who knew Queen
of Blood would be propaganda for veganism?)
— and they give her all their supply of blood plasma in hopes of keeping her
alive for the trip back to Earth without losing any more people.
Alas, they run
out of plasma and she puts the bite on Dennis Hopper (one wonders how stoned
she got from drinking his blood!)
and nearly takes out John Saxon, only his girlfriend pulls her off of him in
time and scratches her back in the process, causing such an immediate loss of
her own blood that she dies. The film has one of those annoying trick endings
in which the surviving crew members discover that the vampire queen has left a
lot of pulsating red bulbs all around their spaceship which represents their
species’ eggs — it seems they reproduce like insects do — and the astronauts
want the entire ship fumigated before it’s reused, but Dr. Farraday, taking the
same attitude towards vampires from outer space as Robert Cornthwaite’s
scientist character did in the original The Thing, overrules them and takes the basket of eggs out to
preserve it as a “The End” title comes up. Queen of Blood is a wretched movie but also an oddly haunting one;
Florence Marly (whom director Curtis Harrington fought the studio to cast; they
wanted someone younger and more nubile, but Marly is sexy enough and her
wordless acting, especially in close-ups signaling her literal bloodlust for
the human crew members, is fine) pulls off the central character beautifully
and the rest of the acting is certainly more than passable for “B” filmmaking.
The use of all that Soviet footage makes this look like it had a considerably
larger budget than it did, and it’s a decently made film that could have been
quite good with more incisive writing (Harrington was the screenwriter as well
as director) and tougher suspense cutting.
