Queen of Blood

Eerie sci-fi from the mid-60s with the help of footage from a few Russian flicks

In the near-future, when Earthlings have a moon base and can travel to nearby planets, a radio transmission is received from Mars wherein an alien craft has crash-landed and needs assistance. Two spaceships are sent on the rescue mission, but serious problems manifest on the return voyage. The cast is headed by John Saxon, Basil Rathbone and Dennis Hopper.

“Queen of Blood,” aka “Planet of Blood” (1966), is an interesting movie in that it uses stock footage from a few Russian films (cited below) as ‘frosting’ on the cake of an entirely different story, resulting in a moody, slow-burn sci-fi experience. People compare it to the Italian "Planet of the Vampires” from the year prior, but this has a more compelling story. Both of these flicks obviously influenced superior future films, like “Alien” and “Lifeforce.”

While I suppose the two women in “Planet of the Vampires” are superior (a blonde and a redhead no less), Judi Meredith isn’t exactly a slouch and Florence Marly is effective as the mysteriously seductive green-skinned extraterrestrial.

The movie was released the same year that Star Trek debuted. If you appreciate serious Star Trek episodes from its first season, you’ll appreciate what “Queen of Blood” has to offer. I’m talking about episodes like "The Cage," "Where No Man Has Gone Before," "The Corbomite Maneuver," "Enemy Within," "The Man Trap," "The Naked Time," "Charlie X," "Balance of Terror" and "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

Executive producer Roger Corman purchased stock footage from a few Russian films to beef-up the production values of his low-budget movies in the mid-60s. As such, most of the F/X in “Queen of Blood” hail from “A Dream Come True” (1963), including the Martian sequences and elaborate miniatures of the launch of the extraterrestrial ‘mother ship.’ The animated exteriors of some of the Earth vessel sequences are from either “Planet of Storms” (1962) or “Battle Beyond the Sun” (1959), which had already been used for “Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet” the previous year.

The movie runs 1 hour, 18 minutes, and the new footage (by director Curtis Harrington) was shot at a studio in Los Angeles.

GRADE: B