Review of Queen of Blood (1966) by Brian S — 01 Nov 2010

"Queen of Blood" is an Ed Wood-quality sci fi flick with an unusual cast. Where else do you get Dennis Hopper, Basil Rathbone and John Saxon sharing screen time with a green skinned, pointy haired alien played by a former major screen actress whose career was destroyed by anti-Communist witch hunts? The stories of the cast members are probably more interesting than the flick itself.

Not that "Queen of Blood" isn't interesting for all the wrong reasons. An alien ship has crashed on Mars sometime in the far-flung future (around 1995). A team of astronauts is dispatched to recover the ship and any survivors. What they find is a green alien queen with pointy hair (it makes her head look like a clove of garlic) and a thirst for blood. She can hypnotize with a glance, and before long she's slurping down earth blood and going through the crew. Still, her green blood has a weakness; it doesn't clot. Still, she's a queen in the insect sense, and she's going to leave her progeny stashed away to stage an invasion of earth and turn it into a fast food joint. Stay tuned!

The production values here are as low as low can be. The sets are obviously sets. The rocket ships are on strings. There's a goof in one scene in which some of the alien queen's green makeup gets left behind on one astronaut's hand. The dialogue is stilted and the better actors in the cast seem to know it. Basil Rathbone is particularly phoning it in for this one; watch his utter lack of reaction in the scenes in which he's informed that one of the crew members has turned into a snack for the alien!

"Aliens" meets "Dracula" meets "Plan 9 from Outer Space." If you get a chuckle out of Ed Wood's stuff and want to get a glimpse of what Dennis Hopper had to go through on his way up and what Basil Rathbone had to put up with on his way down, check out "Queen of Blood." It's so bad. So, so bad. And so, so unintentionally funny, and yet somehow just a little compelling when you consider the stories of the cast members.