IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 18 minutes, rated 5.3 by 1231 cinemitizens
Verdict: Better than many of its kind. Atta girl!
In distant 1990 lunar travel is routine and on Moon Base One plans advance for flights to Venus and to Mars. On earth all is peace and goodwill. Yes, fiction alright.
Sherlock Holmes, clipboard in hand, runs the show. Carmine Orrico will board the Venus flight and Judi will go to Mars. Judi and Carmine are an item. Her flight will be first and Carmine accepts that with good cheer and moral support. Already there are differences from others of this ilk. The woman is an astronaut, not a nutritionist, coffee bearer, or object of either sexism or comic distress. She is just there to do a job. Moreover, Carmine is urging her on.
Wait! Before the off there comes into this carefully planned (see clipboard for details) program a message from the stars. SETI answers. Dit-dat-dat-dot it goes and by consulting the screenplay they can decipher this static as: ‘Hello! Our ambassador is on the way in a spaceship.’
Anticipation moves Sherlock to give a speech. Mercifully brief. Wisely he does not tell Faux News.
Next thing another message arrives. This one is a video log. Check the release data above. Somehow these star travelling aliens have managed to transmit a smartphone video log to the Moonies.
The alien ship.
It is exotic indeed, this video. It is from the ambassador-bearing ship which, by relying on Apple Maps hit Mars instead of Earth and has crashed. ‘Help!’ is this second message.
All hands to the clichés! They launch the Mars rocket first and Judi goes. Carmine mopes. Of course things go wrong. then Carmine tanks up his rocket to go to the rescue. No Apple maps for him! It’s Rand McNally or bust!
Meanwhile, Judi and company have found the alien ship. More moody, exotic interiors, where they find one dead green skin and another barely alive whom they cart to their damaged ship. Humanoid it seems. More so than most Republicans in Congress. Female it seems with a beehive hairdo, sort of. Let’s call her Queenie for reasons to be explained.
She revives. Easy Rider nurses her back to health. So he thinks. Meanwhile she examines the menu. By now Carmine has arrived. We have a full complement on the spaceship of Otranto. But not for long.
Queenie dilates her eyes and Easy Rider falls at her feet. He is the first course. Yum! Yum!
The fraternity brothers loved what came next.
Captain Science, Carmine, and Judi find Easy Rider deceased. Queenie is still licking his blood from her lips.
Hmm. Captain Science is not sure she did it. He is obtuse enough to be a professor. ‘Of course she did it,’ shouts Carmine! Grudgingly Captain Science admits she must have. But he says — get this — ‘We cannot judge her!’ ‘What [bleep, bleep],’ shouts Carmine! ‘We sure can!’
It was all too much like a cultural sensitivity training course, or worse, a snowflake seminar.
‘No, no,’ says Captain Science. ‘Murder and cannibalism are just her cultural ways which we must respect.’ Carmine proposes that she respect his cultural ways while he puts a pistol to her head. ‘No, no’ reiterates Captain Science: What we do is we tie her up and feed her on the blood plasma [we carry for just such emergencies] during the return flight. Is there a shortage of vampires in Hollywood that they have to import another one? So asked the fraternity brothers.
And — get this! — continues Captain Science, if we run low on blood plasma, then we will have to….. Yes, drain our blood for her dinner. Carmine is not on board for this. Captain Science is so unfit for command, I wondered why he was not POTUS.
Any guesses for where this going?
None of them were ever Boy Scouts so when it comes to knots, tying shoes laces is it. Slip knots are called that for a reason. Having slept off digesting Easy Rider, she waltzes free the moment she wakes up.
She dilates her eyes again and the Captain Science drops his test tubes. Two down. Victims of cultural relativity.
The eyes will have it!
Carmine calls Sherlock who tells him to man-up because Queenie is more important than a couple of underlings. There is an ominous implication that the loss of a couple more underlings named Carmine and Judi would not phase Sherlock one bit. ‘Bring her in, unharmed,’ he orders. They shoe lace her up again.
Got it? Yep. She is free again and has eyes for Carmine. He is pasta in her hands and she is about to dine when…..
Judi crashes the party, belts her, and scratches Queenie’s shoulder. Queenie runs off in a snit. Carmine regains such consciousness as he has. Slugger Judi dusts her knuckles.
Unarmed Judi and Carmine set off to find her. Dumb, but turns out Queenie is royalty and green-bled to death. That very big word ‘haemophilia’ was used much to the annoyance of the fraternity brothers who reached for the aspirin. Evidently all royals are bleeders. Hence the title ‘Queen of Blood.’
They speculate that Queenie was a telepath who could control men, but not women. The fraternity brothers scoffed at that conclusion. Oola, who was green, had no need of telepathy to control them.
They land and Sherlock is happy enough with an autopsy. The end.
That Kingie might come in search of Queenie does not cross a page of the script. That they have been party to the death of the first two aliens they have met gives no pause for remorse. Instead we have the eggs she has hidden on board, which Sherlock wants for an omelet. She is a queen in another way, a Queen Bee or a Queen Ant. That explains her hunger. Yeah, right.
It was marketed under several other titles to catch unwary theatregoers, including ‘Planet of Blood,’ ‘Planet of Terror,’ ‘Planet of Vampires,’ and ‘The Green Woman.’ None of it takes place on a planet; another triumph from the marketing department. Since there is only one, the plural is also erroneous. Green, yes, that is conceded.
Get this, jaded Reader: Not only does no one deprecate the woman astronaut, but she saves the day. Go girl!
Moreover, no one smokes. In era when an actor could not play a scientist without a pipe there are no pipes, and no ciggies either.
The alien space ship scenes were cut from a Russian Sy Fy film and pasted into this one. That inserting was often done in Roger Corman productions, but in this case it was well done, which was not often done in Roger Corman productions. The lighting, set design, and camera work is such that the seams do not show. Curtis Harrington was the director and he made maximum use of these aspects to create an eerie, mysterious, and alien atmosphere.
He later directed Debbie Reynolds, Simone Signoret, Katherine Ross, and Shelly Winters in other films. Impressive. He often worked in television. The black widow is a theme in a number of his other works, some of which he wrote, as he did this title. He wrote the story around the available footage from the Soviet film, whereas in most Corman productions the Soviet footage was shoe-horned into a story that was already written or even filmed, and it always showed.
Carmine had his first role in 1954, and he is still at it with a 2018 credit and 200 others in between. Those monkey glands must work a treat. His reputation remains as, hmm, someone with interesting lifestyle choices even by Hollywood standards. Johnny Depp is a homeboy in comparison.
This film was made simultaneously with another Roger Corman production, ‘Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet’ (1965), also derived from cuttings of the same Russkie movie, reviewed elsewhere on this blog. Keeping his white coat on and clipboard in hand, Sherlock walked from one side of the set to the other to do his lines for the other film. The man was the consummate professional, doing two roles in two different movies at once. Curtis Harrington directed that, too, but chose a pseudonym to protect the guilty.
Corman bought Russian Sy Fy films for two reasons, and in this order. First, they were cheap. Second they had superior special effects, though these were often mangled when inserted into Corman productions. The word on the internet street is that in 1950s when the Space Race began, some wits in Soviet policy decided to enthuse the populace for space with Sy Fy films and budgeted for the special effects. That is what caught Corman’s eye.
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