BLOOD ISLAND VACATION!!

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This time around, I'm reviewing another box set, THE BLOOD ISLAND VACATION. This is a quartet of monster movies made in the 60's and 70's by Phillipine director Eddie Romero. There's blood, breasts and crazed monsters. There's also lots of repetition, but I'll get that soon enough.

The series begins with BRIDES OF BLOOD (1968), where three Americans go to a tropical island. You have Dr. Paul Anderson (Kent Taylor) who's researching strange flora and fauna on the island, his horny wife Carla Anderson (Beverly Powers, better known as Beverly Hills, for two obvious reasons - who's well cast but a little long in the tooth) and Jim Farrell (John Ashley) a heroic type who works for the U.S. government and is on the island to help the natives with irrigation and shit like that. Not long into their visit they find out that native women are taking part in a lottery where the losers are tied up on the beach to be mauled and fucked to death by some mutant monster (first, it rips their tops off!) There's another scientist on the island, who turns out to have a very intimate link to the monster. Not exactly a great movie, but the kind of campy drive-in fodder that thrived in the late 60's and early 70's. BRIDES OF BLOOD has some good moments and the monster is just goofy-looking enough to bring a smile to your face. And it must have done pretty well back in 1968, because it spawned three sequels.

Which brings us to the second film in the series, and probably the most well-known, THE MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND(1968). This one is kind of a midnight cult classic for some reason. This time the "gringo" guests to the island are John Ashley (this time playing "Dr. Bill Foster" even though this character is exactly the same as "Jim Farrell") and pin-up model Angelique Pettyjohn as Shiela Willard, a woman who has come to Blood Island looking for her estranged (and drunkard) father. Once again, the American guests get caught up in the strange goings-on on the island. This time the evil scientist is Dr. Lorca (Ronald Remy) who has been trying to cure sick people using chlorophyll (!!) and turning them into green-blooded plant/human monsters with huge fangs and sharp claws. As you can tell, the story is very similar to BRIDES OF BLOOD, but the production values are a little better this time around, and the monster looks a helluva lot cooler and more vicious (in the first film, he looked like a muscleman with some dried lava poured on him - but that first monster reminded me an awful lot of the goofy monsters in early Roger Corman movies, so I kinda dug 'im). It's a better movie than the first one, but not by much. Still campy as hell. And Angelique Pettyjohn was one of those odd women who looks kinda ugly in some scenes and hot in others. By the end, I still couldn't tell if she was pretty or not.

The third film, BEAST OF BLOOD, is a direct sequel to MAD DOCTOR and picks up right where the previous one left off. MAD DOCTOR ended with John Ashley and Angelique Pettyjohn escaping from the Island on a boat, but the last scene shows that one of the monsters has snuck aboard. When BEAST OF BLOOD opens, the monster makes its presence known and makes mincemeat out of the boat's crew. Ashley (once again called Bill Foster, I guess they didn't want to change his character's name yet again) jumps overboard and escapes to the island. But where is Angelique Pettyjohn? She's nowhere to be seen this time around! She must have gotten airlifted out of the boat before the third movie began, I guess. Instead, she's replaced by reporter Myra Russell (Celeste Yarnall - easily the hottest female lead of these films)who wants to get the scoop on Blood Island. Once back on the island, Bill Foster investigates more murders of natives which lead him back to Dr. Lorca (now played by Eddie Garcia), who supposedly died in an explosion in MAD DOCTOR, but who is still doing his experiments in an underground lair, assisted by his ever faithful servant and thug Razak (Bruno Punzalan, who was in all three films - he was called Goro in the first one- and who is one of the few highlights). Lorca also has the severed head of the chlorophyll monster in the last movie preserved and alive - and he talks to it! He carries on full conversations with the damn thing, and at the end of this movie, the monster SPEAKS! It's the funniest damn scene in all three of the movies. He says stuff like "I'm going to get you, Lorca!" Funny shit like that. As you can see, this movie has lots of similarities to the previous two, and is just as hokey. But for some reason, I kinda dug these silly monster movies.

Which brings us to the last BLOOD ISLAND movie, BRAIN OF BLOOD (1972). Any repetitive themes this time around are tossed right out the window (thankfully!). Y'see Eddie Romero wanted to continue to cash in on the Blood Island series, but he didn't have time or inspiration for the final flick of the series, so he turned this one over to Al Adamson, that schlock master who also made such terrific no-budget classics as DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN and CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN. The first thing Adamson does is totally jettison the Phillipine location, Dr. Lorca and his chlorophyll monsters, etc. There is no real link between BRAIN and the other films, except for the appearance of Kent Taylor (the scientist from BRIDES OF BLOOD), brought back here as evil brain surgeon Dr. Lloyd Trenton. The plot of this one is typical Adamson, which means it's totally off the wall and hilarious. A Middle-Eastern leader is dying, so he's secretly brought to America to have his brain transplanted into a new body. The only scientist who would dare do such a procedure is the insane bastard Dr. Trenton (Taylor) who immediately sends his henchman - Gor (John Bloom), a retarded giant whose face was disfigured by battery acid and evil dwarf Dorro (Angelo Rossito - whose career went back to the 20's and was one of the stars of Todd Browning's FREAKS in 1932!!) to go fetch a fresh body. (Yes, there was a strange time in the early 70's where tons of movies had hulking retarded guys and evil dwarves - they were a genre of their own and I might explore this more in a later column!) The plan being that once the dictator's head is put in the new body, plastic surgery will be used to make him look like his old self and he can return to his country as if nothing ever happened (this is a typical, convoluted Al Adamson plot, which is why I loved it). Of course, something goes wrong and the body retrieved is unusable, so at the last minute, Dr. Trenton has to transplant the dictator's brain in Gor's hulking body, which eventually drives him mad! The film also stars Regina Carroll (Adamson's wife, who appeared in almost all of his movies) and Zandor Vorkov (Dracula in DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN!). It also features girls chained up in the basement to be used as human blood banks! This movie is totally insane compared to the previous three and is easily my favorite of the bunch.

These movies have had a wild reputation for years and the box set was the first time they were all collected. Unfortunately, I don't think this box set is readily available - it may be out of print (I got mine off Ebay). If you're into totally insane monster movies and stuff like Roger Corman's early classics, you might really dig these films. But you're going to have to do some real searching to find them. I thought they were enjoyable enough, if silly as hell. And I always love a chance to see another Al Adamson train wreck. So it's up to you if you think you need a BLOOD ISLAND VACATION.