When Genre Worlds Collide: Crooks vs. Creatures, Part One

Now Playing: Beast from Haunted Cave (1959)

Pros: The mash-up of crime-thriller, sci-fi and horror genres works surprisingly well; A couple of the actors shine with the snappy, noirish dialog; The creature concept is unique and eerie.
Cons: The crooks’ “brilliant” heist seems particularly looney; Makes you wonder what might have been if the budget had been a tad bigger.

When I first saw From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), I remember thinking how clever it was of the filmmakers to get things all revved up with what looked like a hard-charging crime-action-thriller, then, like a crazy cab ride in Hell, take a hard turn down a dark and bloody horror detour. If you don’t like getting whiplash from colliding genres, then you probably don’t seek out movies like that in the first place. However, enough people were intrigued rather than annoyed by the bait-and-switch that the film did decent box office and went on to become a legitimate cult favorite. And of course, director Robert Rodriquez and screenwriter (and actor) Quentin Tarantino would become kings of genre filmmaking.

Kings usually owe their positions to their forebears, and Rodriquez and Tarantino are no different. Tarantino in particular is an unashamed B/exploitation flick nerd-geek, and has made a wildly successful living mining vintage sleaze for films that, love ‘em or not, are like nothing else coming out of Hollywood. As he famously said in a 1994 interview, “I steal from every movie ever made… Great artists steal, they don’t do homages.” Ironically, Tarantino’s stealing from earlier film eras makes his films seem wildly original compared to the endless stream of remakes, reboots and CGI-infused comic book movies the industry spews out. 

"It's okay George, your career is going to be fine after this.
Just take the money and buy something nice for yourself."

I doubt that Beast from Haunted Cave (1959) was a direct influence on Tarantino, but who knows? Beast certainly shares a good bit of celluloid DNA with From Dusk Till Dawn: a criminal gang escapes into the remote countryside after a big heist, only to jump from the frying pan into the fire as they encounter a horrific, bloodthirsty creature that wreaks the ultimate Karmic justice.

I know I sound like a broken record, but Beast from Haunted Cave is yet another creature feature that had a big impact on me when I was a kid. I first encountered Beast at the bowling alley, of all places, when I was about 10 years old. My parents bowled in a Friday night league, and instead of getting a babysitter they often took me along.

That was okay by me, because the bowling alley had a lounge with a TV. The lounge was usually empty, so it became my TV den away from home. Better yet, there was a creature feature show that aired on Friday nights, so I was in heaven with the movie and a soda and candy from the machine.

The Friday night show specialized in ‘50s and ‘60s sci-fi like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Killers from Space, and the early Roger Corman cheapies. I remember being excited on one of those bowling league nights about seeing Beast from Haunted Cave for the first time. But the excitement dissipated when it started out looking like some boring crime caper, with jaded adults snarling and shouting and roughing each other up.

CAUTION: SPOILERS HIDING IN THE SHADOWS AHEAD, WAITING TO JUMP OUT AT YOU!

Even more frightening than the Beast from Haunted Cave:
shoes you share with hundreds of other people!

I managed to stick with it long enough to get a jolt. It was a scene in which a character investigates weird cries in the night, and shines his flashlight on a gaunt, spectral-looking woman, half-conscious, who is wrapped in a huge web and suspended in a tree.

That got my attention. I remember checking in a lot with my parents the rest of the evening, which was not my usual practice, and I slept pretty fitfully that night. Like any resilient Monster Kid, the next time Beast aired I made sure to catch it, determined to see it all the way through. I enjoyed it well enough, making allowances for the boring crime caper parts, but I also remember ultimately being disappointed with the monster, which seemed spindly and slow and not very scary.

But man, it was the monster’s work that was the scary part. I’d not seen anything quite like it up to that point: humans pinned against trees or cave walls by giant webs, weakly crying for help as the thing lumbers toward them.

I didn’t have a word for it back then, but having recently watched Beast again, “uncanny” fits nicely. It’s the kind of feeling that some phobic people get when they just think about big, fat spiders (not to mention human-sized ones). It’s also on par with the dread generated by the shock ending of the original The Fly (but done with a fraction of that film’s budget).

It suddenly dawned on Natalie that she had forgotten to get bug spray at the store.

Experiencing it again with adult sensibilities, I have a better appreciation for the “boring” heist sequences. Like Rodriquez’s and Tarantino’s hybrid horror-thriller, the juxtaposition of gangsters with a whole ‘nother level of otherworldly evil serves to sharpen the suspense, keeps the viewer guessing, and even draws a little extra humanity out of criminal characters that might otherwise be all-too-familiar cardboard cutouts.

Beast’s odd coupling of genres was apparently born more out of economical improvisation than artistic inspiration. Always looking to shoot pictures as quickly and cheaply as possible and tired of their usual locations in southern California, producers Roger Corman and brother Gene arranged with the town of Deadwood, South Dakota, for some picturesque winter location shooting. To get the most for their travel money, they planned to shoot two pictures there back-to-back using the same cast and crew: Beast, a horror quickie, and Ski Troop Attack, a lower-than-low-budget war picture.

Even the story was recycled. Roger’s go-to screenwriter Charles B. Griffith dusted off an old script from an earlier gangster/heist potboiler (Naked Paradise, 1957), added a monster, and bam, they were good to go. (Griffith scripted the best known of Roger Corman’s early cult favorites, including Not of This Earth, Attack of the Crab Monsters, A Bucket of Blood, and The Little Shop of Horrors.)

At the core of Griffith’s recycled plot is a tension-filled love triangle that develops when a gang pulls off a heist and enlists an innocent, unsuspecting third party to help them make their escape. In Naked Paradise (with its tropical island setting), the dupe is a for-hire boat captain (played by Richard Denning). In Beast, the gang hires lodge owner and outdoorsman Gil Jackson (Michael Forest) to lead them in a cross-country ski trek to a cabin where, unbeknownst to Gil, they plan to be picked up by a bush plane.

Naturally, complications ensue for the gang. First, when they set off an explosion in a nearby mine to divert attention while they clean out the mining company's stash of gold bars, the blast awakens a prehistoric monster that is royally pissed that its lair has been blown up. The creature proceeds to stalk the gang as they take off for the remote cabin. (To add insult to injury, the criminal geniuses don’t seem to have considered how hard it is to lug heavy gold bars cross-country on skis, or how quickly the weather can change in South Dakota hill country.)

"So Marty, how many bars have you got? No, not on your phone you idiot!"

Second, the gang leader’s moll, Gypsy (Sheila Noonan), becomes mightily disillusioned with her vicious, self-absorbed boyfriend (Frank Wolff) as she falls for the hunky, free-spirited Gil. Both complications eventually converge to create the perfect storm at the film’s conclusion.

It’s tempting to say there’s something for everyone in Beast -- snappy, noirish dialog and a tense love triangle for the adults, and a blood-sucking humanoid spider-fly creature for the kids. Conversely, there’s plenty for either audience segment to be bored with. The latter seems to have been the prevailing reaction, as, in spite of its wide release on DVD and streaming platforms, Beast has never been a nostalgic favorite like Attack of the Crab Monsters or Little Shop of Horrors.

Re-visiting Beast after a couple of decades or more, it occurred to me that, absent the monster, this could have been a decent little low-budget noir. Certainly screenwriter Griffith had an ear for Chandleresque dialog. Take for example this exchange between Gypsy and Alexander at the lodge’s tavern:

Gypsy (commenting on the other bar patrons): "Look at all the happy little people enjoying their freedom. Dosey doe and round we go."
Alexander (looking peeved): "What kind of freedom is that? They’re all tied down to their petty futures."
Gypsy: "It might be nice to have a future, even a petty little one."

When he’s not being vicious and controlling, we see flashes of what attracted Gypsy to Alexander. He knows what he wants, wears cool shades indoors, and his cynicism could easily be confused with sophistication by naive young women.

Alexander smokes, drinks and wears his sunglasses at night.

But once Gypsy has gotten a taste of Gil’s life of the great outdoors, fresh air, and true freedom to do as you please, Alexander’s constricted, bitter life of never being satisfied, endlessly moving around and endlessly planning the next big job, looks a lot less attractive.

Rather than undercutting Gypsy’s poignant story, the addition of the beast punctuates it. Gil’s great outdoors contains more things than are dreamt of in a gangster’s philosophy, including weird bloodsucking monsters that get coughed up from the bowels of the earth by ill-considered explosive charges. Next to such ancient evil, Alexander looks petty and small. It’s fitting that, while the local authorities are apparently powerless to apprehend the crooks, Nature is there to step in and deliver ultimate justice.

If you’re willing to keep an open mind and not judge it by contemporary special effects standards (and if you’re reading this, you’re no doubt very open minded), then the beast does have some effectively eerie moments delivering Nature’s justice (and admittedly, a few that don’t work so well). It certainly is unlike anything else in sci-fi/horror before or since.

In his epic survey of American sci-fi films of the ‘50s and early ‘60s, Keep Watching the Skies! (McFarland, 1986), Bill Warren recounts how the Beast was born:

“[T]he beast, which he [actor and special effects artist Chris Robinson] called ‘Humphrass,’ … was seven feet tall with eleven-foot arms. He based the design on that of an insect he discovered in a book on unusual animals, the wingless hanging fly. ‘To one plywood base, I added a thin aluminum stripping to create the skeletal form. I then covered the skeleton over with chicken wire. After that I wrapped it in sheets and muslin, sort of like I was making a mummy. … The head was fashioned out of quarter-inch aluminum wire, with steel wrapped around that and then once again in muslin, forming a sort of shroud…’ Robinson completed Humphrass by adding spun glass to give it an appropriately cobwebby appearance.” [Warren, p. 233]

While Warren acknowledges that the beast is “not realistic,” he does call it “eerie and unusual” and singles out the scene that had such an impact on me as a kid:

“The film, in fact, has one great shudder scene, the shot of Natalie, encased in webbing, opening her eyes. Our first glimpse of her has a peculiar impact; it’s so unexpected that you have a hard time adjusting to what you are seeing. And the image is beautiful. About the time you recognize it as a corpse caught in the branches, the ‘corpse’ opens her eyes. It’s an imaginative, almost poetic moment, at once both conventional and unusual, like the film itself.” [Ibid., p. 234]

This beautiful, poetic moment scared the crap out of me when I was a kid.

Getting back to the human characters, Sheila Noonan (credited in the film as Sheila Carol), is especially good as Gypsy, whose character, fittingly for her name, has been wandering around for too long in the criminal underworld, clinging to a sociopath incapable of love. Surprisingly, Noonan only appeared in a handful of films -- Beast, Ski Troop Attack,  A Bucket of Blood (with the inimitable Dick Miller), The Incredible Petrified World (a stinker with John Carradine) -- and a single episode of Gunsmoke; all between 1957 and 1960.

Michael Forest as Gil is as wooden as a tree (pun intended), but then, as a buff icon representing clean living and the complete antithesis of Alexander’s urban decadence, nothing more is really required of him. In contrast to Noonan’s brief career, Forest, born in 1929, is still acting today (!!), with literally hundreds of credits and a new film slated for this year. Fans of vintage sci-fi TV may remember his stints on the original Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, and Star Trek series.

The third member of the triangle, Frank Wolff as Alexander the gang leader, brings just enough cynical humanity to the role to make it conceivable that Gypsy might have once had a thing for him, regardless of the character’s disregard for human life. Wolff got his start in films doing the two South Dakota shoots (Beast and Ski Troop Attack) and Atlas (Corman’s mediocre attempt at sword and sandal), but in the early ‘60s he moved to Europe and racked up a considerable number of credits in low-budget potboilers, especially spaghetti westerns. Tragically, he committed suicide in 1971.

"Hey Gypsy, I'll bet you didn't know that many parts of a pine tree are edible!"

Beast was Monte Hellman’s first directing job (Gene Corman is credited as Producer and Roger as Executive Producer). Unlike other directors who got their starts with Roger Corman (e.g., Joe Dante, Francis Ford Coppola, and Ron Howard), Hellman never managed to break into the big time, but he does have the distinction of having directed Jack Nicholson (pre-superstardom) in five films; two westerns (The Shooting, Ride in the Whirlwind), a war picture (Back Door to Hell), a crime-thriller (Flight to Fury), and a horror picture (The Terror; he was one of seven credited directors to take part in that chaotic production).

Beast deserves more of a cult reputation than it’s gotten over the years. To echo Bill Warren, it is one of the more unusual “conventional” sci-fi/horror pics of the 1950s, and includes one eerie scene that is almost “beautiful” in its frightfulness. Add Charles B. Griffith’s stylishly noir dialog and an unconventional love triangle, and you’ve got a B picture that is much more than the sum of its economical parts.

Where to find it: Thankfully, you can throw a stone in any direction and likely hit a DVD copy or a stream.

Coming Soon: More crooks vs. creatures mayhem as a gang of kidnappers do battle with a beautiful but deadly alien in The Astounding She-Monster (1957)!

The B Movie Poster World of Roger Corman

“King of the B’s” Roger Corman, with hundreds (count ‘em!) of credits as a producer under his belt (as well as over 50 as a director), is famously dismissive of the term “B movie” as applied to his cinematic output. To Corman, who grew up during the golden age of the Hollywood studio system, B movies were the low budget quickies made by the major studios to fill out a double-bill alongside an A picture with a bigger budget and well-known stars. As Corman relates in his memoir,

“[T]o my way of thinking, I never made a “B” movie in my life. The B movie dated from the Depression and was a phenomenon only through the early 1950s. … Everyone knew which movies were which; the studio publicity and production lists openly distinguished A’s from B’s Also, B movies earned only flat rentals on the second half of a double bill. … [T]he B’s had died out by the time I began directing.” [Roger Corman with Jim Jerome, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Da Capo Press, 1998, p. 36]

Corman biographer Beverly Gray adds that early on, Corman prefered the term “exploitation films” -- he was always very willing and able to exploit the latest headlines and fads -- but that later, as the success of Star Wars and The Exorcist helped boost sci-fi and horror into big box office gold (with matching big budgets), he settled for the gentler term “genre films” to describe his low-budget output. [Beverly Gray, Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking, Renaissance Books, 2000, p. 48]

For the record, and with all due deference to the historical origins of the term and Roger’s insistence that he never made a “B” movie, we at Films From Beyond use the term “B movie” in its broader meaning, efficiently summarized at Wikipedia as “a low-budget commercial motion picture that is not an arthouse film.” (Interestingly, the first illustration on the page is a poster for Corman’s The Raven from 1963!)

Whatever you call them -- B movies, exploitation pictures, genre films, or independent films -- there’s always been a simmering tension between audience expectations of thrills and chills and the ability of B movie makers to deliver the goods on a low budget.

In the good ol’ days before sci-fi became big box office business, genre filmmakers like Roger Corman could get away with tiny budgets that could only accommodate a handful of effects artists at most (versus the literal armies of artists and technicians required today). You could also make a film with an original story and still expect to make money -- the 800 pound gorilla franchises like Stephen King, Star Wars and the MCU that could crush or shove aside anything else in their genres didn’t exist yet.

But you still had to be tuned into the cultural zeitgeist to keep your B movie gravy train chugging along. Especially in the early days, there were none better at it than Roger Corman. Like a financial wizard, he seemed to know just when to jump into a particular market and when to get out of Dodge.

War of the Satellites, released in 1958 in the midst of the panic over the Russians beating the U.S. into space, is a prime example of Corman’s ability to quickly capitalize on sensational headlines. In J. Philip di Franco’s The Movie World of Roger Corman (1979), the B movie King reminisced about his own contribution to the space race:

“War of the Satellites is an example of producing very, very rapidly. The first Russian Sputnik had been launched. A friend of mine, knowing I worked very rapidly, called me and said he had within the hour constructed a story line and was I interested. After I heard the story, I called Steve Brady, president of Allied Artists, and I said I could be shooting the picture in ten days and cutting it in three weeks. In roughly two months we could release the first picture about satellites. He said, ‘Done, we’ll do it.’” [di Franco, ed., pg. 16; see my review of War of the Satellites elsewhere on this blog.]

Roger’s nimbleness and ability to work quickly and cheaply was very attractive to film companies desperate for a steady stream of new releases to satisfy the voracious youth market. Beginning in the late ‘50s and through much of the ‘60s, Corman was American International Pictures’ (AIP; formerly American Releasing Corporation) go-to guy. As described by biographer Beverly Gray, it was a neatly crafted, mutually advantageous partnership:

“Once he proved he could deliver the goods, he was soon making multiple AIP features a year … Upon delivering a completed film, he would receive $50,000 as a negative pickup fee, plus a $15,000 advance on the projected foreign sale. Though he was also guaranteed a percentage of the movie’s eventual profits, Corman never counted on this potential income. His strategy was to come in under $65,000 per film, so as to have working capital for his next project. The fact that he would plan every third or fourth feature to be ultralow-budget (below the $30,000 range) would help ensure a healthy profit in the long run.” [Gray, pp. 48-49]

Show of hands: how many of you had a cool mom
who let you order junk like this?

By being so savvy with money, schedules and sizing up market demand, he was eventually able to found his own company, New World Pictures, in 1970. It was a wild ride: along the way to becoming an independent movie mogul, Corman made movies in practically every genre or theme you could think of, including sci-fi, horror, westerns, gangsters, juvenile delinquents, motorcycle gangs, auto racing, etc., etc.

As varied, action-packed and eccentric as Corman’s movies were during the period, their marketing, especially the posters, were on another level entirely. In a recent post on duplicitous advertising, I highlighted a couple of posters for early Corman quickies that egregiously exaggerated monsters that turned out to be less than awesome in the films themselves

Over-the-top exaggeration or downright deception often proved to be the rule, rather than the exception, especially with AIP’s practice, perfected by co-founder Jim Nicholson, of coming up with a marketing plan, including poster art, before the script was even completed.

Do you dare reveal the monster lurking behind the poster?

I don’t think kids of the day were bamboozled or overly concerned that the actual movie monsters were pale imitators of the lurid poster art. It was a simpler age, a pre-irony age of over-the-top hype that everyone acknowledged for what it was. The sea monkeys you ordered out of the back of the comic book weren’t nearly as cool as they looked in the ad; the prize at the bottom of your Cracker Jacks box was always a cheap disappointment; and those movie monsters … well, the posters always lied. But we kept coveting the junk in the comic book ads, emptying our Cracker Jack boxes, and going to the monster matinees, because what else were we gonna do on a Saturday afternoon?

The films represented by the posters below all involved Roger Corman in some capacity, either as producer, director or both. For a couple of them he worked with his brother Gene, who was an accomplished producer in his own right. And just like my previous post on deceptive movie posters, these illustrations employ the special un-patented Reveal-O-Rama technology -- simply click on the poster to reveal the actual movie monster that was misrepresented in the art or hidden altogether!

Aka "Attack of the Giant Leeches," 1959. The monsters in this one were actors wearing black plastic wet suits with suckers sewn on. Click the poster to see what they looked like on film!

Brother Gene produced; Roger was an uncredited executive producer. Gotta admit, this one creeped me out when I first saw it. It's an ultra-low-budget combo of From Dusk Till Dawn and Alien. See my review here.

This looks more like a poster for a genteel English comedy -- as a kid, I wouldn't have looked at it twice. Fortunately, I discovered Seymour and Audrey via late night TV.

This was also produced by Gene Corman with Roger serving as executive producer. The excessive poster promised far more than the film dared to deliver. On the other hand, it's the very first (and only?) film to feature a male astronaut impregnated with alien babies. Yeesh! See my review here.

There is a creature in the film that slightly resembles the thing in the poster. It's a kind of forerunner of the facehugger in Alien, and makes a memorable, gross-out appearance in the movie.

For this picture -- the first he produced -- Roger talked the owners of a one-man submarine into letting him use it in exchange for free publicity. Was the monster a worthy adversary? Judge for yourself.

This was one of Robert Vaughn's first starring roles. Kids expecting cool stop-motion dionsaurs were very disappointed. However, if you're a fan of creatures that look like they were made from stuff fished out of a dumpster, then this movie is for you!

When the film was first released, the Loch Ness Monster issued a press release saying he was in no way related to this thing. Somehow, I don't think the sea serpent was the main attraction in this film.

Because the term was plastered all over the news when the film came out, the manned spacecraft in it are referred to as "satellites." Richard Devon plays an alien who can assume human form and replicate himself as needed. See my review here.

Susan Cabot plays a cosmetics executive who tests an experimental anti-aging formula on herself and becomes a voracious monster. Kind of like Gwyneth Paltrow, except not as scary.

Alien Family Values

Night of the Blood Beast (1958)

Oh boy, it's another presidential election year! Time to rip the scabs off old wounds, pick up the torches and pitch forks, and get worked up over all those great hot button issues like abortion, Planned Parenthood, gay marriage, government support for contraception, illegal immigration -- you name it. There's nothing quite so exhilarating as marching off to a glorious culture war. Unless the war is on an interplanetary scale, and the entire earth, and life (and culture) as we know it is at stake. Then that's just scary.

Which brings me to the subject of this post, Night of the Blood Beast. Although it was made well over 50 years ago, Blood Beast raises a number of timeless and controversial issues that would have contemporary politicians shouting at each other until doomsday:

• Is manned space flight worth the risks?
• Should outer space aliens born in this country automatically be granted citizenship?
• Is it permissible to abort space alien fetuses? What about "aborting" them with Molotov cocktails and a flare gun?
• If the minds of a monster alien and a human being were to somehow be "married" via a mysterious telepathic-organic link, can states officially recognize that marriage?
• In addition to a border fence, do we need a shield around the whole planet to keep out illegal aliens from outer space?

Okay, so Blood Beast doesn't address the issues in exactly those contexts, but it is surprisingly thought-provoking for schlocky, low-budget '50s sci-fi. Blood Beast is part of an entertaining (if not particularly distinguished) group of early space age movies that tallied up all the ways man's first attempts to conquer outer space could go horribly wrong. While real rocket scientists were grappling with g forces, weightlessness, radiation, environmental controls and other challenges to human spaceflight, astronauts in the movies were having about as much luck as Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons: after successfully landing on Mars, the crew of the Rocketship X-M (1950) burns up in earth re-entry; one of the astronauts of the ill-fated Quatermass Xperiment (1955) brings an alien organism back to earth, which transmutes him into a horrific hybrid thing; the crew of the first Mars orbital mission tear through the space-time continuum and land on a far future, primitive World Without End (1958); most of the crew of another Mars expedition is killed by a Martian stowaway, It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958); and the First Man Into Space (1959) is encrusted with meteor dust and returns to earth as a hideous monster thirsting for blood.

The X-100 is ready for takeoff.

The astronaut in Blood Beast is similarly unlucky, but in a highly unusual way that distinguishes him from all the other ill-fated sci-fi explorers (more on that later). As the title credits roll, we see America's first piloted spaceship, the X-100, take off into space. The craft and its sole occupant, Major John Corcoran (Mike Emmet) soon run into trouble, and the capsule crashes in a remote wilderness area somewhere in the U.S. The recovery crew is pretty basic, consisting of Dr. Alex Wyman (Tyler McVey), John's fiance Dr. Julie Benson (Angela Greene), photographer Donna Bixby (Georgianna Carter), and generic military tough guy types Steve Dunlap (John Baer) and Dave Randall (Ed Nelson). Much to fiance Julie's dismay, they verify that Maj. Corcoran is dead, although his body looks pretty good after such a rough crash. They transport the body to the remote base in the back of what looks like a dirt farmer's dilapidated pick-up truck (all the money in this fictional space program apparently went into the spacecraft, and there wasn't much left over for "incidentals"). After examining the body, the docs are amazed that after several hours rigor mortis has yet to set in. And even though the astronaut has no pulse or circulation, Doc Wyman exclaims that "his blood is still alive!"

At this point, things quickly get hot, heavy and horrific for the recovery crew. Blood Beast packs a lot into its very short running time (62 minutes): the base is cut off from all communications by a mysterious magnetic field; Doc Wyman is killed by some shadowy thing as big as a bear; Maj. Corcoran miraculously comes back to life with a mystery wound at the base of his neck and an even more mysterious mental connection with the dead Doc Wyman (see the clip below); and most incredibly, the crew discovers that Corcoran has somehow been "impregnated" with alien embryos!! The valiant astronaut has become an unwilling pawn in an alien civilization's plan to impose their own form of "family values" on humankind, and the small band of government employees is the only thing standing in the way of total assimilation.

This expectant "mother" better have good medical insurance!

With its handful of characters, meager special effects, and bargain basement monster suit, Blood Beast can't cover up its low budget. But it does compensate with atmospheric black and white photography; an effective, sudden "jump-out-of-your-seat" introduction of the monster; and best of all, some unusual sci-fi ideas that seem advanced for the period. I think it's safe to say that Maj. Corcoran is the first movie astronaut, and first male, to be impregnated by aliens (twenty years later, an equally unfortunate astronaut "gave birth" in a very graphic way to Ridley Scott's infamous Alien). The mind melding between man and alien also predated Star Trek's Vulcan mind tricks by a good decade. And the alien itself is unusually sympathetic. At the climax, it argues very eloquently for understanding and tolerance. Is it trying to trick the gullible earthlings, or is it sincere? At the movie's end, we're not sure.

The box art for one of Blood Beast's video releases touts it as "Classic Roger Corman." Although Roger is credited as an executive producer, the Blood Beast is really brother Gene Corman's baby (Gene both produced and contributed the story). According to Bill Warren (Keep Watching the Skies! McFarland, 1986), Gene turned over scripting duties to Martin Varno, son of actor Roland Varno, who came up with a script in record time. The Cormans demanded so many changes that Varno asked for more money. When they turned him down, Varno took his grievances to the Writers Guild of America. Cheap to the bitter end, Gene and Roger held off paying Varno until the deadline was up.

Ed Nelson is the most familiar face in Blood Beast. Ed was a fixture on TV for decades, starring in the 1960s series Peyton Place, and guesting on seemingly every crime, western and sci-fi show produced between 1960 and the mid-1990s. The same year as Blood Beast, Ed was involved in producing another bottom-of-the-budget-barrel sci-fi classic, The Brain Eaters (1958).

The Blood Beast grapples with the carrier of his babies.

Night of the Blood Beast shows its parsimonious budget in multiple ways, but it's also eerie and suspenseful and chock full of intriguing sci-fi ideas. In my humble opinion, its user rating on IMDb is way too low. In his lengthy review, B sci-fi movie maven Bill Warren provides a firm but fair assessment:

If it weren't for its talky, derivative script and pathetic monster, Night of the Blood Beast might be widely regarded as one of the better low-budget SF thrillers of the period. It's well-acted by a small cast, tightly edited and efficiently directed by Bernard Kowalski. Though just a little cheapie, there are several good things about it, and one element of the story is unique in films up to 1958. One of the men in the cast essentially becomes pregnant. In one of the great, sick shocks of American International Pictures, we even see the embryos pulsing away in his chest. (Ibid.)

If you're ready for some vintage "sick shocks," Night of the Blood Beast is available on a couple of eminently affordable DVD editions/collections, and Mystery Science Theater 3000's version can be streamed from Netflix and Amazon Instant Video.

After being "dead" for several hours, astronaut John Corcoran (Mike Emmet) wakes up with a huge hangover, and another man's thoughts swirling around in his head: