Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Queen of Blood

In this classic episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss Curtis Harrington’s 1966 space horror movie “Queen of Blood,” starring John Saxon, Basil Rathbone, Dennis Hopper and Florence Marly as the titular alien monarch. (originally published 05/26/2023)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob
Lamb and we have Oh, we have a fun one
for you today. This one is going to be our
episode from five twenty six, twenty twenty three on the
excellent nineteen sixty six space horror movie Queen of Blood
starring John Saxon, Basil Rathbone, Dennis Hopper, and Florence Marley.

(00:29):
This one is a lot of fun. We hope you enjoy.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Hey you, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. So
last week on Weird House Cinema, we were taking a
look at the nineteen ninety three live action Super Mario
Brothers movie. I still stand by my characterization, even with
a little more time to process my characterization of it
as one of the weirdest movies we've ever covered on

(01:09):
the show, and one of the weirdest movies I have
ever watched. It is still just it's bouncing like a
pinball in my head. But one of the many truly
bizarre aspects of that movie was that it had in
the role of the villain King Koopa none other than
the late great Dennis Hopper. Now, one of the other

(01:31):
movies that came up when we were exploring sort of
the back catalog of Dennis Hopper's work was a nineteen
sixty six sci fi horror film called Queen of Blood.
Now I immediately liked that title. I looked up the
poster and I liked that too, So my attention was raised.
I kept digging in and I was like, well, we've

(01:52):
got to cover this movie. And so here we are today.
We're talking about Queen of Blood nineteen sixty six, starring
John Sacks and Dennis Hopper, Basil rath Bone and Florence Marley.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
Yeah, and I think it would be proper to position
this film within a trilogy of space vampire movies that
we'll probably get around to watching all of these at
one point. Planet of Vampires from nineteen sixty five, which
we have covered, the Mario Bava film Beautiful to Behold,
maybe a little bit qua lutic at times and its energy,

(02:27):
but still great, this film which carries on the vampires
of Space tradition, just one year later, and then eventually
we're going to get to Life Force that being the
modern version of this tale of you know, just female
in the case of Planet of the Vapires, male vampires
as well, vampires of all gender coming from space wanting

(02:49):
to consume human blood.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
Now, in life force, I don't think it's exactly blood.
They just kind of generally want to suck all your
life force, basically your life energy out and leave you
a very withered scale, little kind of artifact. Yeah, but yes,
generally I agree with this arc. And I'm going to say,
of the three movies, the one we're talking about today
is by far the least of them, but not without

(03:14):
its pleasures. So we can talk about the kind of
weird jigsaw puzzle that is this film. But overall I
did enjoy it. It raises a question, though, which is that,
of all the movies we've ever done on Weird House,
which one do you think is comprised to the largest
extent of pre existing footage. It's got to be this one.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
Right, It's got to be this one by a long shot.
So to explain this to anyone who's not familiar with
this film, and I think most people are not familiar
with this film, it includes a lot of footage, especially
the effects footage from the nineteen fifty nine Soviet science
fiction film Nebo Zovyacht, a film that the producer of

(03:54):
this movie, Roger Korman, who of course you're familiar with
from past episodes, had perch just the US distribution rights for.
He even roped in a young Francis Ford Coppola, who
worked on some re editing. They apparently added some monster
scenes for US audiences and released it as Battle Beyond
the Sun. This movie also reuses footage from nineteen sixty

(04:16):
threes Mitchta Nevstretchu A Dream Come True, another Soviet science
fiction film. So these are both I've not seen either
of these in their entirety, but they are essentially big budget,
prestige sci fi films from the Soviet Union, and here

(04:36):
footage from them is reused for a low budget Roger
Korman produced sci fi spectacle. You know this part that's
going to be released as part of a double feature.

Speaker 3 (04:46):
Now, I was trying to think of a name for
what you would call this genre of movie genre, not
in terms of the not in terms of the story content,
but in terms of the way it came about, And
to borrow a phrase from the at least the current
edition and of Dungeons and Dragons. I'm going to call
this an attack of opportunity film. Yeah, it is a

(05:07):
film that comes about because you have some opportunity in
terms of production capability. Maybe you suddenly own rights to
a bunch of footage and you can try to figure
out how to build a movie around that footage, like
we have in the case of this movie today. But
there are other such examples. There are cases where like,

(05:29):
we have a very famous actor on hand for two
more days, can we do something with them that we
can build the rest of a movie around later. Or
maybe we have access to sets that have been used
in another movie or props that have been used in
another movie, and can we quickly throw something together to

(05:50):
make use of that. It's sort of an efficiency based
approach to cinematic storytelling.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
Yeah, I think I've heard director Robert Rodriguez speak to
this as well. You know, like seeing what you have,
what do you have at your disposal that you can
utilize and using that kind of as the skeleton to
build up what you're going to create, especially if you're
dealing with limited budget.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
What is I feel like we talked about another movie
recently where there was like a big star who was
already on call having filmed another movie, and they had
him for like a couple more days, and so they
made something that we watched. Does that ring a bell
for you?

Speaker 1 (06:26):
Oh? It does ring a bell. I feel like that's
been the case with various actors, like, well, I guess
I'm going to stay in Rome for another week. Love
it here, you have a movie for me to work on,
you know that sort of thing. I feel like that's
the specific example has come up, But I don't recall
which film and which star it was.

Speaker 3 (06:43):
This is how you get discount Boris Karloff.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
Yeah, but yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:47):
So in the case of Queen of Blood, it's not
like an actor or some sets they had access to.
It was pre existing footage. So we've got a bunch
of shots that are already part of another movie. But
fortunately most of our audience will not have seen that movie,
and the footage looks pretty dang good. So what if
we can just sort of like figure out how to
build a narrative around these shots we have?

Speaker 1 (07:11):
Also, I think they have the same space helmets. I
did some pausing of the film because I was really
distracted by the differences between these two obvious lines of
footage while watching the film, and I was like, are
they even using the same space helmets or do they
just get the color ride and it looks like they're
the same helmets, or they are such an accurate recreation

(07:32):
that it doesn't matter. So I'll give them credit for that,
But there's so many other things that you just can't reproduce.

Speaker 3 (07:39):
I feel like I would have noticed it even if
I did not read about the background of the film,
because number one, like the art style is totally different,
like all of the pre existing footage has a much
more beautifully, lusciously realized kind of character to it the
scenes that are actually shot directly for this film or

(08:00):
much more bare bones in terms of sets and stuff.
But also it's just totally different in terms of like
the film grain and things like the shots just don't
really match. But you know, it's okay. You slot them
in there and you can make a movie.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
And I knew this was coming. I knew this was
one of the notable things about this film, but I
wasn't prepared for just how much they were going to
dump in. Like my mind instantly turns to a single
episode of Night Gallery from the early seventies. There's an
episode called The Different Ones, or rather it's a segment
from an episode called The Different Ones, and it's a
science fiction story that involves characters traveling from one planet

(08:36):
to the next, and in syndication they had to expand
it's runtime a bit, so they inserted spaceship shots from
nineteen seventy two Silent Running, Silent Running, Great Motion Picture.
We have a I think we have a podcast episode
pre Weird House dealing with it to some extent. But

(08:57):
in that particular instance, you know, I was very forgivable
and you can easily gloss over it because it's like, Okay,
we're exterior spaceship. Here's a shot from Silent Running. You
just go with it. And I was expecting it to
be more like that with this film, that like, Okay,
whenever we see an exterior of a spaceship, it's going
to be scenes from one of these Russian films. But
that's not the case. It's all sorts of stuff. It's

(09:18):
just so much stock or in this case, reused footage
dropped into the first hour. It's like when you let
out an eight year old put their own syrup on
their pancakes.

Speaker 3 (09:28):
Yes, yeah, And there are a few things that you
can actually catch, especially if you have a pause button
available to you. One of which is there's a scene
where Basil Rathbone is giving a speech to a big
assembled crowd, and then it does a cutaway to show
the whole room, and I guess it's still supposed to
be him speaking, but it's not actually him in this shot.

(09:49):
And then in this room there's a great statue of
like a god or at least a muscled nude male figure,
and he's holding something in his hand, and when he's
holding is Sputnik, the the Russia, the Soviet spacecraft.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah. Yeah, there are a lot of details like that.
It's almost as if they were like, look, the kids
are just going to be making out for the first
hour of this movie. We don't have to stress too
much about it. And ultimately, like that's how it feels.
It feels like the first hour of the film. Once
you press through that, you have a kind of tight,
little thirty minute story to enjoy and some nice acting

(10:25):
and so forth. But at least for me, I really
had to press through that first hour.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
I agree. Yeah, there's a lot of padding, but there
are some moments in that first hour that I think
are actually extremely effective, and we can explain more about
those when we get into the plot. But yeah, there's
a lot of gonna Bazzel rathbone talking and it's not
that interesting or just like seeing rockets blast off or
shoot through space, that's not that great either. But a

(10:52):
lot of the footage from the Soviet films is beautiful
and sometimes it is used to I think great effect.
I would say of the original stuff in the movie,
probably the best for me was all basically Florence Marley,
who plays the main alien character in the film.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
Oh yeah, she doesn't say a single word, but she has.
She emotes really well with her eyes and her eyebrows especially.

Speaker 3 (11:19):
Yeah, her eyes, her teeth in the corners of her
mouth do more acting than most people do with one
hundred lines of dialogue.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yeah, nice space vampire smirk. All right. Well, the other
fun thing about this is this is one of those
movies that takes us into the future, the far future
of nineteen ninety. So that was pretty fun.

Speaker 3 (11:42):
It's what the narrator actually says it. It's the first
thing you hear in the film is the year is
nineteen ninety.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
All Right, my elevator pitch for this is pretty simple.
Space Vampire sixty six. That's all you need to know.
It's just nineteen sixty six, and this is a Space
the Empire movie coming out of sixty six. Though it's
also interesting that in many respects it's kind of a
it feels more old fashioned than sixty six. It feels
a lot of the energy of this film is maybe
more in line with what we might expect from the

(12:12):
nineteen fifties. So yeah, it's yeah, interesting to think about that.
We'll discuss that as we proceed. Let's go ahead and
hear that trailer.

Speaker 4 (12:30):
Ween of Blood untangalizing, mystifying enigma. She's gorgeous, a fresh blood,

(12:55):
she's a monster. Got a good supply of blood plasma
with us juice actrofeder and if we run out of plasma.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
Commander, all right, if you want to watch Queen of Blood, well,

(13:52):
it's currently streaming. I know it's streaming on Prime. We
watched it there. I think it's streaming on some other sources.
It's also available on DVD from m Limited Collection. There's
also a Blu ray from Keno Laurber and Scorpion releasing,
though it doesn't seem to be widely available right now,
maybe out of print or something. But I wasn't able
to get my hands on that one, but it looks

(14:13):
like it has possibly some extras on it, all right,
Getting into the people behind this film, because ultimately some
of the cast and crew here are what like kind
of pushed the movie over the edge for me, because
you know, I'm already interested in the concept and the
time period. But then I started reading about the director
and writer of this, Curtis Harrington, who lived nineteen twenty

(14:36):
six through two thousand and seven. I wasn't familiar with
his work prior, but Curtis Harrington was a respected Hollywood director,
a film critic, an experimental filmmaker who played an important
role apparently in rediscovering James Whale during the nineteen fifties.
James Whale, of course, the director of such pictures as
Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein.

Speaker 3 (14:59):
It's hard for me to imagine that James Whale ever
would have been like a forgotten filmmaker as long as
I've been aware of him. I was aware of him
with kind of icon status.

Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, I thought of it the same way. But I
was reading about this in Harrington's oh bit in the
Los Angeles Times. They're quoting Dennis Bartak, producer and screenwriter,
who says that that whale had been quote pretty much
forgotten by everybody at this time during the last decade
or less of Wales's life. So fascinating detail there. So anyway,

(15:35):
back to Harrington. Following a string of experimental short films,
his first feature was nineteen sixty one's Night Tide, which
also starred Dennis Hopper, apparently in his first leading role
as a man who falls in love with a mysterious
woman who performs as a mermaid at the local carnival.
I've not seen it, but it's one of Harrington's best

(15:55):
known films and is apparently apparently very well regarded for
sort of darkly fantastic elements. It's supposed to be a
rather rether nice film. It was a Corman production, and
he followed that movie up with two features for Corman,
utilizing big budget sci fi footage that Corman had gotten
his hands on from the Soviet Union. Those films were

(16:18):
Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet in sixty five and Queen
of Blood in sixty six. Harrington's late sixties early seventies
period contained several macabre films, including sixty seven's Games with
James Kahn, seventy one's What's the Matter with Helen starring
Debbie Reynolds, seventy two's Whoever Slew and He Grew? I

(16:38):
guess this is the question title period of his work.
This one starred Shelley Winters. There's seventy threes The Killing Kind,
and then mostly TV episodes and TV movies after that,
but with some intriguing titles like seventy threes The Cat
Creature and seventy eight's Devil Dog the Hound of Hell,
not to be confused with nineteen seventy seven's Draculus Dog.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
Is that like, they ran out of the son of Dracula,
daughter of Dracula, cousin of Dracula, and they work all
the way down to Dracula's.

Speaker 1 (17:07):
Dog, Dracula's Dog, And I mean, obviously they should have
followed it up with Devil Dog versus Dracula's Dog, but
they didn't. Anyway. They're also two theatrical films. In the
later mix there there's seventy seven's Ruby, a supernatural thriller
starring Piper Laurie, and nineteen eighty five's Matahari, a historical

(17:28):
erotic melodrama starring Sylvia Crystal. Best known for the Emmanuel films,
so Herrington's work is frequently explored in scholarship surrounding queer cinema,
though I believe much of this is contextual, as I'm
not sure that any of his films have expressly gay characters,
though Harrington himself was openly gay and wrote about it

(17:49):
in his autobiography. But Queen of Blood, well, I can
only imagine this is not the best example of his work.
But I do feel like when Herring actually has time
to build something here, again, mostly in the last thirty
minutes or so of the picture, it mostly works like
he's able to make use of good actors and also

(18:12):
effectively build a certain amount of tension.

Speaker 3 (18:15):
Oh, I fully agree. I would say, on one hand, yes,
this is the least of the three Space Vampire films
you mentioned, But also I mean, how could it be
anything other than that given the circumstances, Like this is
an attack of opportunity film, It is an efficiency project.
You're trying to build something mostly on the basis of
stock footage or not stock, you know, pre existing footage.

(18:35):
So it is it's a difficult task, and I think
this movie, given that, actually is much better than it
has any right to be.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
Oh, absolutely all right. The cast of this Baby is
also pretty interesting. We got John Saxon playing Alan Brynner,
our lead astronaut. Saxon with nineteen thirty six through twenty twenty.
He's a weird house cinema staple. We've profiled on the show,

(19:06):
I want to say three or four times at this point,
so I'm not going to go in into a lot
of detail regarding Saxon, but it was a former tea.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
I'm trying to remember what were the others? We did
the Cannibal movie, but what were the other John Saxon movies?

Speaker 1 (19:19):
Well, yes, there was the Cannibal movie. There was Hands
of Steel, in which he's one of the villains.

Speaker 3 (19:26):
Yes, hands of Steel.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
Okay, there's something else.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
It's okay, okay, we can move on. Sorry, I just
was troubled that I couldn't remember the others. Okay, at
least two. That gets me there.

Speaker 1 (19:39):
Every few weeks there's at least one John Zaxon film.
We were considering especially from his seventies period, you know,
But at any rate, Saxon's definitely come up in the
show before him just blinking on some of the other
ones he may have we may have discussed him in.
But Saxon was a former teen idol, and he'd been
acting since the mid fifties at this point, and had
already worked with Mario Bava on sixty three is the

(20:02):
Girl who Knew Too Much and Auto Preminger on sixty
three is the Cardinal. He'd appeared alongside a young Robert
Redford in the nineteen sixty two war film War Hunt,
which I've read is quite good. He plays a soldier
in that who also happens to be like a serial murderer.
But Saxon would really come into his own, like I say,

(20:22):
and more in like the nineteen seventies. I think. I
think most of the pictures one is drawn to for
John Saxon are going to be from that period. So
he's maybe a little young here, he's not completely green.
But on the other hand, he's also playing a character
who feels like he's been extracted more or less from
a nineteen fifties sci fi adventure. You know, He's still

(20:43):
better in this sort of bland role than a lot
of the square jaw leads that you find in those
fifties sci fi films, but it still has a lot
in common with that.

Speaker 3 (20:53):
Yeah, I think there's not much to this role. He
is the leading man, and he is, to use the
term I often used to describe leading men from fifties
genre movies, he's kind of a rectangle, like he's just
there to be the masculine energy of rectitude according to
the logic of the film.

Speaker 1 (21:12):
And yet it's still is subdued compared to some of
the early example like he did I don't think he
ever punches anybody, No.

Speaker 3 (21:18):
He doesn't. He does spend the last I don't know
ten minutes of the movie arguing for the destruction of something,
with everybody else being like, oh no, it's fine, we
don't have to destroy it.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
All right. You mentioned him already, but Basil Rathbone is
in this playing Doctor Faraday. Rathbone lived nineteen I mean sorry,
eighteen ninety two through nineteen sixty seven. This was one
of his final film performances, but he had a long
career of stage and screen. He was a South African
born English actor who served in the First World War
and started appearing in films in the early twenties. He

(21:51):
played Guy of Gisborne in nineteen thirty eight s The
Adventures of Robin Hood. He played Sherlock Holmes in fourteen
Hollywood films. Between thirty eight and forty six, he appeared
in various swashbucklers. He stayed active on the stage, won
a Tony Award in nineteen forty eight for The Heiress,
and he was nominated for two Oscars for nineteen thirty

(22:11):
nine If I Were King in nineteen thirty seven's Romeo
and Juliet, in which he played Tibbalt opposite Leslie Howard
as Romeo and Norma Shearer as Juliet. He played Baron
von Wolf in nineteen thirty nine's Son of Frankenstein. That
was the third universal Frankenstein film, with Carloff and Lagosi
in it. But I think there's kind of a drop

(22:32):
off after the first. Yeah, this one was not James Whale,
was it. No, No, no.

Speaker 3 (22:39):
I think Bride is definitely the peak for me.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
Bride is the peak now. Rathbone definitely made his mark
in horror and noir stories, especially later in his career.
Just to name a few films of note here at
least US fifty six The Black Sleep co starring Lon Cheney,
Junior Bell Lagosi and John Carradine. Sixty two is The
Magic Sword. That's a fun fantasy film that was featured
on MST three K back in the day. Roger Corman's

(23:04):
Tales of Terror starring Vincent Price and Peter Lourie. Sixty
three is the Comedy of Terror is starring Price, louri
and Carloff. Then we have sixty five Voyage to the
Prehistoric Planet. This movie. There's also sixty six is The
Ghost in the Invisible Bikini and nineteen sixty seven's Hillbilly's
in a Haunted House.

Speaker 3 (23:23):
I just had to check something real quick. But yes,
The Magic Sword in sixty two was directed by bert
I Gordon.

Speaker 1 (23:30):
That's a fun one. That's fun. I would come back
for that one. It's got a fun cast. And now
it's for the kids. It's a fairy tale movie. It's great. Yes.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
Now I will say of Basil Rathbone in this movie,
I think he you know, he does what is asked
of him, but this is certainly not his best work.
It's kind of a monotonous exposition role. He makes a
lot of bureaucratic statements on behalf of the space institution.
Seems kind of underused to me.

Speaker 1 (23:56):
Yeah, he's fun at the end. It's gonna be fun
to discuss his final Yeah, all right. We also have
a character named Laura James, played by Judy Meredith, who
lived nineteen thirty six through twenty fourteen, best known for
this movie, Shirley Temple's Storybook in fifty eight and Jack
the Giant Killer in sixty two. Mostly a TV player,

(24:17):
she was also the longtime wife of Gary Nelson, who
lived thirty four through twenty twenty two, who directed nineteen
seventy nine's The Black Hole. Now.

Speaker 3 (24:26):
I was looking at Judy Meredith's twenty fourteen obituary in
The Oregonian, and this had an interesting story. It said
that at the age of fifteen, she briefly became a
professional ice skater, participating in the Ice Follies, which was
some kind of touring ice show that would sometimes feature

(24:46):
like Olympic ice skaters, but also had various performances such
as the Swiss comedy ice skating duo Frick and Frack.
Do you know Frick and frack Rup.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
I feel like maybe I've heard a usions to Frick
and Frack, but I didn't know who they were. Like,
maybe there's an old MST. Three K joke about freakin'
frag but uh boy, look at them, there they are.

Speaker 3 (25:09):
I had no idea there was any such thing as
a comedy ice skating duo.

Speaker 1 (25:14):
Which one has the mustache, which one looks like g
Gordon Lyddy.

Speaker 3 (25:17):
I don't know, but that's got to be Frack. Huh No,
maybe it's Frick. I really couldn't say, But so I
wonder I haven't seen their routine. Is it like a
three Stooges thing where they're poking each other in the
eyes and bopping on the top of the head But
they're ice skating.

Speaker 1 (25:31):
I mean, one assumes if you're in the middle of
an ice skating rink and you're trying to portray comedy
to the audience, it's got to be pretty broad, right.

Speaker 3 (25:39):
Yeah, you gotta be kind of physical.

Speaker 1 (25:41):
You got to pad that butt for this act, I'm guessing.

Speaker 3 (25:44):
But anyway, sorry, Yes, Judy Meretith So she briefly participated
in the ice Follies until she suffered a major skiing accident,
and this put an end to her ice skating career.
After this, she focused on acting in theater and was
a parent discovered by the comedian George Burns when she
was performing at the Pasadena Playhouse. This led to a

(26:06):
role on the half hour TV comedy show He Presented
with Gracie Allen, and then this in turn led to
more TV and film roles, including Queen of Blood. But
it looks like a lot of you know, the kind
of stuff, the sixty stuff Western.

Speaker 4 (26:20):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (26:20):
Now, there was a line from the obit that struck
me as interesting. It said that Judy Meredith sort of
created the opportunity for her husband, Gary Neilson to have
a directing career because she agreed to star in the
TV show Have Gun, Will Travel for Free, but only
if Gary would be allowed to direct. That's a move.

Speaker 1 (26:43):
Yeah, so without her intervention, we might not have gotten
to the point of the black Hole.

Speaker 3 (26:48):
Who knows.

Speaker 1 (26:49):
Yeah, well, we may have to do black Hole at
some point. I can't get my family to watch it
with me, so I'm gonna have to revisit it on
my own at some point, so you.

Speaker 3 (26:56):
Can make me watch it with you. Yes, well, I
look forward to that, but yeah, to come back to
I like shooting Meredith in this again kind of like
Basil Rathbone here, I feel like she's a little bit
kind of underused by the script, but she's she's got
good spunk in her scenes. And also, like Basil Rathbone's character,
it becomes fun in the last ten minutes or so,

(27:19):
and she's kind of just like arguing with John Saxon
about whether or not we should let these aliens completely
drink all her blood.

Speaker 1 (27:26):
I agree, she doesn't have as much to do, but
you see the charisma sparkling through the performance, which is nice.

Speaker 3 (27:32):
And you know what, Actually, so I've said that about
the last two actors, I'll also say that about Dennis Hopper.
He's good in this, but kind of underused. This is
the most subdued I have ever seen Dennis Hopper.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
Yeah, it's interesting because, yeah, this is not Dennis Hopper
as a villain or a wild man. I feel like
he says daddy O or something at some point we
felt like an ad lib and maybe, but aside from that,
there's not a lot of what you might expect from
Dennis Hopper. He plays this kind of kind and sensitive
astronaut character that's like really you know, trying to connect

(28:06):
with the They don't know it at the time, but
this alien vampire who they brought on board.

Speaker 3 (28:10):
They make him a writer. So there's a part where
I don't remember exactly what he says. We can explore
that later, but he he's like giving an update on
the ship's log and they're like, wow, Jack Kerouac.

Speaker 1 (28:22):
Nice work, all right. So, yeah, Dennis Hopper playing Paul
Grant here he lived in nineteen thirty six to twenty ten.
We profiled him last week on the Super Mario Brothers episodes,
so we're not going to go into all that again,
but just to put it in context, Queen of Blood
hits just the year before sixty seven's Cool Hand Luke
and The Trip, as well as of course sixty eight

(28:44):
heads sixty nine's Easy Rider, So you know, it's like
a lot of big stuff was about to happen for Hopper,
but he'd still had over a decade's TV and film
experience at this point, though mostly in smaller roles. As
we mentioned earlier, Harrington gave Hopper his first starring role
in nineteen sixty one's Night Tide and Hopper apparently always

(29:04):
spoke well of him due to that, you know, that
break that film gave him, but also his experiences on
that film. He felt like Harrington like gave him the
room he needed to, you know, to to craft his performance,
and it just overall spoke well of him as a director.

Speaker 3 (29:21):
Well that's nice, and it makes me want to see
that other movie. But Dennis Hopper, I'm just gonna say
he's on his best behavior in this one.

Speaker 1 (29:27):
Yeah, okay, But.

Speaker 3 (29:30):
So the last three actors I said, I've felt kind
of underused. All talented, but maybe they weren't given enough attention,
Maybe their roles weren't given enough oomph in the script.
I don't think I would say that about Florence Marley.
She gets some close up time.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
Oh yeah, just straight up coming at the camera with
glowing eyes and that face. She doesn't actually have any
lines in the movie, but but it's a very physical
performce yeah, Nita line, she speaks, She's doing everything psychically.
So yeah, Florence Marley playing on IMDb, its credit is
Alien Queen. In the post credits for the film, it's

(30:10):
just Florence Marley as question Mark.

Speaker 3 (30:13):
Like she doesn't given a Name and the New Mysterians.

Speaker 1 (30:17):
Yeah, she was, but she has lived nineteen nineteen through
nineteen seventy eight. Checkborn actress who made her mark in
European film in the thirties and forties, in such movies
as forty eight's Krakatt and forty seven's The Damned, before
making the move to Hollywood after the Second World War.
She appeared in such American movies as forty nine's Tokyo

(30:37):
Joe opposite Humphrey Bogart, fifty seven's under Sea Girl. I
know that was the title that got your attention, Like,
what does that consist? Is she a mermaid? Is she
like in a wetsuit?

Speaker 3 (30:47):
I don't know, Yeah, I didn't know.

Speaker 1 (30:50):
She also had. She was on a number of TV
series as well, including the original Twilight Zone. Now, like
other actors of the mid twentieth century that we've discussed,
she was impact did by the House on American Activities
Committee's Blacklist, though it turns out that in her circumstances,
it was due to a case of mistaken identity, and
even though this was eventually cleared up, the damage to

(31:11):
her career was done at that point. This was one
of the last handful of films she worked on, though
she later appeared in nineteen seventy three's Doctor Death, Seeker
of Souls, and the nineteen seventy six film The Astrologer,
which I've heard great things about. It's supposed to be
kind of like a weird rediscovered classic. She also apparently,

(31:32):
and I'm going off of various databases and so forth
for this, she apparently wrote and starred in a short
film sequel of sorts to this movie titled Space Boy
Yes with an electronic score by BBA and Louis Baron
of the Forbidden Plan of Forbidden Planet Fame. And this

(31:52):
would have been in nineteen seventy three. I see various
mentions of it. It's listed in the databases, but I
find no actual footage of it anywhere. I don't see
any indication that it was included as an extra on
anything or compiled anywhere. It's it's almost like it's it's
listed in error, or it's a lost film entirely. I'm
not sure what the story is here.

Speaker 3 (32:14):
If you have Spaceboy, send it to us upload now,
give us a link. I've got to see this because
I love Florence Marley in this movie. Of the original footage.
She makes the film.

Speaker 1 (32:26):
Absolutely all right. Another actor in this I wasn't even
gonna mention them because before we watched it, I was thinking, oh,
this is the fourth crewman on the ship. He's just
gonna die. He's not gonna be that interesting. But I
actually found the performance kind of fun. This is Robert
Boone as Anders Brockman. He's like the practical older guy
on the vessel who says things like, well, how different

(32:48):
is it drinking blood from just enjoying a nice, rare stake.
It's not that different. We shouldn't be quick to judge
that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (32:55):
This is right after the alien has drained all of
Denis Hopper's blood. Yeah, this guy gives a speech about like, well,
hold on, now, let's not judge.

Speaker 1 (33:04):
Yeah, she's just murdered his crewmate at this point. But
at any rate. This actor lived nineteen sixteen through twenty fifteen.
Dutch born actor active from the late forties through the
early eighties. And you look at this guy's credits. He
started off playing a lot of German soldiers and so
forth uncredited in war films, and I mean a lot

(33:27):
of them. It's an impressive list. Of like German soldier
uncredited and so forth, but he eventually starts getting better parts.
He shows up on a couple episodes of the classic
Twilight Zone. Same year, he's an uncredited player in Hitchcock's
Torn Curtain. Mostly TV work follows, but I read that
he served as a member of the Motion Picture Academy's

(33:47):
Foreign Language Nominating Committee. So yeah, this is his most
well known film. But he's also it's not just an
invisible role in the movie, Like, I don't know, I
kind of like this character all right. Now. It's worth
noting I didn't actually mark him in this because he
would have been a bit younger. But Forrest j Ackerman

(34:07):
plays Faraday's aid in this lived nineteen sixteen through two
thousand and eight. This is the father of sci fi fandom.
An avid collector of sci fi memorabilia, He was also
the founding editor and principal rider of the magazine Famous
Monsters of Film Land, and was a literary agent for
such authors as Ray Bradberry and l Ron Hubbard.

Speaker 3 (34:27):
I think this is the guy Basil Rathbone is talking
to when he has just gotten a radio update, saying
everybody on the ship is dead except for John Saxon
and Judy Meredith. And then he turns to this guy
and he's like, things are going very poorly on that ship.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yes, yeah, I think that's probably him. This is also
kind of interesting. Gary Kurtz was a production manager on
this picture. This is, of course, the future producer of
the first two Star Wars movies, The Dark Crystal and
returned to OZ. He lived nineteen forty through twenty eighteen.
He's notable because if you've watched any documentaries about the

(35:03):
making of the first two Star Wars movies or The
Dark Crystal, he's the guy with the whaler's beard, the
kind of Abraham Lincoln beard who talks in has a
very serious tone to his voice and always has some
interesting things to say about the production. That's him the
production manager on this movie. Wow. And then finally, the

(35:24):
music is by Ronald Stein, who of nineteen thirty through
nineteen eighty eight composer who worked on a lot of
low budget films, particularly for American international pictures. His credits
in It Conquered The World, Not of This Earth, Attack,
of the Crab Monsters, Dementia thirteen, and more, including The
Rain People. Coppola's picture prior to the Godfather. Wow, he's
writing her z own. Yeah, he's probably come up before,

(35:47):
and if we just don't remember him, I mean, the
music in this is not completely unforgettable. It has some nice,
kind of haunting little bits that have a bit of
a night gallery feel to the that I liked, but
in other places it's just more traditional. All right, Joe,

(36:12):
are you ready to jump into the plot here?

Speaker 3 (36:14):
Oh yes, oh yes. So one thing that I, as
far as I know, was not imported from the Soviet films.
I think this may be original is the beautiful art
behind the opening credits.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
Yeah, as far as I know, this is original. And
this is definitely was The section of the film starts
off strong for me, because it does feel very night
Gallery eskit. This looks like the kind of thing that
would be on one of the night Gallery paintings, and
the music also has that kind of earie vibe to it,
like firmly establishing that, yes, you're going to see a
lot of space stuff, but this movie is going to

(36:47):
at heart be spooky in one way or another.

Speaker 3 (36:50):
Yeah. So all of this stuff is attributed to an
artist named John Klein, who I wasn't otherwise familiar with,
but as the credits roll, we shuffle through kind of
it's a lightly representative but mostly abstract illustrations with a
psychedelic stained glass effect, and I thought it might be
fun to try to describe some of these images. First,

(37:11):
there is a kind of a psilocybin yule lad butterfly
with beard made out of rainbow colored tumors. Then there
is a two headed witch king of Agmar, but he
is chained in the Jacob Marley fashion with sixteen dimensional
Mardi Gras beads, and in the background there are some
mountains and twin moons. After this, there is a giant

(37:32):
pink root vegetable nostril with a wing that has bones
for feathers. Then there is a scene of multicolored gravel
eggs hatching into spoon plants at the base of a
mountain made out of dog paws. This is when it
says Dennis Hopper, by the way. After that it's blood
volcano leaking more gravel eggs and mandl brought fissures into

(37:53):
the air, while there are these white pale vines that
reach up toward the black sun, more wings, more blood planets.
There's one where there's sort of the top right corner
of the screen kind of looks like the Punisher logo
version of a bunny rabbit, but with terminator eyes, and
then there's a bunch of circuit board components under the

(38:14):
rabbit's jaw. Backgrounds for the title of the movie, I
would describe as a DMT furbie with a city skyline
inside its hairdoo. Maybe I'll stop there. There is more,
but in general I think this is all good stuff.
Puts one in an alien mood, goes well with theorem,
and music suggests that we may be in for sights
beyond our comprehension. And as much as I love Florence Marley,

(38:36):
I don't think the movie will be quite as psychedelic
as the credits imply. But after the credits we get
a starfield eerie string's playing and the narrator says, what
did we say it was going to be? The year
nineteen ninety? It says the problem of traveling to the
Moon has been solved for many years. Note that this
movie was in sixty six. The first human moon landing

(38:58):
was in sixty nine. You know this comes out at
a time when humans had not yet walked on the Moon.
Narrator says, space stations have been built there, and authorized
personnel come and go as they wish.

Speaker 1 (39:10):
Of slight Note here two thousand and one, a space
odyssey wouldn't come out for another couple of years, So
I don't know's I think all science fiction depicting travel
within our own Solar system, like near future space travel
and our Solar system, you almost have to judge it
in terms of before two thousand and one or post
two thousand and one.

Speaker 3 (39:29):
Yeah, I agree. But so in these shots, we of
course see the Moon, we see tiny ships zooming past,
and a shot of the surface with rockets posed upright
in this kind of rocky, shadowy landscape, and the narrator
goes on it says, but the Moon is a dead world,
and the great question about space still remains. Does life
exist on another planet? To seek an answer to this question,

(39:52):
the major powers of the world have been preparing at
the International Institute of Space Technology to explore the planets
Venus and Mars. And here we cut to shots of
a kind of hip institutional campus with a bit of
modern architecture flair. People are walking along in the sidewalks
and Rob, did you notice that they're all stepping in

(40:13):
sync with each other. It kind of makes a point
of showing this, and I wondered, why.

Speaker 1 (40:18):
Oh yeah, I don't know. It's just everyone's on the
same page when it comes to space technology. I guess.

Speaker 3 (40:23):
Yeah. Well, anyway, we cut inside, and why here's John Saxon.
Look at his posture, it's really good. He enters a
door labeled Astro Communications, which is in a very strange font.
You remember the font on the door label. It's sort
of the font one would find on the record sleeve
of the band.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
Yes, oh yeah, yeah, it was a little weird, but
it's the future. It's ninety nine.

Speaker 3 (40:46):
So John Saxon, I think his character's name is Alan Brenner,
is here to pick up a lady to go to lunch.
And this is Judy Meredith, playing an astronaut and communication
specialist named Laura James. She's like, I don't know about
I'm kind of busy. I'm picking up a radio broadcast
from another planet unlike anything we've ever heard before. It

(41:06):
may be our first confirmation of intelligent life anywhere else
in the universe. But yeah, okay, let's go to lunch.
She's just like Bill Will you record this alien broadcast
for me. I'll check it out later.

Speaker 1 (41:17):
I mean a tinwheel day at a cafeteria, so you
gotta go. But no, it's what do they actually say
they're eating it? I mean it looks disgusting. It looks
like a kind of burned waffle. But before we see
them at lunch, so they leave, and we're seeing like
the equipment in the Earth based communications lab, and we

(41:37):
hear the droning of the signal from the other planet,
and the droning of the signal becomes louder, and we
cut into space and we zoom toward the surface of
a pale green planet, and then we see the surface.

Speaker 3 (41:49):
We're on it. There are crashing waves in the foreground
against a horizon with giant spires of rock that are
taller than the top of a looming moon. And then
and then we see a giant ball of wires that's
maybe the thing that is sending out the signal. And
inside that ball of wires, I guess it's a building.

(42:09):
We see what must be aliens. There are humanoid bodies
standing in the shadows. It's very dark inside, and they're
manipulating machinery to guide a beam of turquoise light as
it sweeps across space, like are they beaming a signal
toward us? We see hands reaching out for a series
of darkened orbs topped by prismatic triangles, and then cut

(42:30):
to John Saxon and Laura having lunch.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
Yeah, this, this whole segment, of course, on the alien
Planet is all footage from the Soviet productions that are
sampled here, and it was I don't know, I was
distracted just thinking about like did we need to see
any of this? Like the causation of filmmaking is kind
of messed up here, because like would you create this

(42:55):
footage for use in the film? You know, does it
actually serve an important purpose in the narrative or is
it really what we have here where it's just like,
well we have it. We should show what this other
planet is, even though we're never actually going to visit it,
but we should just show it to them because we
have minutes worth of footage.

Speaker 3 (43:14):
I agree, it is a tough question, like it removes
any sense of mystery here and it doesn't really add
anything narratively to the film, But particularly in one segment
coming up in a few minutes, I think it does
actually have a very good effect at achieving a mood.
But we'll get to that. So first we're going to
meet a few Earthling characters again. Alan and Laura are

(43:35):
having lunch. Alan is complaining that the astronaut food tastes
really bad. They're calling it exo biologic food, and he
likes banana splits on Earth better. And then these two
guys named Tony and Paul come to sit down with them.
All the dudes, by the way, are dressed the same
khaki pants, yellow shirt, slightly puffy jacket with a pattern
that looks like a mattress cover. And then we have

(43:58):
Dennis Hopper here. He sits down on the left. His
name is Paul. We learned from conversation that John Saxon
is scheduled to travel to Mars. And then we get
Dennis Hopper's first line, which is what's the latest scuttle?
But there Tony baby.

Speaker 1 (44:13):
Yeah, yeah, Dennis Hopper, Lads.

Speaker 3 (44:16):
And chum, I think this is the line where you
said he may have been ad libbing. I would agree.

Speaker 1 (44:21):
Yeah, what were.

Speaker 3 (44:22):
We saying beforehand? It's imagining him doing the voice and
the trailer saying like space man, it's a real bad trip.

Speaker 1 (44:32):
Yeah, that would have been That would have been a
great tagline, especially if this movie had been made just
like two years later.

Speaker 3 (44:39):
Yeah, but we should clarify nothing about Dennis Hopper's look
or performance in this movie is shaggy, dangerous hippie. Instead,
he comes off very He's very clean cut and conventionally handsome.

Speaker 1 (44:54):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, And now I should also a couple
other things you missed. The uniforms I do have to
drive home. These are not the uniforms in this film
are not on the same level at all with Planet
of the Vampires. I mean, the colors match, everything has
a certain uniformity to it, but high fashion is not
in play. I also feel like this lunch scene that

(45:16):
everyone was very animated for this sequence. I don't know
if they just had a lot of fun setting around,
if there's a lot of cutting up in between takes,
but everyone seemed really happy to be on set for
this one.

Speaker 3 (45:27):
I agree, Yeah, spirits are high. But their lunch is
interrupted by an announcement on the loud speaker. It's calling
everybody to gather in Area one for an important announcement.
The dudes get up and they say that means us,
but the announcement literally says all personnels. I don't know
why they say that. But on the way, John Saxon
he's asking Laura. He's like, hey, have you ever imagined

(45:48):
you'd be getting married on a rocket ship to Mars?
So apparently they're I guess they're engaged.

Speaker 1 (45:54):
Zero G wedding though sounds it sounds exciting.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
Oh, that'd be very cool. Yes, So the meeting place
is outdoors and the background here is a gigantic sculpture.
It's bigger than the Statue of Liberty. It's huge, and
it's a goddess leaping into the air with arms outstretched,
and there's a ringed planet at her feet. Kind of
reminds me of the winged Victory of Samothrace. But here

(46:16):
we get an announcement from Basil Rathbone. He's playing Doctor Faraday,
kind of the big boss at this place, and he says,
my friends and fellow workers in the Great Adventure of Space,
I have the most important news to announce since our
first successful landing on the Moon twenty years ago. As
many of you know, for several weeks now, we've been
receiving organized signals from a far galaxy. This morning our

(46:37):
code experts finally deciphered the message these signals contained. It
is a most extraordinary document. It's very long. And then
he explains he's not going to read the whole thing,
but that it means the Aliens dispatched a spaceship containing
an ambassador who will come to Earth and live with
us here, since our atmosphere will support their form of life.

(46:57):
Faraday says that the entire world will await the arrival
of the alien ambassador with the keenest anticipation, and everybody applauds.
But as the applause dies out, we fade back to
visions of the other world. So we see again the
waves crashing on knights Plutonian shore, and we see the

(47:18):
towers of rock and the beings moving about in the
shadows of their weird castles filled with unrecognizable technology. There
are pipes and hoses and big olds, spheres that themselves
seem to contain stars. And there's no dialogue and no music,
just the shrill droning of the radio signal that's beaming

(47:39):
out to Earth. And I actually think that these scenes
of the alien planet, especially the way that they are
inner cut with the scenes of brightly lit noisy gatherings
and social activity on Earth are extremely effective. It's very
moody and disconcerting the way it goes from like the
crowd at the institute to the planet and that nobody's

(48:02):
saying anything. They're just moving around in the shadows, manipulating
technology that we can't even understand.

Speaker 1 (48:09):
Yeah, I think you're right. It visually drives home this
feeling that's later brought up in dialogue to some extent,
like this idea of like we really don't know what
these other beings consist of, like not only like their
their their biology, but also their society, Like what what
is it they value? What do they want? And what
does it mean that they're sending an ambassador to us?

Speaker 3 (48:31):
Yeah, everything we see of them as silent, methodical, wordless,
almost emotionless, just movements in the dark. So, despite the
limitations imposed by relying so much on pre existing footage
to construct this film, I think it is used to
great effect in some sequences, and this is one of them.
This part I thought was actually excellent.

Speaker 1 (48:51):
Agreed, Agreed.

Speaker 3 (48:52):
But then on the then we get some more kind
of like launch footage, and that stuff is less interesting.
But on the alien planet, we see this giant's vehicle
ship rise up out of an underground bay and the
crew rides a tram up to board it. We only
see the crew members. We see the vaguely humanoid shapes,
but only at the distance, so you never like get
a close up. And in the distance they're kind of

(49:14):
waving goodbye to a crowd again silently. There's no local sound,
just the droning signal, and then they blast off into space.

Speaker 1 (49:22):
Yeah, it's a cool looking ship, the circuit, the spherical
ship with the kind of halo around it. This is
from nineteen sixty three's Mitch to navs Stretch. Who so
it looks good, but yeah, it's it's made by other hands.

Speaker 3 (49:38):
Then back on Earth, we see a giant television ball
appearing in the sky over the Institute with a dude
delivering the news. He's like wearing a suit and tie.
He's explaining how scientists have detected a ship approaching Earth
bringing aliens from quote a distant galaxy. I don't know. Okay,
As I've said before, I can always suspend disp and

(50:00):
this is fine. But note to sci fi writers, if
you care about being realistic at all, the space between
galaxies is immense. I think if if you want to
have aliens, they should be from another star in our galaxy,
now from another galaxy.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
Yeah, unless you're dealing with a far future interstellar empire
sort of scenario, then you can maybe get into these
distant galaxy ideas. But even then, like the galaxy is
big enough, there's still room for discoveries and surprises and
so forth.

Speaker 3 (50:28):
Yes. Also, the guy in the TV ball his lips
are not matching the words he's saying, which makes me
think this is also part of the Soviet film package. Yeah,
but he says, astronomers have determined that an unknown object
has passed the orbit of the Moon and is rapidly
approaching Earth. It is not the ship itself, but a
mechanical device sent ahead for reasons unknown. And then we

(50:49):
see a metal ball bobbing in the waves, so scientists
investigate this. We see Basil Rathbone and Judy Meredith like
watching a video. It seems that maybe what was sent
to Earth was like a video tape from the security
cameras on the alien ship, and so what happens on
the video they watch, Well, in the alien ship, there

(51:11):
is the worrying of a great machine sort of tuning up,
and we see two aliens again, silent in the shadows.
One of them produces, in a an almost ritualistic fashion,
a helmet and then places it on the other one's head,
and then the ship accelerates toward a red planet. And
then Basil Rathbone looks away from the screen and he says, remarkable,

(51:33):
crash landing on Mars, and this is their sos. We're
obviously in touch with beings that have a very advanced technology.
So there's a big meeting in a kind of auditorium.
This is the one with the giant statue holding Sputnik
in his hand like oric skull, and Basil Rathbone says, basically,
the aliens need our help. They have crash landed on Mars.

(51:53):
They are stranded there. We are obliged to go help
them out.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
It's a pretty good setup. Actually, yeah, more in retrospect
than I think in my actual experience of watching this
portion of the film. I feel like there's a there's
a bit of padding getting to this point, but once
we get there, it's like, Okay, we've got a mission here.
This sounds good. It was going to be like we
meet the Space Ambassador, but the Ambassador's ship is crashed
or something, and we got to go check it out.

Speaker 3 (52:17):
Yeah, there is a lot more padding to come, but
in a way it like the premise makes sense. So
they say, there's the the spaceship Oceano, which was originally
planned to go to Mars on an exploratory mission. Rathbone's like, okay,
we're gonna move forward the schedule. We're going to turn
this into a rescue operation. And the time is now,
and obviously John Saxon must be thinking, I was not

(52:40):
ready to eat all of this exobiologic food. I want
my Earth meat loaf, I want my Earth waffles. But
they blast off, so the rescue mission is on the way.
There's a bunch of footage here of rockets, you know,
zooming around and landing and being sent on the Moon.
Once we actually see the surface of the Moon, the
footage is cooler again because I love the little model

(53:01):
set they have this from the original films. And once
they're on the Moon, Laura talks to Basil Rathbone. She says,
you know, I was hoping Alan would be on my flight,
but he's like, nope, no, can't do We put you
on different flights. So Laura is going to be on
the first mission Oceano one that is going now Alan's
going to be on Oceano two, which goes later. And

(53:23):
so there's a sad conversation about how they won't be
traveling together and they embrace and then yeah, I guess
they leave. So there's a launch and the crew of
the first ship is Laura and then Paul. That's Dennis Hopper,
and then Anders who is the commander, and that does.

Speaker 1 (53:39):
Rhyme Commander Andrews reporting for duty.

Speaker 3 (53:42):
I think it's Commander Alexander Anders. So they have some
kind of relaxed cutting up time on the ship. We
talked about the scene where Dennis Hoppers like narrating his
space stuff and then Laura is saying, Wow, you know,
your logs of this journey are so interesting. Maybe when
you get back to Earth you can have them published.
You'll be that famous writer slash astronaut fella. But I

(54:05):
think the scene could have used some punch up in
the dialoguecause I wrote down exactly what Dennis Hopper says
that impresses them so much. This is it, he says,
Mars is giving off a red coloring, and it is
becoming more vivid as we approach. It suggests that there
is a really deep oxidation of the planet's major substance.

Speaker 1 (54:25):
Yeah, it's not great. Yeah, and Hopper's characters has some
better lines coming up, but this is not one of them.

Speaker 3 (54:34):
Yeah, it sounds more like they're impressed at his scientific vocabulary.
They're like, wow, he knows the word oxidation. Folks, that's
not what makes good writing. But come on, Okay, so
we're just well accepted to move on. Okay, except the
premise Dennis Hopper's character has a way with words. But
on the way to Mars, they get hit by a

(54:55):
quote sunburst, which I think is supposed to be like
a solar flare or something.

Speaker 4 (55:00):
You know.

Speaker 3 (55:01):
There is a burst of activity off the surface of
the Sun and their ship is damaged and they I
don't know if this really changes anything. It's damaged. But
then they get to Mars. They enter the orbit of Mars. Oh,
they do have Dennis Hopper take quote oxygenator tablets, and
when he takes them, he's like, oh, there's a symphony
playing in my skull and it's not Brahms. The ship lands,

(55:32):
there are some beautiful and eerie shots of the rocky
red landscape, and Anders and Paul put on their spacesuits
and they go out to explore the crash landed alien ship. Now,
at this point there is a powerful resemblance to the
later sequence in Alien of exploring the stranded ship on
LV four twenty six, And I think I would not

(55:53):
be at all the first person to notice this. People
have pointed out that in some ways aspects of alien
might have come from Planet of the Vampires, but aspects
of alien may also have come from this.

Speaker 1 (56:04):
Right, Yeah, I think I saw that that. Harrington also
commented on it at one point. I mean not in
a mean way or a spiteful way or anything, but
I mean it's part of the legacy of sci fi horror.
The threads that connect these films are stronger than in
other subgenres, I think, yes.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
And there's good sound design in the scene, like the
scene kind of warbles and hums while Anders explores the
ship and Dennis Hopper looks on from outside. Now, first
of all, Anders finds a dead humanoid alien in the
pilot's chair, and then we cut to a newspaper headline
which was jarring to me. I thought it was funny.
It's like, single dead astronaut found on spacecraft, mystery deepens.

Speaker 1 (56:48):
Well, you want to read the rest of the story, right,
The headline served its purpose.

Speaker 3 (56:52):
Yes, if a newspaper said that, I would want to
read it, assuming it was not like the weekly World News.
But they figure out what's going on, Basil Rathbone did
is that the other alien astronauts must have boarded a
quote rescue rocket, and so they ejected from this ship
before it crashed and killed the one alien astronaut that

(57:12):
remained on board. So Alan, that's John Sackson and Tony,
remember Tony from the meal earlier. They make a case,
let's go on a supplemental mission to find the rescue
rocket and they're going to land on the Martian moon Phobos.
Bezil says, you are either fools or very brave men,
but he in the end approves and they go. So
they arrive in orbit, they make contact with Dennis Hopper

(57:34):
on the radio, and there's a lot of Oh, Alan
wants to talk to Laura. Oh, she can't talk right now.
Oh now she can talk. Okay, he's calling. So again
there's a little bit of patting in this.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
But around this part of the film, we're getting to
the point where the movie really begins. There's about an
hour in Yes, I feel like everything says coming together
and it becomes becomes very watchable and and pretty good
in places.

Speaker 3 (58:01):
I agree. So they're on the moon Phobos, and they
were supposed to be just using this moon as like
a sort of a launching pad to get to the planet.
But out of the window of their ship, Alan and
Tony see something in the distance and it is the
rescue ship, the other ship from the alien ship. So
they go to investigate. Inside, they see a silhouette illuminated

(58:23):
in the light from a door. It's a humanoid figure,
but then she collapses, so they carry her back to
their ship and it's a woman. She's dressed in a
red jumpsuit. She has green skin, and she's wearing a
helmet that looks kind of like a cathedral cupola or
kind of like a Zultar machine.

Speaker 1 (58:40):
Also, yeah, it's a well designed spacesuit, like it feel
it's obviously a space suit, but it feels a little
bit alien. It feels it has a good visual flare
to it.

Speaker 3 (58:52):
So there is a moment where they have to decide
what to do because now it's the two of them
and this and this alien rescuee and their ship can
only carry two people. They need to launch and go
meet the other earthship, but they can only go with
two people, so they flip a coin to determine who
goes with the alien astronaut and who stays behind. John

(59:14):
Saxon says, all I have is paper moon money, and
the movie keeps you in suspense for a while, But
who's bringing the astronaut to the other ship. We see
them walking through a dust storm on the surface of Mars,
hunting down the main ship's beacon, and eventually they collapse,
but finally they are found. Dennis Hopper brings the alien

(59:35):
inside and they look at her and Laura remarks, Wow,
she seems so human yet not human at all, and
Paul says, I know, it's uncanny. It's like what would
have happened to us if we'd been in another atmosphere.
And then suddenly Laura remembers to ask, wait, Paul, who
brought her, but there's no time to answer. In walks
John Saxon, her space fiance. He was the one who came,

(59:57):
so he's okay now. There's a whole thing. This kind
of a side story about confirming that Oceano two, the
other ship, will be able to come back to Mars
to rescue Tony, the guy who is left behind on Phobos.
So actually Tony really gets the better deal here considering
what happens on the main ship. So let's see. Yeah,
now it's Alan, Laura, Paul Anders and the Alien Lady

(01:00:21):
and they're all on the ship together and they're gonna
blast off. Now what comes next is I would argue
the best scene in the film. It's the scene where
the Alien Ambassador wakes up. She wakes up in the chair,
and then she makes eye contact with the crew members
one at a time, starting with Dennis Hopper. She looks
at him and her face goes through these subtle changes,

(01:00:43):
and she smiles, and she has these little flares of
expression in her eyes and this gradually inflating grin as
she looks from astronaut to astronaut, Except she doesn't smile
when she sees Laura. She looks at Laura and then
suddenly exhales kind of sharply, leaving a blast of fog
on the inside of the glass of her helmet, and Ooh,

(01:01:07):
this scene was chilling and very interesting, and Florence Marley
is wonderful with the little tiny expressions.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
Yeah. Absolutely, Like this is the point in the film where, yeah,
we're really off to the races here. We have a
strong cast, we have a limited and understandable set. We
know where we are and what the immediate stakes are. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:28):
Here it kind of turns into a different movie. Where
before it was like all about blasting off and landing
and blasting off and discussing what to do and then
blasting off and blasting off again. Now it's basically a
bottle episode. It's just some character stuck in a ship
with something that is acting a little strange.

Speaker 1 (01:01:46):
Yeah. Yeah, at this point it could be like a
really interesting episode of the old Twilight Zone or Outer
Limits or something.

Speaker 3 (01:01:53):
So first they put Dennis Hopper in charge of taking
care of the alien lady, and he shows her how
to water through a straw. She has some water through
the straw, but she is not interested in food. Like
she turns her face away from the exobiologics and anders
wonders if perhaps she is used to some sort of
liquid nourishment the whole time. By the way she is

(01:02:16):
just making eyes at the earth dudes. And oh and
also we see that when her helmet is off, she
has a sort of onion shaped troll doll hairdoo.

Speaker 1 (01:02:26):
I couldn't help but wonder if this is a nod
to Bride of Frankenstein. You know, certainly given Harrington's appreciation
for the work of James Whale, that she has tall hair.

Speaker 3 (01:02:39):
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah I didn't put that together.
But so also well, that's another performance that is wordless
but relies on powerful facial expressions. Elsa Lanchester as the
Bride of Frankenstein. But so after this, they try to
take a blood sample. Anders also wants to do this
to run some tests, but she will not allow it.

(01:03:00):
She smacks the needle out of the dude's hand, and
then we got to Later that night, Dennis Hopper is
making some notes in his audio log and he says
he thinks he's noticed something about the alien that the
others haven't yet. He says she has, but then he
trails off and he doesn't finish the sentence. And I
want to know what was Dennis Hopper going to say?

Speaker 1 (01:03:21):
I know this, I thought this was one of my
favorite acting moments in the entire movie. It was just
just the fact that he trails off and he doesn't
finish the thought, like it's just it works so perfectly
for this character and for what's about to come.

Speaker 3 (01:03:35):
Now, He's sitting there by himself while everybody else is asleep,
and he notices an open doorway and he goes to investigate,
and the alien ambassador is not in her seat anymore,
so he goes wandering around alone looking for her. This
kind of reminded me of the scene an Alien where
like Brett is looking for the cat and Dennis Hopper

(01:03:57):
stumbles into the engine room and there suddenly she appears.
I wasn't sure about this. I think, is she in
her alien way supposed to be nude? Like you see
her back and it is green. She's not wearing her
red jumpsuit, but maybe she was wearing Maybe she had
like green clothes on under that, and that's what it's
supposed to be. She's obviously actually wearing something in the scene,

(01:04:19):
but it's the same color as her skin.

Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
Yeah, I wasn't sure. On there's another scene where it
makes it seem like maybe the back of her costume
is more exposed in the front. I'm not sure on that.

Speaker 3 (01:04:30):
Well, anyway, there she is. Something has changed about her.
Now she has lights glowing in her eyes, and she
seems to hypnotize Dennis Hopper, and she walks up to him.
She lays a hand on his chest, and her skin
appears to have a shiny, almost polymerized texture, and she
leans in and we see only from like the perspective,

(01:04:51):
like from behind her, and it's like, is she kissing him?
Or is she biting his neck? Next morning, people wake up.
They discover Paul dead. Dennis Hopper has left the building.

Speaker 1 (01:05:02):
What a shame? What is shame? Is such a nice character?

Speaker 3 (01:05:05):
Yes, So his wrist has a bloody, ragged wound, and
he appears to have been drained of blood. And they
find the alien ambassador sleeping with blood dripping out of
the sides of her mouth. So there's no mystery about
what happened. It's just like, oh, okay, here she is.
She drank all his blood. Anders says, do you see
how heavy she's breathing. She has gorged herself on blood

(01:05:27):
and now she's digesting like a boa constrictor that swallowed
a whole animal. It's fascinating and then John Sackson goes fascinating,
it's horrible. We ought to destroy her right now and.

Speaker 1 (01:05:39):
Come on ou and come on out. And he's just
admiring her purity. That's all that's going on here.

Speaker 3 (01:05:44):
Yeah, it's like Ian Holme. Yeah, so it's a conflict.
Anders thinks, you know, she's much too precious to destroy.
In fact, he does go somewhere interesting. He says, she's
not even necessarily aware that she's done anything wrong. To
like an argument about whether or not they because they
can't converse with her, that she never talks. So they

(01:06:07):
argue about whether they should assume that the alien knows
it has done something wrong by killing a human or not.
I think that's a great question for a sci fi story.
I can't recall if I've ever heard that being discussed before,
Like should we hold the alien morally accountable?

Speaker 1 (01:06:27):
Yeah, this is a movie where the mission statement does
not call for a lot of philosophical pondering. And yet
there's just a little it dips its toes in a
little bit right here, and it's nice.

Speaker 3 (01:06:38):
Andrews makes some kind of interesting arguments. He says, you know,
maybe this alien comes from a planet where it feeds
on the blood of other organisms, and it doesn't think
there's anything wrong with that, much the same way that
we eat the flesh of other organisms. So is her
Might she understand having drank Dennis Hopper's blood the same

(01:07:00):
way we would understand eating a steak? And then Alan,
so that's an interesting point, and Alan responds by saying,
but we don't feed on blood. I think the philosophical
dispute is going a bit over John Saxon's head, like
he doesn't understand that it's not literally what the substance
is that matters.

Speaker 1 (01:07:20):
Yeah, everyone's pissed, but everyone seems to agree thus far.
They need to check back in with headquarters and not
do anything drastic.

Speaker 3 (01:07:28):
Right, So they come up with a workaround. Anders says, Okay,
we're going to feed her from our medical supply of
blood plasma, and we keep her drinking that so that
she doesn't drink the blood from our bodies and that
works for a while.

Speaker 1 (01:07:40):
Yeah. Yeah, the basic understanding it is like she's not hungry,
she's not a threat.

Speaker 3 (01:07:43):
They make a report to Basil Rathbone about the blood
drinking and it shows Basil Rathbone back at Mission control
and he just like puts his head in his hands,
which made me laugh. Then I think he walks over
to the wall and he says he looks at a
map of the stars, and he says, one should not
be shocked by anything we find out there. And I'm like, man,
you could imagine so much weirder forms of life than

(01:08:06):
something that drinks blood. That's like something that a lot
of Earth life does.

Speaker 1 (01:08:11):
Yeah, yeah, it shouldn't be really that shocking, But I
don't know. I do kind of like it as this
little flourish that you know, puts you in the space
of this you know, really kind of like an old
fashioned pulpse sci fi where like the rest of the
Solar System is wild. Baby, you don't know what's out
there right, could be teeming with all sorts of weird
life life forms.

Speaker 3 (01:08:32):
You can't possibly imagine. This one drinks blood, this next
one has three eyes. So they hold a funeral for
Dennis Hopper. They blast his body out the air lock.
The funeral includes readings from the Bible, and there is
a discussion between John Saxon and Anders. John Saxon says,
should we tie her up? Andrew says no, no, we'll

(01:08:54):
be safe as long as we never all fall asleep
at the same time. And John Saxon's like, well, but
there there's no sign of struggle, and Andre says, well,
she must have gotten to him in his sleep.

Speaker 1 (01:09:05):
Yeah. They bring up the vampire bad as an.

Speaker 3 (01:09:08):
Example, right, They say, yeah, okay, so vampire back can
feed on animals without them necessarily detecting. Maybe she has
something in her saliva that dulls the pain of the bite,
and thus you don't know when you get bitten. So
they feed her a bunch of blood plasma. She drinks
it through a straw until ooh, they run out of
blood plasma. That's a problem. So next thing, there is

(01:09:29):
a very creepy scene. Again I thought this one was
really effective. Anders is alone in the control room, awake
while everybody else is asleep, and he clearly is tired.
But he starts looking at the door of the room
and was that a silhouette there? Although it's not there anymore. Oh,
but there it is again, and it's back lit, but
it's like it's a female silhouette and she's approaching. The

(01:09:53):
eyes are glowing. He drops his ray gun and then
there's another blood feast.

Speaker 1 (01:09:59):
Yeah, it's a good seat, quin say, a nice build
up of tension, and you know, and especially I thought
it worked well because you know that this guy is
toast like, he's not John Saxon's, he's not Alan, he's
not Laura. He's going to get killed by the space
vampire at some point, and yet it still feels it's
still a tense sequence when it occurs.

Speaker 3 (01:10:20):
Agree, I really like that, like is he seeing her
or is he not? A thing that makes it tense.
So now only Alan and Laura are left, and so
they tie up the alien while she is asleep and digesting.
They conclude that she must work by some kind of
deadly hypnosis. And here is the scene I mentioned earlier
where they call Basil Rathbone to be like, hey, everybody's dead,

(01:10:43):
and he turns to the guy next to him and
says things are going very badly on that ship, very badly.

Speaker 1 (01:10:48):
Indeed, they are not having a good day up there.

Speaker 3 (01:10:51):
So the alien lady wakes up, discovering she is restrained.
They've tied her up, and her eyes light up and
she somehow turns her hot enough to burn through the ropes.

Speaker 1 (01:11:02):
That was cool, yeah, yeah, or yeah, some sort of
like laser vision or her skin's heating up. But yeah,
she burns through the bonds and now she's free to
move around the ship and finds more of that sweet
human blood.

Speaker 3 (01:11:14):
That's right, but I think it's implied that she is
only interested in man blood because we see her shadow
pass over the body of sleeping Laura, but she doesn't
go for it. She just walks right past. And then
Laura wakes up and she looks around and the room
is very still, and she doesn't hear anything, so she
gets up, she walks around, and then she suddenly catches

(01:11:38):
the alien in the act of drinking John Saxon's blood.
I guess he got hypnotized off screen. There's a brief
fight and Laura injures the alien. She like scratches her
in the fight, and the alien begins bleeding green fluid,
and she screams and runs away. John Saxon wakes up,
he's all right, And then they go to look for
the alien and she has collapsed on her bed and

(01:12:00):
bled to death from only a tiny scratch. John Sackson
concludes that she suffered from hemophilia. He says perhaps she
was some sort of royalty, a queen maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:12:10):
And this is.

Speaker 3 (01:12:11):
Referring to royal hemophilia on Earth that I think was
a heritable trait that in many ways was related to
I think Queen Victoria and her husband.

Speaker 1 (01:12:22):
Yeah. I mean there's also some examples in the you know,
the Russian royal family as well, if memory serves.

Speaker 3 (01:12:30):
They may have been related to Queen Victoria somehow.

Speaker 1 (01:12:32):
I think.

Speaker 3 (01:12:33):
I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 (01:12:34):
I think you're right.

Speaker 3 (01:12:35):
I just looked it up. I think Czar Nicholas's wife
Alexandra was Queen Victoria's granddaughter. There's a lot of oh,
there you go. They're all, you know, mixing and match
in European royalty.

Speaker 1 (01:12:48):
At any rate, the end result is that our Queen
of Blood here is a glass cannon. She the slightest
little scratch is enough to cause her to bleed to death.
And there she is on the ship seemingly like that
was kind of a freezing. Now we're done with the
alien menace has been defeated.

Speaker 3 (01:13:06):
Right, so they land back on Earth and John Saxon
and Laura are waiting, I guess, to be retrieved from
the capsule they're in and whoops, oh, we just discovered
that the alien here left a bunch of eggs in
a cabinet, pulsing slime covered eggs, very cool looking, and
John Saxon concludes she was a queen, a queen bee.

(01:13:28):
She came here to deposit all of her eggs so
they could hatch and take over Earth. And John Saxon
wants to destroy the eggs. Laura says, we can't do that.
Scientists will need to study them. She's arguing for their preservation.
And then when Basil Rathbone runs in the door with
all of the science dudes, John Saxon takes him aside
and it is like, hey, listen, I've got something secret

(01:13:50):
to tell you. We've got alien eggs all over the ship.
We've got to destroy them before people find out about them.
And Basil Rathbone is like, oh my dear boy, no,
we must study them, not destroy them.

Speaker 1 (01:14:01):
Yeah. He suddenly has just all the vim and vigor
in the world just just scampering unto the space ship
here to check out those alien eggs. Nobody's wearing a
contamination suit or anything like, let's just go get them,
get big handfuls of these things.

Speaker 3 (01:14:15):
He really perks up here at the end with the
eggs I have to say that the eggs.

Speaker 1 (01:14:19):
When we first see the eggs, I thought they looked hokey.
They looked like they looked like little pulsating red balloons.
But then eventually we do get a close up off
them as they're being taken off the ship on a tray,
and in the close up they do look really cool.
They look gross and pulsating and it looks like there's
something inside them, you know, implied there's some sort of

(01:14:40):
form there that is developing. So ultimately, great job. In
these eggs.

Speaker 3 (01:14:46):
They are in a tray, they're on like a quarter
sheet baking pan, like there's gonna be some cookies or something.

Speaker 1 (01:14:52):
Yeah, And that's pretty much the close of the film,
that close up on the eggs, the end ominous music,
because you know, ultimately this is I mean, it's ultimately
a darker ending than Alien because oh, you've brought them back,
and now who knows what's going to occur.

Speaker 3 (01:15:09):
Well, I think we do get Alan and Laura. They're like, oh,
we're back on Earth. I love you, you know, it's
we can feel the sunshine on our faces again.

Speaker 1 (01:15:17):
I think they say, well, that is true. They do
like having the sunshine back. But I don't know how
long they're going to get to enjoy it. I don't
know how long it takes these eggs to develop into
whatever they're going to grow into.

Speaker 3 (01:15:27):
I'd say I give earth like twenty to thirty years. Yeah,
or they're just the blood bags are all drained.

Speaker 1 (01:15:35):
So there you have it, Queen of Blood. Like I say,
I feel like the last thirty minutes or so of
the picture is pretty solid and pretty fun. I'm not
sure I would have gotten to those last thirty minutes
had I not been on a mission to watch this,
you know, And I guess you have to think about
the original context of the release, right, I mean, this

(01:15:55):
was something that was going to be shown theatrically, the
shown is part of a double feature, so you know,
it's it's it's not something we had to worry about
keeping somebody on the same TV channel or keeping them
you know, watching a film on a streaming service or
anything like that. So it's a different a different mission
statement for this film, for sure.

Speaker 4 (01:16:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:16:14):
I wonder if this was mostly destined for drive in
theaters or not.

Speaker 1 (01:16:18):
I imagine, so, yeah, very much a double I forget
what the film it was released with as a double feature,
but it was part of the double feature. I also wondered, like,
to what extent did they study, like how people watch
these films of those double features? Did they did they
think about things like when will the teenagers be making out?
And yeah, and what should be going on in the

(01:16:38):
screen at that time. I've never read anything on that.

Speaker 3 (01:16:41):
Yeah, it wasn't a calculated decision to take an hour
to get to Florence Marley.

Speaker 1 (01:16:46):
Yeah, but at any rate, I will, you know, coming
back to Curtis Harrington, you know, I feel like he
did given the weird limitations of this film, you know,
having to use all of this footage from from from
so at cinema and so forth, obviously not having a
huge budget, I feel like like the end results work

(01:17:07):
amazingly well given those constraints. I feel like the cast
does a great job given what they're they're given to
work with. So it is kind of an interesting exercise
in in overachieving for for you know, a B picture
like this. Totally agree.

Speaker 3 (01:17:23):
Yes, And despite the fact that it is overused and
there's too much padding, I will emphasize yet again, most
of the Russian footage does look pretty beautiful. I like
the aesthetic.

Speaker 1 (01:17:35):
Yeah, it would be interesting to come back and what
maybe I don't know if we would watch one of these,
but they are a number of these Soviet sci fi
films that I would be interesting to look at more.
I think everyone called Planet a burr that that may
have been utilized in Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet. I
think I've seen that one in full. There's a there's

(01:17:57):
like a whole box set of these. I think they
have a video here in Atlanta, and I've rented one
or two of them in the past, but I don't
recall them much. I think I just kind of had
them on in the background. Well, let's rind them again. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
all right, we'll go ahead and close it out there.
But hey, we'd love to hear from everyone out there
if you have thoughts on Queen of Blood, on space,
vampire films, and media in general. Yeah, right in, let's

(01:18:22):
talk about it. We have our listener Mail episodes on
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aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird
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(01:18:43):
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peek ahead to what's coming up.

Speaker 3 (01:18:54):
Here's thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
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