Killer B's on DVD: Blood Flood

Of all the movies I've covered for Killer B's on DVD, this is the first one that had me muttering "oh boy, oh boy, oh boy" when it arrived in the mail. Blood Flood is a double-sided triple feature of grindhouse era horror flicks from Retromedia and Image Entertainment. The disk is hosted by Morella, a buxom Elvira wannabe who makes the Mistress of Dark's humor seem downright highbrow. While I think the idea of creating a modern horror host in the tradition of Vampira, Ghoulardi and Commander USA has some merit, Morella's shtick is painfully unfunny, and her segments are best skipped over. The films are a mixed bag with 1968's House of Evil being one of the last and least interesting films of Boris Karloff's career, and Andy Milligan's Guru the Mad Monk from 1970 providing a modest but notable amount of entertainment. 1974's Grave of the Vampire (which was also released under the title Seed of Terror) is what got me so excited, it being a personal favorite that until now was only available in a washed-out, fuzzy fullscreen presentation from Alpha Video.

Grave of the Vampire begins in the 1930s as a man named Caleb Croft (Michael Pataki) crawls out of the crypt he has lain in for three years. Croft is a serial rapist who was accidentally electrocuted while running from the police, but more importantly he is also a vampire who began life as a 15th century nobleman named Charles Croydon. Croft discovers a young couple parked nearby, and after murdering the boy, sexually assaults the girl in an open grave. The young woman (Kitty Vallacher) soon finds herself pregnant with what she believes is her boyfriend's child, but when the newborn will drink only blood, the identity of the father is obvious. The boy grows into a man named James (William Smith, not to be confused with another soon to be vampire hunter Will Smith) who dedicates his life to finding and destroying his biological father. Croft is now posing as a college professor named Adrian Lockwood, and James enrolls in one of his classes in hopes of proving that this is the monster that attacked his mother.

With the likes of Count Yorga, Vampire, House of Dark Shadows and Blacula still fresh in the public's memory, Grave of the Vampire was part of a trend that saw vampire films switching from period pieces to contemporary melodrama. Croft's misogyny, also shown chillingly when he murders a librarian, serves to make the character all the more monstrous. Pataki chews the scenery to sinister effect, even making the viewer forget how cheesy those dime store fangs are. The scene in which Croft first rises from the grave looking very much like a man who has been in the ground for years is unforgettable. This is no masterpiece, mind you, and I suspect the film might have become better known had it not been hobbled by Smith's performance which is amazingly flat in some places and embarrassingly over the top in others, but the film still manages to be creepy and disturbing when it needs to be. All in all, this is an effective scare flick from the drive-in era, and it's never looked as good on video as it does here. Not only are the picture and sound amazingly sharp compared to the aforementioned Alpha Video version, but the film is presented in its original aspect ratio presumably for the first time since its theatrical run.

Guru the Mad Monk is the handiwork of Staten Island's godfather of garbage cinema Andy Milligan (and believe it or not, that is intended as a compliment). Father Guru (Neil Flanagan) is the priest in charge of a medieval prison colony, doling out the last rites before his minions lop off the heads (or for lesser crimes, other appendages) of the convicted. Guru, who suffers from multiple personality disorder, is not pleased with the pittance the Bishop sends to keep the colony running, so he blackmails a young man named Carl (Paul Lieber) into helping him sell the bodies of the recently executed to a medical school. In exchange, Guru will spare Carl's fiancee from execution and keep her safe within the church. Meanwhile, Guru is carrying on an affair with Olga, a potion maker who, in a plot point that seems almost an afterthought, just happens to be a vampire. If the story isn't obvious to you by this point it's because there really isn't one.

Compared to some of the other Andy Milligan films I've seen (see my mention of The Ghastly Ones in Cinematical Seven: My Favorite Grindhouse Movies) Guru the Mad Monk seems almost tame. There's some of the traditional Milligan gore, particularly in the scene where Olga uses a pin to draw blood from Carl's had and he winds up with a hand full of what appears to be red paint, demonstrating that what Milligan lacked in talent he made up for with enthusiasm. The decapitations, severing of hands and crucifixions are sparse and thoroughly unconvincing, and based on Milligan's track record I was surprised by the lack of gratuitous nudity. Still, this impoverished little trash-fest held my attention all the way through, and I give it a modest passing grade.

House of Evil suffers from a malady sure to be fatal to a Boris Karloff film: not enough Karloff. One gets the impression the production could only afford Karloff for so many days, which is why his character is off napping or being dead through much of the picture. If my math is right, the star would have been about 80 years old when this film was shot, and I'm happy to say he still had a formidable screen presence, though the film has little else to offer. The dubbing for this Mexican-made Spanish Language feature is atrocious, with Karloff apparently the only one using his own voice, and the score which must have been culled from others films is rarely appropriate for the scenes it accompanies.

Set in an unnamed 19th century European country, Karloff portrays wealthy recluse Matthias Morteval. When he learns that a woman has been murdered and her eyes removed, Matthias suspects that an old family curse may have reawakened. He summons the surviving members of his extended family, including his niece Lucy whose fiance happens to be one of the police detectives investigating the murder. The rest of the relatives are a predictably unsavory lot, and the plot goes off the deep end when we learn that Matthias's brother had been manufacturing murderous and thoroughly ridiculous looking toys for wealthy clients. When one of the unpleasant relatives is nearly waltzed to death by a dancing death toy I thought the movie had hit rock bottom, but there's some more nonsense about Matthias's late brother suffering from an ailment that caused his brain to shrink and made him develop the urge to pluck out someone's eyes. If you've only got so much time to spend with Blood Flood, may I suggest that you will miss very little by skipping House of Evil.

One final cautionary note: Blood Flood originally streeted a few months ago but was recalled when it was discovered that the Grave of the Vampire feature's audio was badly out of synch. This review was based on the corrected version, but I recommend being very careful about buying a used copy, as I'm sure plenty of those out of synch copies are still floating around.