Queen of Blood (1966)

Director: Curtis Harrington

Cast: John Saxon, Basil Rathbone, Judi Meredith

Synopsis: Astronauts go to Mars and return with a green vampire woman.

It’s always interesting to see some long-ago screenwriter’s vision of their future which is now in our past. Invariably, they over-estimate the ways in which technology will transform our lives while simultaneously failing to consider the fact that computers may no longer comprise of massive plain grey panels fitted with a couple of randomly flashing lights. Queen of Blood is no different. It imagines a 1990 in which everyone dresses the same but no-one has a mobile communications device. In fact, the film is so cheaply made that it consists of only a handful of plain sets. Much of the impressive special effects are stolen uncredited from a couple of big budget Soviet movies – which is a bit akin to a hack writer like James Patterson inserting a few lengthy excerpts from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment into one of his books when you think about it. The story is fairly ordinary, with a group of astronauts rescuing the eponymous queen from a crashed spaceship on Mars only to discover that she’s a green-skinned blood-sucking vamp who looks a bit like Glenn Close. For such a cheap American-International movie, this boasts an impressive cast including John Saxon, Dennis Hopper (Hang ‘em High, Easy Rider) and Basil Rathbone (The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Magic Sword), approaching the end of his life and clearly on his uppers when it came to film roles. For fans of trashy sci-fi only.

(Reviewed 17th February 2012)