By Hank Reineke
In case you were wondering, the answer is “yes.” That is Christopher Lee’s visage featured on
the slipcase of Kino Lorber’s Blu ray issue of Vernon Sewell’s The Blood Beast Terror. Now, ordinarily, displaying Sir Christopher’s
image on a Gothic horror film release wouldn’t make for bad marketing. The problem is that Lee doesn’t actually appear in The Blood Beast Terror. The
team at Kino curiously chose to use the poster art of Distribuzione Italiana
Films Internazionali, the distributor readying the film for European release as
the Mostro di Sangue.
The artwork procured by D.I.F.I. for The Blood Beast Terror was, at the very least, familiar: a reverse-image
lifted from the Italian poster of 1958’s Horror
of Dracula (Dracula il Vampiro). Kino is taking a fair battering on fan sites
for their packaging of this 2022 issue. But let’s be fair. Kino’s decision to forego the original British poster
art for the imagery of the Italian campaign might be a bit odd but not technically incorrect. Moviegoers in Italy had, in fact, been lured
into visiting their local cinema with such eye-catching - if misleading -
artwork.
Though Tigon’s The
Blood Beast Terror has a core of supporters – perhaps defenders is a better term - I find the film a mild amusement at
best. Which is a shame as I really want to like it. In a sense, it’s a film conceived from a time
out of mind. Some critics suggest that’s
exactly the film’s failing. Upon UK release
in the early spring of 1968, stately Gothic horrors were seemingly growing
stale amongst horror film fans. Critics
argued a new era of more edgy, sadistic and blood-letting horrors was in the
ascendant, old costume-drama gothics now too tame to frighten. While that’s not necessarily untrue, there’s
no denying The Blood Beast Terror is of
middling interest simply due to it not being terribly involving.
While it’s true goth-horror had lost some of its courtly appeal
with a large sect of cinemagoers, the sub-genre was hardly dead. A case in point: upon original release The Blood Beast Terror was paired as the
undercard to Michael Reeve’s brilliant Witchfinder
General, a film set circa 1645. This too was a Tigon release of Tony
Tenser’s, a Vincent Price vehicle far superior to The Blood Beast Terror on every conceivable level. I might be wrong, but I suspect if not for
the presence of Peter Cushing in The
Blood Beast Terror, Sewell’s more modest film would have far fewer
champions than it enjoys today.
So what’s wrong with it? I admit to moments of melancholia when watching The Blood Beast Terror. For
starters, it’s difficult to watch old pros Cushing and Robert Flemyng (known
best to horror film fans as the titular necrophagic M.D. The Horrible Dr. Hichcock) try their best to rise above the
mediocre material they’ve been given to work with. The film’s Director of
Photography, Stanley Long, recalled Flemyng complaining “how shit the script
was, how shit the effects were.” Even director
Sewell wasn’t spared the castigations of an unhappy cast member. He recalled the famously gentlemanly Cushing mildly
offering only a couple of days into the shoot, “Vernon, I think this is perhaps
the worst film I have ever made.” Sadly, in a few years’ time there would be new
challengers to Cushing’s lament. Such
clunkers as Tendre Dracula (1974) and
Blood Suckers (1971) would prove short
term contenders to that particular title.
I won’t give away anything important about the film’s
flimsy plot – just in case you’ve yet to see the film and still wish to after
reading this review. I’ll just say the
trail of mutilated bodies scattering the English countryside are – as ever –
the result of bad science gone horribly wrong. In this case entomological science. As transformative feminine-insect monsters go, Wanda Ventham’s fetching “Clare”
in The Blood Beast Terror is, IMHO, a
far less interesting or menacing creature than Susan Cabot’s “Janice Starlin” in
Roger Corman’s low-budget The Wasp Woman
(1959). But, again, the fault here lies
not with Ventham or Cushing or Flemyng, but with a script riddled with excessive
verbiage and slow-moving, sluggish plotting.