Blood (US ’74)
Was pretty sure I made it through this, yet my memory is patchy…
Not fair, I was really enjoying this! But showing up onscreen at six in the morning after NINE other films? It was too much for me. I won the battle against my eyelids by sticking to a strict routine of shifting my arse in the seat every 10-30 seconds, however it turned out that my brain was taking very little of it in.
I spotted that our hero was the grandson (or some sort of descendant) of The Wolfman, stuck in a loveless marriage to Dracula’s granddaughter (or something). The vampire is kept alive by a serum extracted from the man-eating plants in the basement. The plants are kept alive with blood taken from the vacant (is mongoloid offensive?) servant Carlotta by the two sane servants, one who has lost his legs to bites from these plants and the other who is limping towards the same misfortune.
Genius set-up, right? Where to from here?
Well, there is a beef with their real-estate agent, the main guy falls for another woman, plus financial woes result in a confrontation with a solicitor. Not quite what I was expecting…Which’d usually be fine, but I was far too dopey at this stage to be following any of it.
The ‘effects’ were getting through though, I have a few a those embedded in my memory. The highlight:
That right there is the vampire’s skin condition – far more severe than the Ailurophobia found in The Night Of The Cat (US ’73) - when she is caught without her serum. Other magic movie moments included novelty vampire teeth, greenery wobbling about with evilness, a very sharp chest-lid and half a mouse (in stark contrast to the rest of the film, I couldn’t tell if that mouse was real or not; perhaps it was the sleep depravation).
One of those special films that seems to have been made without a filter, as if ideas were thought up and committed to film immediately without scrutiny. It didn’t seem to care what anybody thought of it or whether anything came across as a little too silly, it just went for it. I’d love to see this again fully stocked up on sleep, as I could sense that there was a lot of oddness – truly effortless insanity, not manufactured bizarreness – to be appreciated here. All lost to me now in a blurry sea of awful film memories.
