When Roger Corman made one of his early, cheap science fiction films, you could count on some lively ideas and a sense of humor to get one past the lack of production values. When he was involved in other directors' pictures, titles like Beast With a Million Eyes and this picture made by his brother, the results were never as good. Night of the Blood Beast has an awful script cribbed from earlier successes where a half-dozen unconvincing characters retrieve a dead astronaut, only to undergo the typical 24 hours of terror. The corpse is dead but animated by some alien organism. A man-sized globby monster (seen, with alterations, in the same year's Teenage Caveman) skulks around, with the magnetized capsule knocking out phones and car distributors much like Klaatu did in Day the Earth Stood Still. Thus isolated from the outside world, the rural space lab fight to survive, as in The Thing. Lifting an idea from an earlier Corman movie, Attack of the Crab Monsters, the alien eats Dr. Wyman's brain, and thereafter can speak with his voice.

With all the borrowings from better films, Night of the Blood Beast basically has a bunch of actors running around Griffith Park (plenty of chain-link fences on which to hang 'security area' signs) and finally that most overused location, Bronson Caves. The pre-Alien idea of a man pregnant with the offspring of a monster from outer space goes nowhere. It's unusual that a naive 50s sci-fi monster romp is as completely charmless as this. Z pictures like King Dinosaur and Giant Gila Monster are much more entertaining.

Perhaps Retromedia's wretched DVD is the reason. Night of the Blood Beast in this presentation is a washed-out 16mm print with obtrusive multiple changeover marks (circle cues, round punchouts) every seven minutes or so, as if this 65 minute movie was carved up to be shown in a two-hour time slot. It's hard to believe the commercials we used to put up with, but we did. Parts of shots are lost at these changeover points, which are very jarring. The show looks too tight when matted on a 16:9 set, so it's likely that the optical framing on the 16mm original was adapted smaller than the 35mm original. The transfer, digitizing and compression are so blah, that this could be a homemade disc, authored in an afternoon.

The okay packaging calls this 'A Classic from Roger Corman', and presents no credits to tell us he just helped his brother produce the picture. On the back are liner notes from one 'Thorn Sherman' and a book that a web search couldn't locate, Last Gasps: Horrible Horrors from Horror Heroes. Apologies if the author and his book do exist, but the notes read like a contemptous sham, full of meaningless and garbled nerd-speak about the film. We learn that Night of the Blood Beast is one of the five greatest sci fi films of the 50s, indeed 'one of the greatest films of the 1950s' and 'remains the one missing cinematic footnote in American science fiction history.' The condescension and again, contempt, on the part of Retromedia for the loyal monster movie audience makes this disc twice as unpleasant. The last sentence says the show is 'in its complete, truncated form' - the writer sneering at the thought that his readers won't know what 'truncated' means.

Normally any Z monster movie is going to please its fans, but this DVD is definitely not recommended, just on principle.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Night of the Blood Beast rates:
Movie: Fair
Video: Poor
Sound: Fair
Supplements: Partial trailer
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: October 20, 2002