(aka, Fiend with the Electronic Brain)
I never particularly paid any attention to Al Adamson before.
After all, there were a lot of low budget American filmmakers of the Sixties, and about the only one of his films I knew I’d seen was Dracula vs. Frankenstein, thanks to a friend with an obsession with Lon Chaney, Jr.
But then I learned that David Gregory, who directed the documentary about Richard Stanley’s disastrous attempt to film Island of Dr. Moreau a few years ago also directed a documentary on Al Adamson, his career and mysterious death.
This led me to take a quick look at Al’s IMDB page and I was stunned to learn that that I’d actually seen a surprising number of his films: Horror of the Blood Monsters ,the terrible space vampire movie based on a Filipino fantasy film, ; The Female Bunch (see my Lon Chaney, Jr. comment above); and his entry into the Filipino Blood Island series, Brain of Blood which has no connection to the series other than that word “blood.” They’re cheap; they have lots of gore and women being killed; and they are all terrible.
But I’ll admit it, I enjoyed Blood of Ghastly Horror. Yeah, I did so very much in a bad movie sort of way, but, hey, that counts.
Look, Blood of Ghastly Horror must be the platonic ideal of bad exploitation filmmaking: it started out as a tough crime drama called Psycho a Go Go, about gang who lost the jewels they stole in a bank robbery and end up kidnapping a young mother and her child to find out what happened.
But for some reason Al wasn’t satisfied with that, and he re-edited it into Fiend with the Electronic Brain. This time he added footage of John Carradine as a doctor who had tried to save the villain of Psycho a Go Go after a shell fragment lodged in his brain during the Vietnam war. Joe Corey was left catatonic, but Dr. Vanard thinks he can restart Joe’s brain by implanting a device that can take over the functions of its missing regions.
Instead, Joe wakes up a different and far more violent person, who takes pleasure in killing and violence.
I suppose mad scientists had been doing that sort of experiment for years in one form or another, but the idea of creating an electronic device to correct a serious problem in the brain? One immediately thinks of Michael Crichton’s The Terminal Man but his novel didn’t come out until 1971, which means that Blood of Ghastly Horror predates it by about four years — and you have to remember that the brain implant was part of Al’s second version of the film, which was at least a year earlier.
Mind you, I’m not sure anyone would classify this as a serious exploration of the idea, not even in the second version of the film.
Al’s backers weren’t happy with the second version, either, so they filmed even more new footage to create the final version, with a very unglamorous Tommy Kirk as a police officer who worked on the original case years before. Someone is killing off the people involved with Joe Corey’s death, and they find his fingerprints on the scene of one of the murders.
Although it all becomes much clearer when they learn that Joe’s father was a doctor who specialized in studying native medicine and magic…and, of course Voodoo.
And, thanks to his mad scientist lab with lots of machinery and flashing lights, he has resurrected Joe as his zombie slave to get revenge…
The combination is enough to make your head spin. It reminds me just a little of Bela Lugosi and, yes, John Carradine in the classic poverty row horror film, Voodoo Man.
What makes all this even worse is that I have no idea why Dr. Corey needs all this equipment, as his treatment just involves an injection. He does talk about refining and improving his formula, but then he says that the test tube full of blue stuff is all there is and can’t be replaced when it’s gone. I suppose he brought it back from wherever, but that still doesn’t explain what all the lab equipment is for.
Maybe they had a clearance sale at the mad scientist lab supply place, I don’t know.
As you can imagine, it is all a bit of a mess, filled with flashbacks and minor characters who may have been more important in one or the other versions of the film. Al’s wife, Regina Carrol played in a lot of his films, and she shows up here as Dr. Vanard’s daughter in the framing story, and even [spoiler] gets turned into a zombie.
And I think it says something rather disturbing about the exploitation film in general that there is no nudity in this film, just lots of violence directed against women. The closes we come is when Corey threatens to rip the blouse of one of his victims open but is stopped in the act. While there are hints of potential rape here and there, Joe murders the girls he pursues long before it gets to that point, as if he only gets sexual satisfaction from hitting or strangling women. And this theme of violence against women seems to show up in a lot of these grindhouse films.
As I said, rather disturbing.
Look, I’ve told you already: this film is a mess. It is weirdly funny — but not on purpose — and we’re not supposed to notice that, under all the zombie makeup and the ruined eye, that isn’t the same actor playing zombie Joe. I had no idea what I was getting into with this one as the only summary I’d seen was A.) technically accurate and B.) totally unhelpful. I think that helped because a large part of Blood of Ghastly Horror‘s charm is just how batty the final story had become thanks to the endless reworkings.
Let’s face it, even a good story would have ended up a complete mess if you did all this to it.
But if you are looking for an entertainingly bad film to watch, one you can mock late at night with the help of your friends, some quality popcorn and maybe an adult beverage or two, Blood of Ghastly Horror will definitely fit the bill.
Maybe almost too well…
rivets on the poster 
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