jamesrupert2014 Review of Night of the Blood Beast

Night of the Blood Beast (1958)

Imaginative at times but a distinctly low-budget production

[4/10 · 25 March 2019]

America's first orbiting spaceship collides with a mysterious object and crashes to Earth, bringing with it an alien mother and her parasitical brood who are using the undead astronaut as an incubation chamber. After a number of inexplicable deaths, the humans decide to destroy the intruder but pause when the alien claims to be on a goodwill mission to save our species from ourselves. The film is a bargain-basement, Bronson Canyon blend of the vastly superior "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) and "Alien" (1979), but typical of a Corman opus (auteur brothers Roger and Gene were producers, Bernard L. Kowalski was director), is watchable in an eye-rolling way. The special effects aren't really special: the monster (recycled from a previous Corman film (typical)) is a hairy, beaked, lump that you never get a really good look at and the alien embryos look like fat seahorses. The acting is on par for a '50s B-monster outing, with the usual characters delivering the usual material (the 'science' in the script varies from reasonable to ludicrous (somehow eating a brain confers the power of human speech through photosynthesis)). 'Night of the Blood Beast' is a silly but short and watchable, although it never lives up to the lurid imagery on some of the posters and DVD covers.