QUEEN OF BLOOD (1966)
Article #113 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 7-7-2001
Posting date: 11-20-2001

The earth receives a message from an alien race informing them they will be sending them an emissary. When the aliens’ craft becomes stranded on Mars, the earth sends an expedition to rescue survivors. The lone survivor turns out to be a strange mute woman who has a special diet…

Several movies were made during the sixties that were built around Russian science fiction footage; this is probably the best of them. Granted, it would have probably been best if they had just tried to do a straighforward dubbing of the Russian movie, but I’d rather that they did what they did do (build a whole new movie around the special effects footage) than to try to incorporate part of the plot of the original movie with cut-ins of American actors that never interreact with the cast of the original (the Jerry Warren approach). It has a few familiar faces in it; Basil Rathbone, John Saxon, and Dennis Hopper are all there, as well as Forrest J Ackerman as an assistant to Rathbone. I quite like Hopper in this film; I found him distracting in Curtis Harrington’s earlier NIGHT TIDE, but here he adds some very nice human touches to his character. And Florence Marly, who plays the alien queen, really does leave you with that creepy feeling that despite her human form, she is totally alien on the inside.

Overall, I quite like the movie. I think it’s one of those that may have had an influence on ALIEN. I also find the ending quite intriguing in its way, despite the fact that it is an example of what I think of as the “typical seventies downbeat ending” only in a movie from the sixties. Nonetheless, I really wonder what is going to happen next, and this is one movie to which I would have liked to see a sequel.