Vampires, Lobsters and Dinosaurs

The Italian made Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970) might possibly be the all time WTF horror/sci-fi movies ever made. You can start with its numerous re-titlings, from 7 per L’Infinito Contro I Missili Spaziali (translation: 7 For The Infinite Space Against Missiles), to Space Mission to the Lost Planet, Vampire Men of the Lost Planet and The Flesh Creatures. I honestly can’t decide which one I like best.

Then there are the movie’s “everything but the kitchen sink” elements: vampires, cavemen, dinosaurs, UFOs, space rockets, lobster people, flying bat people, snake men, missiles, spears, lasers, bow and arrows, hatchets, supermodel cave girls and the highly-convincing (ahem) Spectrum radiation that keeps turning the “atmosphere” from orange to green. Yep, you guessed it – Horror of the Blood Monsters is actually a Grateful Dead hippie drug party.

The movie begins with gangs of vampires attacking citizens at night, sucking their blood or “sangue” from throats as if artificially-flavored cherry milkshakes. Then the movie abruptly shifts to outer space and a mission to a distant galaxy to discover the source of the vampire plague being a pain in the neck to us Earthers.

A shiny spinning UFO mothership dispatches a smaller less shiny UFO landing party to the mysterious planet below. And it’s here they find an ongoing war between vampire cavemen with candy cigarette sized/shaped fangs violently beating and stabbing a non-vampire tribe.

Everyone wears animal skins for performance boxer briefs (or “britches”) except for a super hot cave chick sporting an off-the-rack open shoulder ensemble with matching panties or “smoothing hi-cut briefs.” Meanwhile, up in space, rocket ships and the UFOs are shooting armed missiles at each other. I don’t know why.

Watched this one without sub-titles (free on YouTube™) and was unable to learn the entire Italian language during its 80 minute running time. Figured it couldn’t be that hard. But as supremely dumb as this movie is (the cavemen fight scenes were spliced in, taken from the 1965 Filipino movie, Tagani and other monster stock footage was also wedged in there), you can’t help but entertained by the lobster people with pain-inflicting pinchers and the mini bat people that live in caves and fly right at your face when you spelunk their caves.

Repeating scenes of the spaceships exploding and then reversing the footage to re-use again and again kinda wears you out. So does waiting for the hot cave chick to remove her top because it’s so hot on that irradiated planet. And was the mission to find out the source of the blood plague (brought to Earth by the Tubaton, vampire men from a distant galaxy) a success? For our sake I’d like to think yes. But man, I just don’t know.