A ragged, befuddling palimpsest comprised from the detritus of no fewer than three unrelated pre-existing films, all shuffled together within a framework of “new” scenes(added, I suppose, to bring some degree of cohesion to the amalgamated mess at hand). Success? ….erm….hardly. In fact, watching this tatterdemalion patchwork is like staring at one of those damn squiggly-dot pictures…eventually, you might catch a fleeting image of a snow-boarder or something, but was it really worth the headache in the end?
Well, there is actually some sub-atomic particle of a story straining to emerge from all the disorder…as I see it, there’s a spaceship that has landed on a planet which is the origin of all vampires, as well as home to various other predatory monstrosities and a tribe of peaceful cave-people. The bizarre atmospheric conditions of this planet cause everything to appear as color-tinted black-and-white, the tint randomly changing from blue to red to green and so forth. During one scene set inside the spaceship, an astronaut is looking through a periscope-type of device. The view presents a grid with marked north, south, east, and west coordinates. I’m certainly no science brain, but don’t those points of direction become “lost” once you have left the Earth? Hmmm…whatever.
John Carradine is in this flick. A little. He looks sort of embarrassed…he knows very damn well that this is a petrified turd of a film, but as the patron saint of undiscriminating “any old thing for a paycheck” movie stars, he sails through the muck like an old pro.
