Queen of Blood was a 60s Corman produced quickie which recycled elaborate special effects sequences from a Russian scifi epic about heroic space exploration and matched them with cheaply shot footage of a plot about a bloodsucking, green skinned female alien who was clearly the inspiration for the big haired Martian girl from Mars Attacks.
The plot is strikingly similar to Alien. The creature gets on board after the crew pick up an SOS signal from a faraway planet. She bumps off the crew one by one but they are reluctant to kill her at first because they have been ordered to bring an alien life form back to earth. She even has an elongated head and lays eggs.
I caught the original Russian film called "A Dream Come True" at London's BFI a few years ago and it looked gorgeous, but its conflict free high-mindedness and lack of drama made it a bit of a snooze. I was hoping to get the beauty of the Russian film with something more trashily entertaining, but the Russian sequences (shot in 4:3) have been heavily cropped at top and bottom and reprinted on grainy stock, which pretty much ruins them.
The main thing to commend about the US film is Florence Marly, the actress who plays the alien. She does a good job at being strange and otherworldly, aided by some clever lighting. Otherwise this lacks the visual ingenuity of Mario Bava's similar "Planet of the Vampires", which also has close similarities to Alien and which creates a ravishingly beautiful alien planet with limited resources and the ingenious use of special effects (literally smoke and mirrors).
The film features Dennis Hopper in an early career high as an alien snack.
The plot is strikingly similar to Alien. The creature gets on board after the crew pick up an SOS signal from a faraway planet. She bumps off the crew one by one but they are reluctant to kill her at first because they have been ordered to bring an alien life form back to earth. She even has an elongated head and lays eggs.
I caught the original Russian film called "A Dream Come True" at London's BFI a few years ago and it looked gorgeous, but its conflict free high-mindedness and lack of drama made it a bit of a snooze. I was hoping to get the beauty of the Russian film with something more trashily entertaining, but the Russian sequences (shot in 4:3) have been heavily cropped at top and bottom and reprinted on grainy stock, which pretty much ruins them.
The main thing to commend about the US film is Florence Marly, the actress who plays the alien. She does a good job at being strange and otherworldly, aided by some clever lighting. Otherwise this lacks the visual ingenuity of Mario Bava's similar "Planet of the Vampires", which also has close similarities to Alien and which creates a ravishingly beautiful alien planet with limited resources and the ingenious use of special effects (literally smoke and mirrors).
The film features Dennis Hopper in an early career high as an alien snack.