Putting the “International” into American International Pictures, Roger Corman acquired U.S. distribution rights to several Soviet SF films, ransacked them for their impressive (or at least economically obtained) special-effects footage, and deputized three of his famous protégés to morph them into four “new” movies. The level of insult to the original varied considerably: Francis Ford Coppola’s Battle Beyond the Sun (1962) mostly just hacked up and redubbed Nebo Zovyot (The Heavens Call; 1959), directed by Mikhail Karzhukov and Aleksandr Kozyr. Using the nom de cinéma of “Thomas Colchart,” he deleted all the boring Commie agitprop and inserted—as it were—monsters suggesting human genitalia.
In 1997, Earth is divided into North Hemis and South Hemis (clearly analogs for the U.S. and U.S.S.R., respectively); learning that the latter plans to send the Mercury to Mars, or perhaps the other way around, the former gets the jump on them in the Typhoon, yet it comes to grief and is abandoned after its crew is rescued. The Mercury now lacks enough fuel to return home, forcing them to land on the asteroid Angkor, where they set up an antenna and we dimly see the battling Genitaliasauruses. An unmanned fuel ship crashes, but South Hemis sends a second ship, whose pilot heroically dies completing his mission, and both crews make it safely back to Mother Earth to set up peaceful coexistence, ending the bitter, years-long rivalry. If only.
Conversely, writer-director Curtis Harrington (1926-2007) added so much—even dollops of Nebo Zovyot—to Mechte Navstrechu (A Dream Come True; 1963), which Karzhukov directed with Otar Koberidze, that Queen of Blood (aka Planet of Blood; 1966) is a “real” movie in its own right, aptly bearing his own name. It stars Florence Marl[e]y in the title role, with genre legend Basil Rathbone, a young Dennis Hopper (with Marly below), and John Saxon. Asked in our Filmfax interview (c. 2004) about being reunited with Judi Meredith, his co-star in Charles F. Haas’s Summer Love (1957), Saxon said, “we were friendly, and it was fun to see her again. Her career was kind of waning….[That] lasted about seven shooting days.
“Most of the footage…had all the special effects of people in these costumes, and you couldn’t see their faces. So we just dubbed in the story with Americans, and maybe 25% or 30% of it was already there, in special effects that came from the footage that they had bought from this other film. All I can remember was that Dennis Hopper couldn’t keep a straight face in any of the scenes, and it was one of Basil Rathbone’s last appearances [he died the following year]. He came off a spaceship in one scene and that was it. He was old and tired and, I think, ill. Florence Marly was intense and striking. Curtis Harrington admired her a lot. He [recently said] how well [it] holds up. I haven’t seen it for years.”
By 1990, the Moon has been colonized and expeditions planned to Mars and Venus; Dr. Farraday (Rathbone) reports that deciphered alien signals say an ambassador is en route, while a probe arrives with a video log of aliens crash-landing on Mars and sending out an S.O.S. A mission planned for six months hence is thus accelerated, with Allan Brennen (Saxon, above), Laura James (Meredith), and Paul Grant (Hopper) aboard the Oceano, which is damaged by a sunburst. When one dead astronaut is located in the alien wreck, Farraday posits that the rest escaped aboard a rescue craft, spotted on the Martian moon of Phobos as Allan and Tony Barrata (Don Eitner) are placing satellites in orbit aboard the Meteor.
They find an alien queen—billed simply as “?”—alive, but with room on the Meteor only for two, Allan leaves Tony there to await the Oceano II. The alien refuses solid food and freaks out at the sight of a hypodermic; when he sees her bloody lips after Paul is drained, Allan advocates destruction, and while Anders Brockman (Robert Boon) argues in favor of feeding her, he’s next on the menu when the plasma runs out. The alien burns through her restraints with heat vision and is feeding on Allen when Laura sees and scratches her, but the hemophiliac queen, who bleeds to death, has left a clutch of jelly-like eggs, which Farraday’s aide (a gleeful Forrest J. Ackerman, above) preserves once they’ve returned to Earth.
I also interviewed Harrington, who had given Hopper his first lead in Night Tide (1961), and cast Czech blacklistee Marly, briefly seen in the Twilight Zone episode “Dead Man’s Shoes” (1/19/62). “I enjoyed doing that very much. I devised the story and worked out using the Soviet technical footage, and I was very happy to give the key role of the alien creature to Florence…whom I had admired in her European films,” he related. “That was a completely salutary experience, even though it was a very low budget, done in a short time, but it is the film that got me my contract at Universal Studios,” where he and Queen of Blood producer George Edwards resumed their long collaboration with Games (1967).
Trying to match the Soviet footage “was a technical challenge, but I think I did it very well. We worked it all out very carefully. We had a special effects company that made the space suits to look exactly like the Russian ones, and it mainly was a problem at the first in the lab, matching up the footage of the two when I would cut into close-ups of our people and so on. But we accomplished it.” Regarding the appearance by Ackerman, he said the literary agent and editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland (see my seminal first issue below) “had been a personal friend of mine since [the] early days…[I had first met future collaborator Kenneth Anger] when we were both quite young at a film society in Hollywood that showed old films…”
Forry “used to come to the same film society…and I met him, and I had always had a great interest in the fantasy pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Unknown, so I found I had a great rapport with Forrest Ackerman. Famous Monsters was well established by then, so with all of his fans in the world, and they were the kind of people—all science fiction fans—who would be seeing the film, ‘Mr. Science Fiction’ himself, it seemed a logical thing to do. I can’t remember whether he suggested it or I suggested it, but I said, ‘Let’s do a cameo of you at the end of the film carrying the living eggs of the creature.’… Of course [he was having fun in his role]. He’s a dear man and I’m very fond of him.”
Of the similarities between Alien (1979), his film, and Edward L. Cahn’s It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958; above), he said, “I made a habit very early on never to see any film directed by Edward Cahn, a director of no talent whatsoever. It’s like Herbert Strock; I won’t go and see a film by him, either. People of absolutely no talent, and I just hated their films. So I’ve never seen that….I’m sure it’s abysmal, whatever it is. [Yes], it’s the same story. Whether the author of Alien saw my film, I have no idea, and I don’t know if it touched something off in him. I think there is a strong similarity. I wouldn’t accuse him of plagiarism per se, because I don’t even know if he saw [Queen], but I bet he did.”
To be continued.
Sheesh. Don’t remember a thing about the one we watched!
The what now? 🙂
Actually, you were disappointed when you learned that the Genitaliasauruses were American rather than Soviet.