QUEEN OF BLOOD (1966)
Written and Directed by Curtis Harrington

A distress call from Mars sends a small crew into unknown space to attempt a rescue. They discover that the sole survivor of a rocketship crash is a mute woman, who they take aboard their ship. But it turns out she needs blood to stay alive. There is a sub-category of science fiction film that might be called “the message from space.” FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS, PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES and ALIEN would all fall under this subheading, as would Curtis Harrington’s excellent little QUEEN OF BLOOD. I had forgotten how much of the first half of this movie is made up of footage from a Russian epic acquired by Roger Corman, which gives the film a genuinely strange epic grandeur. The Russian sequences are seamlessly edited in with the California scenes, most of which are shot outside a building that matches the epic scale of the Russian footage. Most of that grandeur falls away in the film’s second half, which is limited to the confines of the rescue ship, but the strangeness increases as Florence Marley’s charismatic vampire queen takes over the storyline. Harrington stages her pre-feeding seduction scenes as dreams, and they are quite effective, both visually and dramatically. The cast - Basil Rathbone’s chilly scientist, astronauts John Saxon, Judi Meredith and Dennis Hopper - is fine, but it’s Marley’s movie. Forrest J. Ackerman makes a cameo in the film’s final scenes. For a personal memoir of Countess Florence Von Wurmbrand Marley, read David del Valle’s December 2005 entry on the Films in Review website. (Viewed on a nice color print from OnDemand, probably the same one now available from MGM’s DVD-R-on-demand archive service.)

http://www.filmsinreview.com/2005/12/01/camp-david-december-2005/

— Robert Deveau, The Doomed Farmer