![]() ![]() It's all rendered in stunning Technicolor, peppered with flashes of titillating nudity and unseen graphic violence. Brides of Blood plays like a movie out of time in certain regards, as a new set of adventurers – including Beach Blanket Bingo ('65) stud and future Jack Hill producer John Ashley – land upon the cursed shores of Blood Island, only to discover a jungle paradise infested with radiation-poisoned mutations, ranging from tentacled trees to a melting green creature that the villagers sacrifice their women to (echoing the atomic panic B-Movies of the late '50s). Ten years after Terror Is A Man, de León and Romero re-teamed to re-establish themselves as horror filmmakers, having toiled away in the Filipino studio system throughout the '60s (not to mention a stint working in America), which subsequently collapsed and led to more independent productions being churned out in their country. In the end, she seeks comfort in the arms of a shipwrecked stranger (Richard Derr), while the creature kills islanders before battling the mad scientist with all its might, shrieking as it tries to reconcile the fact that it's no longer human, but rather something much more deadly.īrides of Blood (d. This is a deeply tragic picture, as the monster is abused by its creator (Francis Lederer), who turns his back on the gorgeous wife (Greta Thyssen) who used to love him. Terror Is A Man is just as much a riff on James Whale's Frankenstein ('31) as anything else, making us experience genuine sympathy for the half-feline Beast-Man (Flory Carlos). De León is essentially crafting his own Universal Monsters installment, while simultaneously minting a formula that they'd end up following ten years on. Shot in stark black and white, and resembling a Reuben riff on Erle Kenton's Island of Lost Souls ('32), there's a disarming level of shadowy menace on display in Romero and de León's debut exploitation collaboration (working off a script by Paul Harber, who previously penned The Kidnappers for Romero). De León remained Romero's partner for the first two subsequent entries following Terror ( Brides of Blood and Mad Doctor of Blood Island), while the tiny Filipino genre godfather brought the series home on his own with possibly one of the strangest creature features the world has ever seen. Thus, the Blood Island Trilogy ('68 - '70) was born, gifting schlock fans a set of films that are rubbery, titillating (what with all those scenes of nude women racing through the forest) and increasingly gory. ![]() In a true moment of "nobody knows nothing" cinema economics, Terror Is A Man became an American hit, making both Romero and Hemisphere hungry for more Filipino-crafted lo-fi exploitation. Just like the movie's initial release, Sherman matched it with another one of Romero's works – the war mini-epic The Walls of Hell ('64) – in an attempt to make a quick buck off a dusty old horror curio that nobody else wanted to put out. Sherman and Hemisphere Pictures (who mostly made their name on weirdo Al Adamson movies), which partnered with Independent International to distribute Terror Is A Man in the States in 1969 (under the title Blood Creature). Terror was released on a double-bill with another Romero-produced project (his Hong Kong shot mystery, The Scavengers ) and unfortunately didn't do particularly well at the domestic box office, mostly receding into obscurity throughout the next decade.Įnter Samuel M. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau, that found a deadly panther man prowling the perimeter of a spooky land mass in the Pacific. The result was one of their country's first genre pictures: Terror Is A Man ('59), a cheapie spin on H.G. De León had read one of Romero's early short stories and wanted to make a movie together, despite the author insisting they didn’t even speak the same language (but that’s what translators are for). ![]() Eddie Romero had been working in the Filipino film industry for a decent stretch of time – mostly as a writer, penning comedies and comic book flicks – when he received a call from doctor-turned-actor Gerardo "Gerry" de León. ![]()
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