Blood Of Ghastly Horror (1967)

Sadly Over-hyped

best movie i've ever seen.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Disjointed horror film that was made from a heist film that was cut apart and had new scenes added. It has something to do about a zombified people going around killing. The original film was a crime caper film about a jewel heist. Watching the film for the first time in years, and for the first time without commercials I found it to be an absolute disaster area of a film. Its awful. Its films like this that make me hate Al Adamson films because they are such patchwork messes with new and old footage mingling freely. After listening to the commentary on the DVD I have to temper my criticism of the film since its clear that the scenes from the original heist film were actually really good. Had that film been released (it couldn't get released because it had no stars) I'm pretty certain that it would have had a nice reputation and Adamson might have gone on not to be a hack. The trouble was that Adamson was willing to sell his film short and shoot and reshoot and cut apart the heist film. Producer Sam Sherman who does the commentary takes the blame for ruining the film with the re-cuts and rewrites. The film as it stands now seems to be about four films blended together, which is about right since the heist, the cops, the zombie and what ever else all seem to be in different films made at different times. Sherman in his commentary said the film plays better with commercials and he ain't kidding. Watching this on TV you can blame the station for hacking it up, however seeing it sans commercials you realize what a nightmare it is. Awful

Don't ask me how I did it, but even though this is technically a botched and splicey patchwork of a movie, I had a good time with it. It's poorly made to be sure, but somehow it's also mesmerizing in its ineptness at the same time. It helps going in to know the history...It was directed by drive-in movie maestro Al Adamson (of "Dracula vs. Frankenstein" fame), who originally planned a straight jewelry heist picture in 1964 until meeting up with producer/mentor Sam Sherman who persuaded him to gradually add new scenes and ideas specifically for the horror/sci-fi television market in the early '70s. It was finally sold to TV with the lucrative title of MAN WITH THE SYNTHETIC BRAIN, but Sherman thought it could be milked further, so the movie was also played at theaters where it became known as BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR.Ultimately emerging as connected pieces of different half-baked incarnations (one of these was even called PSYCHO A-GO-GO before the music was eliminated), the movie begins with a zombified maniac running around town strangling people. Through flashbacks within other flashbacks we're treated to a background story of how a Vietnam vet named Joe Corey was wounded and then "helped" by a wacky scientist named Dr. Vanard (the always welcome John Carradine) who planted some sort of mechanism inside Corey's head and unintentionally turned him into a murderer with a taste for jewel robbing (which is how the old 1964 heist footage managed to get utilized). But this man-made killer's got an angry dad who's also a scientist and is even nuttier than Dr. Vanard. He's out to even the score for what was done to his victimized son, and that includes making a mummified and whimpering she-monster out of Vanard's sexy daughter (Regina Carrol, director Adamson's wife).This isn't a film for most audiences, but anyone who revels in idiotic or badly made exploitation films of the '60s and '70s would want to get a load of this concoction. You've got to hand it to Sam Sherman and Al Adamson, in any case... they knew how to have fun and freak out audiences. The current DVD available by Troma is badly framed, however... this cuts out some widescreen and results in an unfortunate pan/scan affair. But it's unlikely at the time of this writing that there's any better source material. * out of ****

[Also released as: "The Fiend with the Atom Brain", "Fiend with the Electronic Brain", "The Love Maniac", "The Man with the Synthetic Brain", and "Psycho A Go-Go"].The Film that Wouldn't Die: a movie which has endured more surgical alterations than the Frankenstein monster. Each version has been equally monstrous, but the history of this movie is a real hoot. Behold:In 1965 Al Adamson produced and directed a very low budget quickie called "Psycho A Go-Go", in which an ex-soldier is turned into a zombie-slave-killer by criminals who implant a device in his brain. The film was a big flop.Four years later Adamson tried to jazz it up by adding new scenes and giving it a new title: "Fiend with the Electronic Brain". This new version was also a big flop.In 1971 Adamson decided the film needed more new scenes, and this time he got Kent Taylor ("The Day Mars Invaded Earth") and John Carradine to help out. Even better, Adamson persuaded his sexy wife, Regina Carrol, to play Carradine's daughter. Best of all, he got Tommy Kirk ("Mars Needs Women", "Village of the Giants") to play a police detective who investigates the murders. To celebrate the film's big upgrade, he retitled it again: "The Man with the Synthetic Brain". Even with these well-known stars and nifty new title, the film was still a big flop. So Adamson waited awhile, gave the film another new title, "Blood of Ghastly Horror", and re-re-re-released it. Naturally the film was a big flop again because it was the same terrible movie that had flopped the last time.Is that the end of Adamson's Indestructible Movie? Definitely not -- in fact, this isn't even the entire middle of this remarkable film's history. At various times the movie has also been released under the title's "The Man with the Atomic Brain" and (get this) "The Love Maniac".Maybe the next reincarnation of this unkillable film will be disguised by a really tricky title -- like "War and Peace" or "The Eleven O'clock News". Good heavens, what if we just walked into some theater and found ourselves trapped into watching . . . "X: The Unknown Movie"!

First they filmed a crime drama. Then they decided to make it into some sort of sci-fi flick, by adding footage which explains the criminal's behaviour in terms of a synthetic brain place in the head of a soldier. Then they decide to wrap this with some incredibly trashy low-budget early 70s zombie monster footage.