Verdict
Summary
An adequately entertaining creature feature in the Hammer or Amicus style, The Blood Beast Terror might’ve added even more creature action and gore to amp up its intensity, but as it stands, the film is a fairly classy – albeit one without a lot of distinction or style – horror film.
Plot:
A creature is terrorizing an English countryside and township.
Review:
Seemingly from the night sky, a creature of unknown origin and type is descending upon innocent people in an English countryside in the 1800’s, and when found the victims have been horribly slashed and drained of their blood. Detective Inspector Quennell (Peter Cushing) has no leads and is confounded by the killings that appear to be animalistic in nature, and so he visits a colleague and friend named Mallinger (Robert Flemyng), a well respected professor of entomology who might be able to nudge him in the right direction as to what sort of animal or insect might be committing these heinous killings. We learn that it is more than possible that a large winged insect could be the cause of the deaths, but what seems less possible is that the creature might be a man-sized monstrosity! As it turns out, Mallinger has been performing experiments on his own daughter (Wanda Ventham) and plans on turning her into a massive monster with the intention of breeding a whole new race of wasp-like bloodsuckers! As Quennell zeroes in on Mallinger’s dastardly experiments, more bodies pile up, and if there’s any time left to stop the experiments from going even further, the Detective Inspector will have to confront his friend and face him in a horror-filled showdown!
An adequately entertaining creature feature in the Hammer or Amicus style, The Blood Beast Terror might’ve added even more creature action and gore to amp up its intensity, but as it stands, the film is a fairly classy – albeit one without a lot of distinction or style – horror film. Cushing and Flemyng add some gravitas to their roles, and the big reveal of the creature comes fairly late in the game and very quickly, but the movie works on the whole and should appease fans of these types of genre films. From director Vernon Sewell.
Kino Lorber’s brand new Blu-ray release of The Blood Beast Terror looks solid in a 2012 2K restoration and comes with a commentary by historians Kim Newman and writer /editor Stephen Jones, as well as the trailer.
