Bloodtype Online

    In this release from American International Pictures of an adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft short story a young man named Stephen travels to England to visit his fiancé Susan and meet her family for the first time.  It becomes apparent that something is amiss the moment that he gets off the train and tries to hire a taxi.  As soon as Stephen mentions that he needs to be taken to Witley estate his suitcase is thrown from the taxi and he is left standing.  After getting much the same response from the rest of the town he ends up walking to the estate where he is told by Susan’s father (played by Boris Karloff) that he isn’t welcome there either.  Of course Susan is excited that he has arrived and whisks him away to see her mother who has take very ill and is bedridden.  The two of them insist that he stays and soon enough both Susan and Stephen begin hearing strange sounds and seeing mysterious figures moving about the estate.  After the butler dies and the elder Witley buries him in the backyard Stephen becomes really concerned and starts to follow Susan’s father around the estate.  Eventually he discovers that in the basement of the house is a meteor that is giving off radiation, which is turning everyone that is exposed to it into monsters!  This leads to a showdown between Stephen and Susan’s father who has himself become a glowing radioactive monster.   

    I’m a big fan of cheesy monster movies and a huge fan of American International Pictures but Die Monster Die just doesn’t work for me.  To begin with I’m a big fan of Boris Karloff and to watch him in this movie is just painful.  His acting as always is top notch, but it is very clear that the man was very frail and weak during the filming of this movie.  His character spends most of the film in a wheelchair and when he is out of the chair it is clearly not Karloff in most of the scenes.  The movie itself is very slow with little to no action to keep the viewer interested.  Add to that some fairly uninspired camera work and direction all add up to a very long eighty minutes.  In addition to Karloff the cast does a bang up job trying to make something from a very weak script about meteors and radiation but it just doesn’t work.  Now I’m going to get really picky here and add that as a fan of H.P. Lovecraft and the fact that they moved the setting from the United States to England really bugged me.  While the packaging on this DVD may remind you of the Poe pictures that AIP was also churning out during the sixties don’t be fooled this is nowhere near the quality of those films.   

Rating - *

-John "El Juan" Shatzer