Night of the Blood Beast (1958) on Netflix
A rocket crashes in the woods and the team finds the pilot's body without a heartbeat yet with the blood pressure of a living man. A creature stalks the tracking station.
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- Netflix1.8/5
- IMDb3.6/102,726 votes
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Plot summary
John Corcoran's rocket lifts off as the first crewed American launch and is struck by an unknown object, forcing him to abort. The ship comes down too fast and crashes in the woods near a tracking station, where technicians Dave Randall and Donna Bixby recover his body. Dr. Alex Wyman, technician Steve Dunlap and physician Julie Benson, Corcoran's fiancé, join them. The corpse shows no rigor mortis, no heartbeat or pulse, yet it holds the blood pressure of a living man, and its blood teems with cells that resist the white blood cells. The radio stops working. Randall goes out to check the transformers and is attacked in the underbrush by a large creature, which he escapes with a few pistol shots.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Night of the Blood Beast (1958)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Screenwriter Martin Varno won both arbitrations against the Cormans, but Roger Corman refused to pay him, which cost Corman the right to use Writers Guild of America members on his films for several years, until he finally paid up.
- Even after Varno won arbitration over the writing credit, Gene Corman kept his on-screen original story credit: distributor American International Pictures told Varno that removing it would mean recalling all the prints and changing them at a cost of thousands of dollars, so he let it stand.
- Tracking-station exteriors were shot at a television station on Mount Lee, said to be the first TV station built in Los Angeles and used during World War II to send information and propaganda to overseas allies; Martin Varno got permission simply by calling the city and asking, and Los Angeles charged $8 per actor, with the crew any size.
- Art director Daniel Haller, later a film director, built the rocket ship himself from plywood cut into circles, covered with a plastic sheet and spray-painted to look metallic, and brought a trailer onto the sound stage so he could sleep there between work sessions.
- Most of the tracking station's night scenes were filmed during the day, so the crew looked for shadows or blocked out the sun to fake nighttime; Gene Corman called it "one of the more mobile units I've ever been involved with", normally everybody chases the sun, "we were chasing the shadows."
- Alexander Laszlo's score was reused for the Cormans' Attack of the Giant Leeches and then used again for their 1959 film Beast from Haunted Cave, which was directed by Monte Hellman.
- The monster costume scenes in Teenage Caveman and Night of the Blood Beast were shot about two weeks apart, and for Blood Beast the nose was cut down to more resemble a beak after somebody on the set said it "looks too Jewish."
