<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Queen of Blood, 1966, 81 minutes, (also known as Planet of Blood) is the most successful of the sci-fi vehicles Roger Corman cobbled together from excellent Russian footage (Meshte Nastreshu, 1963 likely provided the goods here).

Director Curtis Harrington has ties to Kenneth Anger’s strange experimental films and made experimental shorts himself, including The Fall of the House of Usher. His best-known films may be 1967’s What’s the Matter with Helen?, and Night Tide, in 1963. But Queen of Blood, which shows up fairly often on cable channels, is probably most familiar to viewers now.

Perhaps its greatest claim to fame these days is that Dennis Hopper played one of three astronauts on the doomed ship, with Florence Marley as a green-skinned alien vampire feeding on the crew one after another. John Saxon plays another of the spacemen, while Basil Rathbone adds the authority of his six-foot-deep voice to their communications with Earth. Judi Meridith played the requisite woman-in-danger. Critics have pointed out that the plot is similar to both that of It, Terror from Beyond Space in 1959 and the much more successful Alien in 1979.

Forrest J Ackerman has a cameo and gave Marley nice play in Famous Monsters of Filmland, the magazine he still edited when the film appeared.