Bloody Queen

TCM did a salute to Roger Corman some months back, which once again gave me the opportunity to record several lower-budget titles that I'd never heard of before their TCM airings. This should, I suppose, not be a surprise, considering how many movies Corman produced over the course of his career. One of them was a film inspired by Soviet science fiction, Queen of Blood.

The year is 1990, about two dozen years in the future since the movie was released in 1966. Humans have made it to the moon and found it lifeless, so the question of whether there is in fact life out there is one that's still open. Working for the IIST, the International Institute of Space Technology, is astronaut and expert in communications Laura James (Judi Meredith). She picks up a signal that may be from extraterrestrial intelligence, and her boss Dr. Farraday (Basil Rathbone) agrees. In what should be an ominous sign, the message is that an alien race is planning to send an "ambassador" to Earth.

The Institute then gets another message that the ambassador has not been able to make it to Earth, but has instead crash-landed on Mars. This means that the Institute is going to send out an expedition to Mars to search for the ambassador. Laura hopes that she'll be on the spaceship with her boyfriend and fellow astronaut Allan Brenner (John Saxon), but he's put on a different ship. This leaves her to travel with Paul Grant (a young Dennis Hopper) and Anders Brockman (Robert Boon) on their ship to Mars, with Allan and another astronaut following on another ship.

Laura's ship does make it to Mars, albeit not without some difficult. And, despite the size of Mars, they're able to find the alien ship, only to discover that the one passenger on the ship is really quite dead. The presumption is that the rest of the crew was able to make it to escape pods or something, and a search is set up for that, a search in which Allan and his crew will take part.

It is indeed Allan who finds the escape pod, only it's on the Martian moon Phobos, which is going to present all sorts of logistical problems considering the difficulties of interplanetary travel. They also find that there is one surviving alien on the escape pod, a female alien who gets called the alien queen (Florence Marly). The bring her down to the surface of Mars, and the ship on which Laura and her crew are located.

They try some scientific research, which is a bit difficult since the alien doesn't seem to speak English, but then one night when only Paul is away, the queen attacks him and kills him for his blood! The other three know that the queen is a problem, but for whatever reason don't tie her down or anything. Apparently they want to bring her back to Earth alive and in good condition, which seems like an iffy proposition if she's already murdered one of their number.

Queen of Blood is a moderately interesting movie, although I have to admit I think the story would have been more appropriate for one of those science fiction anthology TV series that were not uncommon in the 1960s. The movie only runs about 80 minutes, but it's surprisingly slow for an 80-minute movie. Stick the material into a 30- or 60-minute time slot, and it probably works better. Queen of Blood isn't great, but it's the sort of thing where you can see why Roger Corman would have been drawn to it.