Beast of Blood (known as Beast of the Dead when it ran on U.S. TV in the late 1970s) is actually a direct follow-up to The Mad Doctor of Blood Island, an American-Filipino co-production from low budget independent company Hemisphere Pictures. Aspects of the first film are alluded to in this sequel without much explanation. This isn't really a problem, though, as the plot's pretty basic. Besides, there's not the remotest possibility anyone seeing this thing would give a damn.
Frankly, I expected more from this movie. On paper it sounds like a cheese lover's delight... On a remote tropical island a mad doctor conducts nightmarish experiments on humans, resulting in a goofy monster with slimy green skin and a severe tartar control problem. The good guys mount a jungle commando mission to end the villain's reign of terror. Sounds groovy to me! Unfortunately most of this potential is wasted with a sluggish, yawn-inducing narrative. Having a lead actor who's little more than a block of wood with Elvis sideburns certainly doesn't help matters.
The film does start out promisingly, however. A young American doctor, Bill Foster (Beach Blanket Bingo's John Ashley), is leaving Blood Island by boat after the events of the first movie — I have no idea what those were as I haven't seen it. Suddenly the monster appears onboard, killing all the crewmembers with an axe. Foster battles the creature but an accidental fire sets off an explosion which sinks the boat, leaving him floating in the ocean holding on to some wreckage. The monster — who's got huge yellow fangs and mucusy skin lathered in what looks like guacamole, hot dog relish and Vaseline — has also survived, washing ashore on Blood Island. He stumbles off into the jungle just before the animated opening credits, which were designed by the same folks who provided title sequences for Al Adamson's Dracula vs. Frankenstein and Horror of the Blood Monsters. Unfortunately we don't see the Beast again until halfway through the film, and by that point he's had his head chopped off! More on that in a minute.
Immediately after the credits we see Foster boarding another boat, heading back to Blood Island. (Why he's doing this isn't explained until near the end of the film, in a throwaway line.) Onboard he meets a reporter for a Honolulu newspaper, Myra Russell (Celeste Yarnall, who costarred with The King himself, Elvis, in Live a Little, Love a Little). She wants to do a story on the events of the previous film (whatever those were) but Foster is noncommittal. (In fact, Ashley's entire performance is noncommittal, as he walks through this picture with the same blank expression throughout, delivering his lines in a disinterested monotone.) Along with the boat's captain (co-writer Bev Miller), Foster and Myra land at Blood Island and visit with some natives the doctor knows from the first movie. They learn that villagers have been periodically kidnapped by "The Green Men", guys in loincloths and covered in green skin lesions. Then Myra is kidnapped, so Foster and a Filipino woman who's got the hots for him set off into the jungle to track her abductors. An attempt to help Myra escape fails, but Foster sees that Razak (Bruno Punzalan), the bald, monkey-eared henchman of his old nemesis Dr. Lorca, is the leader of the armed thugs holding her captive. Their trail is followed to a hidden mountain encampment. As help is summoned from the village, Myra becomes the unwilling guest of Lorca (Eddie Garcia), the film's Dr.No-like archvillain. (Aside from being evil he wears an eyepatch, has a bad limp, and is burned across part of his face.) He uses unwilling human guinea pigs in his immoral experiments, which somehow involve chlorophyl and which earlier produced the slimy monster we saw in the opening sequence. The titular Beast, by the way, has been recaptured by Lorca and is now held in his underground laboratory. To render it easier to control, Lorca has cut off the monster's head, keeping both the body and severed head alive by artificial means. Just what he's attempting to achieve by all this is never explained. (He does hold one-sided conversations with the head, however.) It all culminates with Foster, the Captain, and the village chief leading an armed assault on Lorca's compound to free Myra; the Beast's animated head gets final revenge on the mad doctor as the papier-mâché cavern crumbles around them.
Until its final 30 minutes Beast of Blood is just a monotonous drag. Things pick up considerably once Dr. Lorca comes on the scene, with some unintentionally funny dialog, amusingly inept action sequences, and the reappearance of the monster. There are a few fleeting moments of Grade-A cheese, as when the Beast's noggin (the mask-wearing actor's head stuck through a hole cut in a table) gets to speak. Judging by the opening mayhem, had the monster showed up now and then before this it'd have been a livelier picture. Instead we get a lot of 'jungle trek' scenes with pauses here and there for Ashley to drone a bit of dialog. The sound effects are pretty bad but not in an amusing sense; they're just irritating. (Regardless of where characters tread — be it indoors, the jungle, or in a cave — the foley sounds like people stepping on discarded peanut shells.) All the dialog was poorly looped afterwards and the terrible music score ranges from 'Get Smart in the Jungle' to 1920s silent movie accompaniment. Given the potential of the available exploitation elements, Beast of Blood fumbles the ball when it should've easily scored a few points. If the other Filipino-shot horror flicks in the so-called "Blood Island Trilogy" are this lame, I'll likely pass.
