Powerful

A lot of fun.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

I'd have to do research to figure out which version I saw, based upon what I've read, but frankly, I don't want to waste any more on this film (if you can call it that) than I have to. It is a hodge podge of multiple plots, none really developed, part 60's crime drama, part psychedelic anti-establishment protest, and most interestingly (not by much) mad doctor horror film with poor John Carradine sinking very low in his extremely long career and somehow being the only classy element of what has to be one of the most pointless movies ever made. When the individual stories do meet up, the bad acting, horrible writing and truly wretched production values have already ruined half of this lengthy flick. How this was made, let alone distributed, is a puzzle to me, being not only everything I describe it above to be, but ghastly dull. The soundtrack is noisy, so if you make it through, it won't lull you to sleep, but chances are, you'll give up after the appearance of Carradine's overly tanned daughter who delivers an embarrassingly lifeless performance.

Blood of Ghastly Horror (1972) * 1/2 (out of 4) Drive-in master Al Adamson strikes back once again with another mix and match film. Apparently in 1964 Adamson finished a police thriller but it couldn't be sold so he and producer Sam Sherman started filming new scenes to try and make it better. Five or six films were eventually "made" but this one here is the one that finally sold and apparently made a profit. Considering there are five or more movies on display here it's pretty hard to follow any story but it involves scientists (John Carradine) doing brain work on a killer who eventually goes out and kills. Make sense? Well the movie certainly doesn't. The Carradine footage is obviously the most recent thing filmed for the movie and he does have a few campy moments, which earn a few laughs but I'm really not sure what his footage has to do with too much of the film. The cop footage seems to come from Adamson's Psycho a Go-Go, which is also pretty bad but this film does have its charm because it moves at a nice speed and you really can't believe your eyes with what you're watching. Tommy Kirk and Kent Taylor are also scattered around the film and what they're doing exactly is anyone's guess. This is certainly an important film if one wants to see this type of drive-in fluff but others should stay far away.

Don't ask me how I did it, but even though this is technically a botched and splicey patchwork of a movie, I had a good time with it. It's poorly made to be sure, but somehow it's also mesmerizing in its ineptness at the same time. It helps going in to know the history...It was directed by drive-in movie maestro Al Adamson (of "Dracula vs. Frankenstein" fame), who originally planned a straight jewelry heist picture in 1964 until meeting up with producer/mentor Sam Sherman who persuaded him to gradually add new scenes and ideas specifically for the horror/sci-fi television market in the early '70s. It was finally sold to TV with the lucrative title of MAN WITH THE SYNTHETIC BRAIN, but Sherman thought it could be milked further, so the movie was also played at theaters where it became known as BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR.Ultimately emerging as connected pieces of different half-baked incarnations (one of these was even called PSYCHO A-GO-GO before the music was eliminated), the movie begins with a zombified maniac running around town strangling people. Through flashbacks within other flashbacks we're treated to a background story of how a Vietnam vet named Joe Corey was wounded and then "helped" by a wacky scientist named Dr. Vanard (the always welcome John Carradine) who planted some sort of mechanism inside Corey's head and unintentionally turned him into a murderer with a taste for jewel robbing (which is how the old 1964 heist footage managed to get utilized). But this man-made killer's got an angry dad who's also a scientist and is even nuttier than Dr. Vanard. He's out to even the score for what was done to his victimized son, and that includes making a mummified and whimpering she-monster out of Vanard's sexy daughter (Regina Carrol, director Adamson's wife).This isn't a film for most audiences, but anyone who revels in idiotic or badly made exploitation films of the '60s and '70s would want to get a load of this concoction. You've got to hand it to Sam Sherman and Al Adamson, in any case... they knew how to have fun and freak out audiences. The current DVD available by Troma is badly framed, however... this cuts out some widescreen and results in an unfortunate pan/scan affair. But it's unlikely at the time of this writing that there's any better source material. * out of ****

First they filmed a crime drama. Then they decided to make it into some sort of sci-fi flick, by adding footage which explains the criminal's behaviour in terms of a synthetic brain place in the head of a soldier. Then they decide to wrap this with some incredibly trashy low-budget early 70s zombie monster footage.