|
Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
|
|
|
|
|
Amir (Reed Hadley), benevolent ruler of Kalid, is dying - but his three
confidants, Bob (Grant Williams), Tracey (Regina Carrol) and Mohammed
(Zandor Vorkov) have found a way to keep him alive - via brain
transplantation, performed by one American doctor Trenton (Kent Taylor).
Thing is, the whole thing has to be kept top secret, plus Doc Trenton's
methods are not especially legal. Trenton needs a donor, who
would volunteer to give up his body to Amir's brain ... so he sends
out his hulking brute Gor (John Bloom) to get him one, but the donor, a
no-good burglar (Mike HAven) gets squashed when Gor persuades him to
volunteer, so Doc Trenton decides to take the horribly disfigured Gor as
his donor. Meanwhile, Trenton sees to it that Bob and Mohammed are
killed in a car accident, but somehow Bob survives the ordeal, hooks up
with Tracey, and tells her there's someone trying to sabotage the whole
deal - not realizing it is Trenton himself, who wanted to get Bob and
Mohammed out of the way to get Amir under his control, and also not
realizing that Tracey is secretly in cahoots with Trenton. Tracey and
Bob arrive at the doctor's just when it's time to wake up from his brain
transplant for Amir ... but Amir is less than pleased with his new look.
Tracey helps him escape from the doctor's lab and tells him that Bob is in
cahoots with the saboteurs, so Amir (in Gor's body of course) knocks him
out and the Doctor has him thrown into his dungeon before going after
Tracey and Amir. In the dungeon, Bob meets Katherine (Vicki Volante),
and the two manage to overcome Trenton's assistant (Angelo Rossitto) and
escape. Bob then tries to track down Amir, and finally catches up with
him when Trenton and Tracey are about to persuade him to follow their
cause. For some inexplicable reason, Bob then tries to kill Amir - after
all Amir was the ruler he loved and is now the least guilty party of them
all - but makes a poor job of it, so Trenton orders Amir to kill Bob ...
and somehow, Tracey gets mixed up in it too and is also killed. In the
end, Amir's brain has been transplanted into Bob's body, and he has
returned to his country to continue and rule it - but rule it only in Doc
Trenton's interest. Enjoyable low budget drive-in trash: The
story does not make all that much sense, the action is not all that
well-staged, and some of the more sleazy elements of the film are simply
left unexplained (like why does diminuitive lab assistant Angelo Rossitto
keep women chained up in the dungeon) ... but then, that's also part of
the film's charme, a film that's an exercise in cinematic bluntness (on a
budget) and in-your-face horror - especially the brain transplantation
sequence - mixed with a few action sequences. In a word, it's fun. Silly
yes, but fun as well. By the way, Brain of Blood was
advertised as the fourth part of the Filipino Blood
Island series, and Kent Taylor, the film's main villain,
actually was in Brides of Blood
(1966) while the film's score was lifted from Mad
Doctor of Blood Island (1968) but other than that the film has
nothing to do with the series. It was just that Hemisphere Pictures,
the Blood
Island series' co-producer and importer, wanted to cash in on these recent
successes.
|