Primarily devoted to Mexican lobby cards, or small placards displayed in theater entrances to advertise upcoming films, and American pressbooks, which provided promotional guides for theater owners, Cozzoli has curated an extensive array of cult classics on his blog, Zombos’ Closet. Not because of its sheer size (though he does have over 500 film artifacts), but because Cozzoli’s ephemera all relates to lesser-known horror movies of the 20th century. It’s a singular brew of a few different types of genre film you don’t often see smushed together under a single title, and it makes for something that’s likely to hang around in your brain for a bit.John Cozzoli’s collection is frightening. Mad Doctor of Blood Island has enough good and interesting things about it, especially considered in the context of when and where it was made, that it’s a worthwhile use of time for anyone whose tastes linger on the grotesque and lascivious. That may not have been what was intended, but she’s the only one out there bucking expectations, so it was refreshing to see her doing her thing. The one exception is Marla, the pseudo-villain of this tale, who actually kind of kicks ass. A lot of runtime is burned by dull characters standing around discussing dull things that have no bearing. That said, Mad Doctor of Blood Island isn’t mean-spirited at all in fact, it’s sort of got a lively, fun beach party vibe to it, if Frankie and Annette had been whisked to the Philippines and pursued by slaughter-drunk monstrosities with rotting, sluicing skin.īut unique ambience aside, there’s not enough butchery and salaciousness - and definitely not enough story - to keep things from dragging quite a bit in its hollow midsection. Just for the hell of it, Romero and crew also throw in some animal deaths. This flick has the feel of a prototypical cannibal film, where the sleaze and primitively but effectively executed gore are draped in the mossy tendrils of exotic flora and the atrocities are often overshadowed by the movie’s mesmerizing travelogue qualities. While Lewis’ splatter flicks often had a naivete about them in that almost nothing but the frequent decapitations, dismemberments, and disembowelments was adult-oriented, Romero and his co-director Gerardo de Léon often added gratuitous nudity to the equation to make things extra spicy. He’s been using chlorophyll to create scaly green monsters that are now rampaging around and massacring an assortment of naked women. Mad Doctor of Blood Island, from 1969, is the second film in the trilogy (the third if you count the series’ progenitor, Terror is a Man (1959)).Īs the title makes clear, the film’s about a mad scientist who resides on Blood Island. MAD DOCTOR BLOOD ISLAND GORE SERIESAround the same time, Filipino producer/director Eddie Romero was working on a series of films set in a fictional location called Blood Island, populated by green-blooded monsters with a predilection for rending humans limb from limb. And sure, he was definitely one of the earliest enthusiasts of on-screen fleshly carnage, but he wasn’t the only one. Herschell Gordon Lewis is generally hailed as the “Godfather of Gore,” thanks to his 1963 splatter flick, Blood Feast. Starring: John Ashley, Angelique Pettyjohn, Eddie Garcia
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