Alternate titles : Grave Desires, Tomb of the Living Dead, Blood Doctor.

Tagline : "Hideous zombies, lusting for bizarre human pleasures."

The Mad Doctor of Blood Island If you're familiar with the film "Brides of Blood" (if not, use the links below to checkout my review NOW), you'll remember that it was set on the fictional "Blood Island". Well the director liked the name, so when he was asked to do another movie in a similar vein, he decided to use it again for this next film.

Owing nothing to the previous movie, apart from being set on an island with the same name, Dr Bill Foster (John Ashley, who co-incidentally also starred in "Brides of Blood", though in a different role) has been sent to the remote isle of Blood Island to investigate reports that some of the natives are turning green and going mad.

After doing some poking around, Foster discovers that this is the work of the islands physician, Dr Lorca (Ronald Remy), who's not been sticking to his hippocratic oath and has been performing some decidedly unethical experiments on some of the island folk with a mutant strain of chlorophyll, which has some "interesting" effects when injected into the human blood stream.

Lorca thinks it may hold the key to eternal life, even though it has the unfortunate side effect of turning its subjects into mutated green monsters. To compound matters, one of his test subjects has escaped, so now there's a huge green blooded monster with an extremely bad complexion loose on the island, which for some reason causes the camera to zoom in and out rapidly whenever its on screen, and has been going around dismembering the natives (particularly the scantily clad females).

So with the monster running around terrifying the locals and Lorca killing anyone that stands in the way of his research, Dr Foster and his group find they've got their work cut out for them if they want to bring his grisly experiments to a halt.

As with "Brides of Blood", which was filmed earlier in the same year (1968 to be precise), this is good old fashioned drive-in movie fair, featuring a fair old amount of nudity and blood for its day (though pretty tame by today's standards) and is extremely fun, in a cheesy kind of way (which reminds me, don't be surprised if the film starts with a prologue urging to viewer to drink a sample of green blood, which was a gimmick used for the films initial release at drive-in theatres).

If you've seen the previous movie, you may get a little confused if you come to this thinking its a sequel (which it isn't as such) as, despite being set on an island of the same name and utilising most of the same cast, including lead actor John Ashley, the story is completely unrelated and the cast are in completely different roles. So just remember to view this as a standalone film, otherwise you'll be left scratching your head as to how this all fits in.

There was actually a proper sequel filmed to this, entitled "Beast of Blood", which I've also reviewed, but be sure to check out this film first.

Overall Marks : 5/10.

Terrifying Trivia

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Cast & Crew

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