In the grand tradition of top-heavy horror hostesses, corny puns, and low-rent cinema, Morella's Blood Vision is the latest in a line of drive-in DVD anthologies provided courtesy of movie cheese-master Fred Olen Ray's Retromedia and Infinity Entertainment Group.
A collection of three obscuro horror flicks from the sixties and seventies, two of which get introduced in shot-for-video sequences featuring the zaftig Morella, Blood Vision features Del Tenney's Zombies (which also was released under the much more evocative title, I Eat Your Skin), a Philippine horror item entitled The Blood Seekers, and the seventies Southern survival tale Blood Stalkers. According to the DVD case, there's also supposed to be a trailer for something entitled Blood of the Man Devil on the disc, but I'm damned if I could find it.
Morella's brief opening sequences aren't much to speak of, though they do have that all-important, one-take, local channel, middle-of-the-night feel to 'em. Don't know why there isn't an intro segment for Blood Stalkers, though I liked the way she stabs a turnip as a comment on the relatively bloodless nature of Blood Seekers. As a dirty-minded post-post-post-adolescent, I know I'd gladly watch more Morella.
As for the movies themselves, Zombie proves to be a very of-its-decade mid-sixties cheapie. In it, Tenney, who is perhaps better known for The Horror of Party Beach (once featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000), tells the tale of a swingin' bachelor novelist (William Joyce) who travels with his agent and his agent's blond bimbo wife to Voodoo Island to investigate dire doings on the tropical isle. Said evil deeds involve a mad scientist and his predictably fetching daughter, plus an army of zombies with bug-eyes and what looks like an excess amount of calamine lotion on their faces. In one of the movie's proto-dumb moments, our hero swims across a lagoon with a pistol in his pants, then pulls it out to fire at a zombie. Even the kids in the audience were shouting aw, c'mon! with that one, though they probably dug the bit where a fisherman's head gets lopped off by a machete-wielding zombie. For the record, no skin-eating actually occurs onscreen, but we do get a lot of movie-padding voodoo dance scenes.
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