It’s a shocking moment that comes out of nowhere and seems ill-placed in an otherwise bloody but silly mad scientist/monster romp.
The film’s most contentious moment – missing in many prints – comes during what starts out as a sexy ceremony out in the woods, the locals going through some sort of ritual that begins with a couple having sex and ends with pigs and goats being slaughtered on camera. The chlorophyll man is a nice idea (don’t even think about trying to make sense of the science though) but he’s poorly executed and not a great deal is done with him – he lurks around the undergrowth as the screen pulsates around him and he messily disposes of a few disposable extras and bit players but in the end he’s a rather mundane sort of monster. It looks great in stills but in motion it never looks like anything else than a man in a very shoddy make-up effect. One assumes that it was done to distract us away from how unconvincing the monster make-up actually is. It’s an effect that becomes tiresome on its first outing and is well-nigh unbearable by the end of the film. The screen starts to pulsate as the lens zooms in and out at high speed for no discernible reason. But the thing that will capture your attention most, and which will ultimately cause your eyes to bleed and your sanity to shatter, is Romero and his director of photography Justo Paulino’s insistence on using an irritating zoom effect every time the monster appears. There are plenty of things you notice as you plod your weary way through The Mad Doctor of Blood Island – the surprising amount nudity, the lashings of gore, severed limbs and heads and spilled intestines, and the inexcusable real animal slaughter scene that comes out of nowhere. People from the other islands say there’s a curse on it.” The passengers’ various searches lead them to Dr Lorca (Ronald Remy) the eponymous mad doctor who has been experimenting on locals in his search for a cancer cure, resulting in one unfortunate victim mutating into the monster as a result of “chlorophyll poisoning.” A ship arrives on Blood Island carrying American pathologist Bill Foster ( Ashley), looking to discover the cause of a chlorophyll-related disease afflicting the islanders, Sheila Willard (Angelique Pettyjohn) who is searching for her missing father and Carlos Lopez (Ronaldo Valdez) who Is hoping to persuade his mother to leave the island, described by the ship’s captain as “a pest-hole, a jink. The film itself begins with a naked woman running through the jungle and falling foul of green-skinned monster. The prologue – clearly added later as an afterthought – has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the film but at least gets things off to an amusing start as the narrator (voiced by star John Ashley) tells us that “I, a living, breathing creature of the cosmic entity, am now ready to enter the realm of those chosen to be allowed to drink of the Mystic Emerald fluids herein offered” and exhorts to the audience to “drink your sample of green blood and it is guaranteed that you can never turn into a green-blooded monster” and indeed in the States punters were supplied with a green drink to quaff at the appropriate moment.
The Mad Doctor of Blood Island, the third in the series, begins with some bored-looking young people (they were teenagers rounded up from families stationed at local US Air Force bases) knocking back vials of green liquid as a narrator witters on about “the Order of Green Blood” and leads us through this entirely superfluous ceremony to join its ranks. Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau. The Mad Doctor of Blood Island was one of a string of very loosely related films that have come to be known as the “ Blood Island” trilogy, which began with Brides of Blood (1968) and ended with Beast of Blood (1970) ( Terror is a Man from 1959 was something of a precursor) all directed or co-directed by Romero and all inspired to varying degrees by H. It turns out that not only does the scene in the still not appear in the actual film but the monster looks far more impressive frozen in time than it ever does in Gerardo de Leon and Eddie Romero film. One of the most enduring images was of a hideously decomposing victim of a “chlorophyll man” from the Filipino The Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968) (reproduced below) which seemed impossibly exotic at the time. In the review of Kyôfu kikei ningen: Edogawa Rampo zenshû/Horrors of Malformed Men (1969) I waxed lyrical about Denis Gifford’s 1973 book A Pictorial History of Horror Movies and the cornucopia of strange sights it offered, from the collection of eponymous deformed men from Teruo Ishii’s film to the woman with the axe in her head from The Black Cat (1965), from the sinister skeleton in Kyûketsu dokuro-sen/The Living Skeleton (1968) to the cackling undead disposing of a body in The Plague of the Zombies (1966).
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