ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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A spooky and gory (for its time) movie about a truly demented doctor (Donald Wolfit) who needs regular injections of blood to counteract the effects of the suspended animation process he used years earlier to escape the death penalty for murder.

Now Wolfit is the head of an insane asylum, and he uses the inmates to obtain the blood he needs. Victor Maddern is the doctor's disfigured henchman, a cripple with one good eye and one bad eye which slumps hideously low on his face.

Vincent Ball is unjustly accused of murder and committed to Wolfit's asylum, where fellow inmate William Delvin warns Ball that terrible things are going on.

Later, Delvin attempts to escape, but Wolfit's vicious guard dogs catch him, and he ends up a tortured captive in Wolfit's lab, a living source of blood for the evil doctor.

The doctor captures Ball's fiance (lovely Barbara Shelley of Five Million Miles to Earth), and he intends to drain her blood, too.


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The climax involves an exciting struggle in the laboratory between evil-doctor Wolfit, disfigured-assistant Maddern, mutilated-victim Delvin, and brave-hero Ball. Even the blood-thirsty dogs get in on the act.

Directed by Henry Cass from a screenplay by Jimmy Sangster.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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IMBD trivia contains one item that's of special interest to film preservationist.
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Magnetic Video's VHS release had excellent full color, released in 1978. In the 1980s it was thought that no good color print of the film had survived, but this release was being overlooked. Kodak Eastman color film was introduced in the 1950s and it was not designed to last more than a few short years, for what they called the normal circulation life of distributed films.

As years went by everyone got angry at Kodak when the prints turned reddish. Kodak then in the 1980s improved it to last over 100 years. The original negative films did not fade, but they had to be transferred to positive prints for further releases.
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I've never seen this movie, but every time I see the lobby card below I start singing a variation of a famous song from South Pacific.

"Some enchanted evening . . . you may BIND a stranger!"


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)