Rating: 
Summary: The Moral? Never Eat Sea Monkeys.
Review: This sublime little gem from the one and only Roger Corman is a fun and cheesy way to spend 62 minutes of your life. After being launched into space via the magic of some of the lamest animation you will ever see, pilot John Corcoran loses control of his spacecraft and plummets to earth. For crashing at such high speed the spaceship is in remarkably good shape. NASA dispatches their one Jeep to the crash site and arrives within minutes. (Note: it is inadvisable to smoke cigarettes at an aircraft accident site.) John has one cut, but is dead, (evidently) although there is a lot of medical doubletalk about his skin color, so they whisk him to the base in the official NASA flatbed truck for examination. Once back at the base John comes back to life with no warning. They draw a blood sample and see a hysterical piece of animation of one cell, oh sorry, 'alien amorphic cell structure', gobbling up another in the microscope. They decide they best put John in front of a fluoroscope to look inside him, and, (oh the humanity!) he is revealed to be teeming with what appear to be Sea Monkey embryos. John rapidly realizes that the thing that has been terrorizing the base since the crash is a Blood Beast from a different planet, and he is carrying its spawn. Surprisingly, he ends up leading the pro-monster lobby, and decides to reason with the Blood Beast. We actually get to see the felonious (murder and kidnapping) Blood Beast quite a bit (and his amusing shadow a couple of times, too.) It is normally good to get a lot of screen time for the monster in one of these movies, but here, I am not so sure it was that great of an idea, especially in daylight: the Blood Beast looks like a cross between something from 'Sigmund and the Sea Monsters' and a giant puffin with beak, claws, zipper, and very bad complexion. In short, the Blood Beast is a little less than horrifying. Ultimately the movie evokes a bit of 'It Conquered the World' or 'Zontar, the Thing From Venus' in the dramatic ending. Throughout the movie there is dreadful acting (especially the women, for some reason), and great gothic music, which has been recycled from earlier Corman films. This movie was given the MST3K treatment to good effect, and I wish that version was available on DVD as well. Even without the MST3K treatment, this movie is fun to watch and makes you wish that they still made monster movies like this one. Thanks, Roger!
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