Terror Is a Man

An atmospheric ripoff of Wells' "The Island of Dr. Moreau"
"Blood Creature" is the reissue title for this film, originally released as "Terror Is A Man" but also known as "Creature from Blood Island" and "The Gory Creatures." The script by Harry Paul Harber is obviously inspired by the uncredited H.G. Wells novel "The Island of Dr. Moreau," which is enough to tell you that this 1959 film is about a mad scientist turning animals into people. But except for a tacky little horror film gimmick, this is an above average B-movie of the horror genre.

What we have is a shipwrecked American sailor, William Fitzgerald (Richard Derr), whose lifeboat ends up on Isla de Sangre, where he is rescued by Dr. Charles Girard (Francis Lederer) and his assistant, Walter Perrera (Oscar Keesee Jr), who are on a hunting expedition for an escaped lab animal. The young sailor is attracted to the doctor's wife, Frances (Greta Thyssen, a Danish beauty queen), who wants to leave the island and her husband as soon as possible. He was a successful New York...

First and Best of the Blood Island Movies
A shipwrecked sailor washes ashore on Blood Island and is nursed back to health by the local mad doctor (Francis Lederer) and his neglected blonde bombshell of a wife. Our mad doctor has spent two years surgically transforming a black panther into the semblance of a man, complete with some sort of drug regimen to enlarge the creature's brain. Smart as it now is, the beastie keeps escaping and killing the locals, who get fed up and evacuate the island, leaving the foreigners to their fate. This is pretty much a by-the-numbers imitation of the Universal horror films, with obvious inspiration from Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau. It's Lederer's performance as an unnervingly calm, ultra-rational scientist that keeps the movie from becoming a cliche - the insanity is in his work, not in his demeanor. which just seems to make it more chilling.

CURIO FOR FILM BUFFS
I stayed up late one night when I was about 10 yrs old and watched this movie in the dark. It was called "BLOOD CREATURE" then and my parents were VERY concerned about my appetite for horror films and had forbade me to watch it. HA! It scared the bejeezus out of me and I spent the rest of the night looking out the window to be sure nothing was "out there"...Of course, today I see that it's a low budget oddity and nothing like what upset me so bad all those years ago. But what I appreciate about it is just that--it's an odd little movie that really is kind of weird in it's own way. Vivisection, mad doctor, voluptuous heroine, disoriented hero, and a monster running around an island jungle scaring off the natives. All this on a low budget and not done very badly either. What's not to like? The black & white photography and the island atmosphere give it a strange,goofy Saturday-afternoon-at-the-movies-when-I-was-a-kid feel that compensates for the so-so acting (or lack of in some cases)...

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