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ONCE UPON A TIME AT THE DRIVE-IN: The Testament of Al Adamson

It was 50 years ago last year that the cheap and peculiarly patchwork films of Al Adamson first began to assert themselves on drive-in and grindhouse screens across America. Initially recognized for his horror films (Blood of Dracula’s Castle, Horror of the Blood Monsters, Brain of Blood, and especially Dracula vs. Frankenstein), he went on to add biker, action, blaxploitation, sexploitation, and even family fare to his rickety roster before retiring from his director’s chair sometime in the 1980s and vanishing into private life. The rise of Adamson’s unpretentious output happened to coincide with the decline of the Hollywood studio system as well as such old guard avatars as American International Pictures, Britain’s Hammer Films and Amicus Productions, whose imprints always guaranteed a certain level of production value and class. Adamson’s work was something of a throwback to the gore films of Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs!), but whereas Lewis’ work in horror was a taboo-breaking branching-out from his earlier nudie-cutie fare, Adamson’s pictures were endearing for their sentimental casting of veteran character actors well past their prime; technically, they didn’t bear comparing even to the old Monogram or PRC titles where Bela Lugosi was often found slumming during the 1940s, but the average drive-in patron could look at them and think, after his third or fourth beer of the night, “Damn, I could do better than this!” And sure enough, Adamson’s rough-and-ready example and his impressive earnings played a part in encouraging the powderkeg of DIY horror breakthroughs that went epidemic around the turn of the decade. Just to name the Americans, these feral young newcomers included George A. Romero, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, Bob Kelljan, David Durston, Andy Milligan, S.F. Brownrigg, even Oliver Stone, not to mention the many young and international filmmakers associated with Roger Corman’s New World Pictures.

1969’s Golden Anniversary honors were largely drawn to Quentin Tarantino’s behind-the-scenes movie fantasy Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood, which was much praised for its magical extrication of the beautiful and talented actress Sharon Tate from her hideous murder on August 9th of that year. For some of us, Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood links directly to thoughts of Al Adamson; in early 1969, he shot parts of his biker thriller Satan’s Sadists at the notorious Spahn Movie Ranch in Los Angeles’ Ventura County, where thwarted songwriter Charles Manson lived with his “family” members, inculcating in them a blood-lusting resentment for the established Hollywood order that would not invite him in. When Satan’s Sadists was first released in June 1969 (its trailer promising “A Rebellion of Human Garbage!” led by West Side Story star Russ Tamblyn), it quickly disappeared… but in the wake of the Tate/La Bianca murders just a few months later, its distributor Independent-International shipped it back out with a new, sleazier publicity campaign that actually emphasized its prophetic Manson Family associations. “See the Shocking Story Behind the Headlines… Wild Hippies on a Murder Spree!,” crowed the ads; “Actually Filmed Where the Tate Suspects Lived Their Wild Experiences!”And just in case this wasn’t enough, the film was frequently co-billed with Tate’s 1968 British film Eye of the Devil, now being sold with the tagline “Weird, mystic cult slaughters innocent victims!”

As irony would have it, almost thirty years after so grossly pandering to the public’s prurient interest in the murder, the director of Satan’s Sadists got the biggest headlines of his career when Al Adamson was named as the murder victim in a crime story nationally broken in August 1995, a couple of months after his mysterious disappearance.

This story is now the subject matter of a feature-length documentary by filmmaker David Gregory: Blood and Flesh: The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson, which premiered late last year at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal and at the UK Fright Fest.

The son of 1930s western star Denver Dixon (in truth, transplanted New Zealand native Victor Adamson), Al had been kicking around the exploitation film business his entire life. In 1960, working under the alias “Lyle Felice”, he took the lead role in a Western entitled Halfway To Hell, which he ended up co-directing with his father. The film was never released and the young Adamson wasn’t able to put another film together until 1965, when he wore all the various hats needed to make his first official feature Echo of Terror, a jewel heist programmer somehow given the breath of life on a mere $2,000 investment.

Low on thrills and boasting no stars, Echo of Terror followed in the footsteps of Halfway To Hell by never finding a distributor. It remained on the shelf until Adamson made the fateful acquaintance of Samuel M. Sherman, then working in the publicity department at Hemisphere Pictures, designing campaigns for the likes of Filipino imports like Eddie Romero’s war drama The Ravagers and Gerardo de Leon’s vampire opus The Blood Drinkers. Sherman had just finished a two-year stint as the editor of the Warren Publications magazine Screen Thrills Illustrated, devoted to the movie serials of the 1930s and ‘40s – so he was familiar with the name Denver Dixon and formed a fast friendship with his son. He screened Edge of Terror and, while agreeing it was unviable in its present shape, he was impressed by what Adamson had accomplished with so little money. They didn’t yet have the means to produce an entirely new picture, so they made a reel’s worth of changes to what they had, and that’s how Echo of Terror – with a modicum of new footage featuring some go-go dancers - became Psycho A Go Go.

Through Hemisphere, this jarring concoction was shipped out in support of The Ravagers in Rochester, New York at the end of 1965, and it remained in circulation in New England and Midwestern states through 1967, first playing with another Gerardo de Leon picture, Curse of the Vampires (retitled Blood Creatures) and later appearing at the bottom of triple – and even quadruple - bills with Hammer’s Dracula Prince of Darkness (1965) and Plague of the Zombies (1966).

Even as Psycho A Go Go was tempting sullen motorists to stick around for the free donuts and coffee being served to anyone who lasted till the fourth feature, Sherman and Adamson could see that the clock was ticking against the timeliness of its title. So yet another scheme was hatched to squeeze maximum earnings out of a minimal further investment. Sherman knew more about the film business than Adamson did, so it was likely he who suggested they write some additional mad scientist gobbledegook, hire John Carradine for a day or two, and ship out their brand new picture with a more exploitable title like Fiend With the Electronic Brain – pretty much exactly what producer Jerry Warren had done some years earlier with the reels of unmarketable Swedish and Chilean footage that he sold to unsuspecting patrons as Invasion of the Animal People (1959) and Curse of the Stone Hand (1965), starring John Carradine!

They followed through on the plan and did indeed secure a distribution deal (or at least an arrangement) with David L. Hewitt’s American General Pictures, who got Fiend With the Electronic Brain into a couple of drive-ins in Corpus Christie and Austin, Texas in late 1967 and early 1968 as a co-feature to Jack Hill’s as-yet-unrecognized classic Spider Baby. On the books, it gave them credit for having produced and released a new picture that year, which made their new partnership the beneficiary of a much-needed tax break and a foundation from which they were able to produce their first real joint effort. This was Blood of Dracula’s Castle (1969, also starring Carradine), made in partnership with Paragon International Pictures, as was its co-feature, Bud Townsend’s Nightmare In Wax starring Cameron Mitchell. Released through Crown International, the double bill premiered in May 1969 and Blood of Dracula’s Castle in particular was never out of theatrical circulation for the next two years.

You might think they would have moved on to more important things, but the Frankensteinian efforts to make a bigger, better Fiend With the Electronic Brain continued to occupy Sherman and Adamson. Sherman’s success with Blood-titled campaigns – ranging from 1970s Mad Doctor of Blood Island to 1971’s Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror – had convinced him that “Blood” was the most commercially vital word in horror terminology. His theory was subsequently bourne out by the success of his 1972 “Chiller Carnival of Blood” – a drive-in festival composed of old, decomposing Hemisphere titles (1959’s Terror Is A Man retitled Blood Creature, Mad Doctor of Blood Island retitled Blood Doctor, Theater of Death retitled Blood Fiend, and Brides of Blood retitled Blood Brides). Sherman’s “good luck noun” was prominently applied to their old warhorse the next time it surfaced, this time with new footage featuring Kent Taylor and Adamson’s wife Regina Carroll, who had become a fixture of his work since Satan’s Sadists. The rechristened Blood of Ghastly Horror actually headed drive-in triple bills upon its release in January 1973 – and some ticket buyers may have been understandably annoyed to discover that it was the same film that had been playing on television stations across the country as early as April 1972 under the title Man With the Synthetic Brain.

This is but one of numerous stories of patchwork reinventions and retitlings attending the filmography of Al Adamson, which will receive the fullest possible examination when Severin Films releases the mind-staggering tributary box set Al Adamson – The Masterpiece Collection, on April 21st. Compiling all 32 of Adamson’s surviving feature films and variants on 14 Blu-ray discs (all Region A, except for Discs 1, 12, and 14, which are region free), a 128-page book, as well as the David Gregory documentary, this Matterhorn of home video retrospectives will be limited to only 2,000 copies and supply is dwindling fast. The dwindling is faster still for two variants packed with additional incentives: you’ve already missed the “Bundle of Ghastly Horror” (limited to 200 copies and containing posters signed by Adamson stars John “Bud” Cardos and Zandor Vorkov), but the limited 300-copy “Bundle A Go Go” retains most of the contents - a T-shirt, dimestore vampire fangs, 7” soundtrack single of music from The Female Bunch, and Adamson patch and enamel pin - while substituting a signed postcard for the posters. Pick your poison at severin-films.com.

If you’re wondering, “Do I need this?,” only you can answer that question reliably. However, should you be open to further temptation, I can whole-heartedly recommend the documentary Blood and Flesh: The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson, which is available for purchase separately and now streaming on such outlets as Amazon Prime, Vudu, and Google Play.

by Tim Lucas

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