A zombie is killing people in what appears to be a random pattern. One of the people he kills is a cop. Lt. Cross (Tommy Kirk) and Sergeant Grimaldi (Arne Warde) discuss the case. A package shows up for Cross. Inside is the head of the cop. A note with the head references someone named Corey. Cross remembers the Corey case.
Joe Corey (Roy Morton) was a soldier with a shell fragment in his brain. Dr. Howard Vanard (John Carradine) operated on him. Vanard planted an electronic device in Corey’s brain trying to help him. The devise turns him into a psychopathic killer.
Two years later Corey and some other guys rob a jewelry store. The jewels end up in the back of a pickup truck. Corey traces the truck to someone named David Clarke (Kirk Duncan). He then goes looking for Clarke to get his jewels back. Clarke doesn’t have them. What he doesn’t know is that his daughter Nancy (K. K. Riddle) put the jewels inside her doll. Corey goes looking for Clarke’s wife Linda (Tracey Robbins) who happens to be a singer at a night club. Corey finds out that Linda and her daughter Nancy went on a vacation to Lake Tahoe. He follows them but is eventually shot and killed. Before leaving for Tahoe Corey tracked down Dr. Vanard and killed him for turning him into a walking killer.
Now, Dr. Vanard’s daughter, Susan (Regina Carrol), shows up to talk to Lt. Cross. She tells him that she heard a psychic voice at night telling her to come to where her father died. She said it was like being in a voodoo trance. Cross finds out that Corey’s father Elton Corey (Kent Taylor) was a practitioner of voodoo. Elton has created a zombie killer named Akro (Richard Smedley). He is in town to get revenge on those he feels responsible for his son’s condition and death. Since Vanard is already dead he decides to take it out on his daughter Susan. He plans on turning her into a zombie just like Akro.
“Blood of Ghastly Horror” was released in 1971 and was directed by Al Adamson. It is an American horror film and a trashy, low budget, exploitation movie. Al Adamson is another cut and paste maestro. He is the director who brought us treasures such as “Horror of the Blood Monsters” 1970.
The movie is a conglomerate of one of Al’s previous films “Psycho a Go Go” with new footage. The original film was about a psychotic murderer jewel thief who was trying to track down the proceeds of a robbery. Al added scenes with John Carradine and released the film as “The Fiend with the Electronic Brain”. Not happy with the result Al added more footage with Kent Taylor, Tommy Kirk and Regina Carrol. The result was “Blood of Ghastly Horror”.
If you like crappy “B” movies this one will be right up your alley. Here you get three movies for the price of one, a heist movie, a mad scientist movie and a zombie movie. All are interwoven with flashbacks to try to tie them all together. Together they are a little confusing but each part separately actually has something interesting in them. It’s not a good movie by any means but it can be a little entertaining.
Adamson married Regina Carrol in 1972. He retired from filmmaking to work in real estate. Carol died in 1992. In 1995 Adamson was murdered by a live-in contractor, Fred Fulford, he had hired to do some work on his house and he was buried beneath his floor. Fulford was convicted and sentenced to 25 to life. His death and the trial of the contractor were highlighted in a few true crime shows.