According to Fred Olen Ray, he picked up this Floridian schlocker after the director died from cancer following shooting. The Brides Wore Blood is a terminal, bleak film in more ways than one. Said film is so obscure that notorious furniture retailers turned video pirates Regal Video released Brides Wore Blood under its original title!
(To whit: disreputable video distributor Regal Video took many old no-budget horror films and retitled them: Demon Lover (1974) became The Devil Master; Barn of the Naked Dead (1972) became Psycho Circus, etc. They appear to still in business importing Philippine films to the states . . . . subject for further research.)
Filmed in Jacksonville, Florida around 1971 or 1972, Brides is an absolutely lousy flick that leaves the viewer in a dispirited state days afterwards. The story: a rich young woman is advised by a psychic medium to get herself to Florida to find a new, more exciting life. Once there, she is invited by an old man to tour an ancestral mansion. Unknown to her, the old man and the medium are working together to insure a bride for their vampire son. According to legend, a child is required to break the family bloodsucking curse.
Raped and impregnated by the vampire son, the girl is kept prisoner in the mansion. Attempting to escape, she manages to kill the son and a house concubine but is far too expectant and weary to run very far. Once more locked in her bedroom, the girl contemplate suicide rather than giving birth to a monstrous child. The psychic and old man rush to inform her that her child will be born normal, only to find that she has impaled her pregnant stomach with a long, jagged piece of glass. Yeeeeeccccchhh. Gross, and highly original. Director David Durston already beat them to it in a similar scene in I Drink Your Blood in 1971.
Lensed in milky, diffuse 16 mm film, Brides is a wretched stinker but a powerful wretched stinker. It's hard to imagine somebody sitting down to create a film intentionally so downbeat and devoid of entertainment value. The Brides Wore Blood is a foremost example of a bad film that creates a stifling atmosphere of dread and hopelessness, if on an unintentional level.
by Greg Goodsell (1998)
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