Folks, this is one incredibly, amazingly, unbelievably bad movie. Who could ask for anything more?
    Al Adamson (Dracula vs. Frankenstein) cobbled this picture together from different sources. It's a demented amalgam of zero-budget schlock shot by Adamson between 1966 and 1970 — mostly in L.A.'s Bronson Canyon, stand-in for alien worlds in a host of sci-fi films and TV shows — peppered with stock dinosaur footage and heavily padded with scenes from an incredibly bizarre Filipino flick about bloodsucking cavemen. It simply must be seen to be believed!
    The movie opens with a four minute sequence that's absolutely hysterical. Vampires (director Adamson himself and others, sporting novelty shop fangs) attack a succession of random victims in what appears to be the same dingy, back alley. As the vampires slay one human after another, gravel-voiced performance artist Brother Theodore (a frequent Letterman guest in the '80s) provides a hilarious, overwrought narration detailing a "scientific" explanation for the existence of the Undead. It seems that the vampires of Earth sprang from the Tubaton, a race of blood drinkers from a distant planet. Just how they got here isn't mentioned. Brother Ted prophesizes the eventual "bloody ruin" of the human race unless Earth's scientists learn the secrets of the Tubaton. (You can listen to this opening narration by playing the MP3 audio file on the left-hand sidebar.)
    Meanwhile, a space expedition to a newly discovered solar system is about to begin. Commanded by Dr. Rynning (Carradine, slumming again), the team consists of three dorky military men and Rynning's stacked blonde assistant, Linda (Britt Semand), whom the cranky scientist spends a lot of time chiding and snapping at. Aboard spacecraft XB-13, they're shot into the void in one of the most drawn out launch sequences ever. Not only do we get the usual pre-launch technobabble, we're also introduced to two ancillary but vitally expositionary characters: Col. Manning (Robert Dix) and mission control assistant Valerie (Vicki Volante). Sitting in front of black curtains Ed Wood style, Dix and Volante (who both appeared in Adamson's Five Bloody Graves) woodenly read their lines in close-up while shots culled from a different film — looped over and over — are edited in to show the control room. (Watch as the actor who's supposed to be Manning [from behind] fiddles with the same control knob over and over again.) Not only do these two explain everything that's going on, they also show up later in a bedroom scene... and Manning's brought some NASA equipment home as a sex toy! (I am not kidding.)
    Almost immediately after launch, the XB-13 is bombarded by a strange radiation (or something) which throws it off course. For the crew to effect repairs the ship will have to land on the closest suitable planet. This is done using a toy rocket purchased at a dime store — the so-called special effects here make The Green Slime's look like Star Wars. Conveniently, the planet's atmosphere turns out to be Earth-like. It also changes colors, randomly switching from green to yellow to blue, etc., due to "chromatic radiation". The script goes to ridiculous lengths in an attempt to explain this phenomena; it's really just an easy way for Adamson to blend color film together with black and white footage from the Filipino movie he's cannibalized... by tinting it all a single color. As Rynning is too ill to leave the ship (so that Carradine spends the remainder of the flick sitting down, talking on a radio), the rest of the crew prepares to explore Bronson Canyon. A wobbly aluminum painter's ladder is lowered to the "planet's" surface from above camera range. Time to encounter that stock footage! Our intrepid space explorers climb a bluff so they can watch dinosaurs from other movies gambol about or fight each other. (Yep, it's that same footage of wrestling lizards — including the one with a spiky fin glued to its back — that you've seen exactly 1.8 zillion times.) They also spot some primitive humanoids engaged in a running battle. These are the sequences cribbed from the dubbed Filipino caveman movie the producers bought the rights to, and boy, are they weird. They're almost wall-to-wall action, with a normal human tribe fighting against a succession of goofy mutants: snake men, crawfish men, furry bat-men that fly about on visible wires, and their most dangerous enemy, the Tubaton vampire men — animal skin-wearing barbarians with huge, tusk-like fangs. The tribe of "normals" is led by Ramir, a warrior who doesn't say a whole lot ("Get firewater!") but does kick some serious ass. It's all delightfully, deliriously insane... sort of Last Of The Mohicans meets Quest For Fire by way of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It's much more fun than the crap Adamson shot, that's for sure. Trust me — you've never seen anything like it.
    Nor will you care who among the XB's crew survives or whether they ever repair the ship. You'll be too busy laughing or simply shaking your head in disbelief.