Queen of Blood is the third of three Russian movies picked up by Roger Corman and his Filmgroup and given an English-language brushing to allow it find a new audience. And this one is the most successful of the three by a large margin.
You have a team of astronauts who answer an alien distress call and upon landing on a bizarre asteroid find a crashed ship with only a single dead alien. Later a second team finds a living alien who has a yen for human blood. Th movie has a good solid cast with John Saxon and Dennis Hopper on hand to find English words to slather onto the visuals. Basil Rathbone is on hand also as the leader of the organization which sends the astronauts forth and apparently his role here and in Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet were filmed pretty much on the same day. That's efficiency!
The alien bloodsucker is a bit of looker too. The novel cover above shows off her assets in ways the movie never does, but that doesn't mean that sexual attraction isn't an aspect of her ability to pick off the astronauts as they try to return to Earth.
When I thought of a vampire from space I thought of the movie Lifeforce which in its telling of finding life-sucking aliens in space skips over most of the return trip home. We have that trip here.
And when I think of vampires from space I also think of the lovely femme fatale for Warren Magzines, the erotic Vampirella. Now having that thought is not one in a vacuum because guess who is in this movie as Basil's right-hand man -- Forry Ackerman! The Acker-Monster is silent but present throughout this movie and he has a gleam in his eye at the very end as if a notion has sprung upon him about another "Queen of Blood".
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