Blood Beasts, Bronson Canyon, and Babes

Spoiler! There is no girl in her underwear in this flick.

If there is a more photographed piece of real estate in moviedom than Bronson Canyon I'd like to know where it is. Roger Corman's team puts the famous cave to good use at the end of 1958's Night of the Blood Beast, when the brave scientists ignore the Cold War pleadings of the Blood Beast and get busy with the Molotov cocktails. (Molotov. Get it? Take that irony, you lousy Commie blood beast from space!)

An astronaut returns to earth in a thing the scientists insist on calling a "satellite," which I suppose it is, but really appears to be a large cigar tube.

He's dead, except he doesn't show any signs of being dead except just lying there, not saying anything. (It's not too different later, when the character returns to life.)

Hisd blood pressure is fine, but there's no respiration. And there's a big blobby thing in his blood eating all the regular red and white cells.

And then the power goes out and the scientists are stranded in the desert hills of...Florida.

Turns out there's a creature out there, and he's stuck a bunch of these little seahorse-looking critters into the astronaut.

Plus, in order for the creature to communicate with the earthlings, he is forced to adopt a strategy that ultimately proves unpopular — he rips the head off the senior scientist, the better to adopt human speech.

(Surely an advanced civilization that has been observing the Earth for hundreds of years would have developed the post card.)

There's a lot of Cold War guff about letting the monster explain itself, but not too much, and the gang get down to business when they burn the creature up at the famous Bronson Canyon cave.

The girl with the '80s hairdo realizes, too late, that the Blood Beast was hiding under the footbridge.

We're talking internal space seahorse infestation; slimy creature in desperate need of a manicure; girl sporting 1950s foreshadowing of the kind of hair style popular with coeds in the mid-'80s; interplanetary cigar tube; Bronson Canyon.

Pleasantly short at 62 minutes. Three coils.