Having been a cult-film cutthroat for most of my life, Al Adamson is a brand name that fans of filmic trash have come to know and adore. Having rented titles like Satan’s Sadists, Dracula vs. Frankenstein and I Spit on Your Corpse as a teenager from the local video joint, I knew that as dirt-cheap as his flicks usually were, you were at least guaranteed a good time of breasts, blood and beasts.
What I didn’t know about Adamson, however, is the lurid way that, at 65 years of age, he was ruthlessly murdered by a conman. Yikes.
The son of an Australian Western star, Adamson became famous in America’s grindhouse theaters and rural drive-ins, pumping out outrageous titles and usually making more than a few bucks on them. The documentary Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson goes into great detail, with hard-boiled talking heads like Greydon Clark, John “Bud” Cardos and Fred Olen Ray coming together to tell tales of low-budget excitement in cinema’s gory days.
Adamson’s life, however, took at dark turn in the 1980s when, after having directed a lost “docudrama” in Australia about unidentified flying objects, he allowed a drifter named Fred Fulford to work on a couple of his houses; Fulford would eventually take over Adamson’s life, stealing his money and then burying him under 6 feet of concrete in the basement.
Director David Gregory — who did the equally great Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau a few years back — crafts this film as if it were one of Adamson’s double-bill shockers: one half a rip-roaring action flick and the second half a true crime mystery. Despite the terrible ending, I think Adamson would have been proud. —Louis Fowler
