John Ashley
Born Dec. 25th, 1934 – Died Oct. 3rd, 1997
John Ashley was one of the up and coming teenage stars of those popular beach movies in the ’50s and ’60s, which he made quite a few of. But once he moved to the Philippines, he was responsible for giving us cult horror fans a lot of hours of enjoyment with the films that he was involved with, such as the Blood Island trilogy: Brides of Blood (1968), Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968), Beast of Blood (1971).
He later would become a successful TV producer for series like The A-Team and Walker, Texas Ranger.
But besides all the entertaining films that he made, this quote is one of the reasons why we admire him so much:
“This is a terrible thing to admit, but maybe the key to my success with exploitation films is that I always like those movies, and I never had any real reason to turn them down. I just enjoyed doing them.”
Sometimes I am just amazed at not only some of the titles that get released on blu-ray, but in the huge special editions that they come out with. Case in point, a title that Arrow Video just announced. At the end of May, they will be releasing a special edition of the 1966 film Blood Bath. But this isn’t just any ordinary film that was made under the Roger Corman umbrella. In fact, it started as a film being made in Yugoslavia by someone named Rados Novakovic and called Operation Titan. But it didn’t really fit Corman’s approval, so he hired Jack Hill to take the film and see if he could make something out of it, which he did, and would be later called Blood Bath. But for various reasons, such as the film stock from the original footage and what Hill shot didn’t match up that too well. So because Hill went on to make Spider Baby, the film was set aside. Then Corman came back to the picture and hired Stephanie Rothman to see what she could do with it. She changed the title to Track of the Vampire and made it more of a vampire film! According to Hill, about 80 % of the film is what he shot, but I have to say that it is kind of a mess of a picture, even though it has one of the best posters from that era!
We meant to post this earlier this week but time just got away from us. But we hope to make up for it now. While Frank Finlay might have been known for his stage work, as well as plenty of TV work for the BBC, he did appear in enough horror titles that is worth noting.
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