Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson

Director David Gregory in Attendance!

Even the most die-hard fans of trash cinema might give you a puzzled look if you mentioned Al Adamson. Not exactly a household name even in his heyday, Adamson is responsible for such 60s/70s grindhouse fare as Psycho A-Go-Go, Blazing Stewardesses, Dracula vs. Frankenstein, and Black Samurai just to name a few.

Adamson, along with his filmmaking partner Sam Sherman, would go to impressive lengths to stretch his budgets, improvise ways to get the perfect shot and grift his way through the entire process with the ragged crew of misfits. If there was one thing Adamson loved to do, it was making movies, and he did it during a golden age of cinema when almost anyone with a camera could get their movie played theatrically alongside Hollywood studio fare.

Director David Gregory (Plague Town, BUFF 2009) made a name for himself and a documentarian with the fascinating, sad and hilarious Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau. And although that tale was tragic in its own right, at least Stanley survived his ordeal. The same cannot be said for Adamson, as Blood & Flesh deftly switches gears from a look at a kooky filmmaker to a true-crime procedural. As the details of Adamson’s disappearance and eventual discovery of his remains are revealed, a fiction stranger than truth emerges in the cracks.

You don’t need to know a thing about Al Adamson to enjoy the hell out of this doc. And whether or not you immediately seek out copies of Satan’s Sadists or Blood of Ghastly Horror, you will be informed as well as entertained.

Produced by: David Gregory, Heather Buckley, Nicole Mikuzis