Year: 1965
Director: Mario Bava
Country: Italy
Language: Italian
Planet of the Vampires is an early minor classic in the space horror genre and represents the director’s only foray into science fiction. While it wasn’t the first of its kind (It! The Terror From Beyond Space hit theaters seven years earlier) it feels like such an obvious precursor to films like Alien and The Thing. Surprisingly neither Ridley Scott nor John Carpenter had seen this picture before watching their respective films.
After landing on a mysterious planet, a team of astronauts begin to turn on each other, swayed by the uncertain influence of the planet and its strange inhabitants.
Planet of the Vampires has the deliberate pacing of an early gothic horror (see The Uninvited), but is infused with a 60's sci-fi vibe. Essentially some scenes like they came straight out of an episode of Star Trek, although this was made before Gene Roddenberry's vision hit the airwaves. Meteor rejecters, atomic ray guns and other geeky gadgets are a nice dressing for a classic monster film at the center of the picture. Although the monster isn't a vampire?
The true nature of the film’s horrors is a drawn-out mystery, and Planet of the Vampires represents one of Bava’s most impressive feats of budget-stretching, which was the company line at AIP. The entire film is hemmed up in a studio soundstage, although the exterior sets have a staggering sense of depth and openness that captures the despairing mood. It’s perhaps as beautiful as a film can be when it’s dealing with reanimated bodies and soul-sucking beings from outer space,oozing with Bava's signature weirdness.
Effects work here involves primitive miniatures that are crudely effective and don’t fare as well as the make-up effects, which are fantastically grisly. Planet of the Vampires is a B-movie, but a pretty effective one at that. It's not the best Bava, but it's still pretty engaging.
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