Planet of the Vampires (1965)

July 13, 2000

by Nathan Shumate

aka Terrore Nello Spazio, aka Demon Planet, aka The Haunted Planet, aka The Haunted World, aka The Outlawed Planet, aka Planet of Blood, The Planet of Terror, aka The Planet of the Damned, aka Space Mutants, aka Terror in Space. Whew.

Directed by Mario Bava
Written by Mario Bava, Alberto Bevilacqua, Callisto Cosulich, Louis B. Heyward, Ib Melchior, Antonio Roman, and Rafael J. Salvia, based on the story “One Night of 21 Hours” by Renato Pestriniero
Starring
- Barry Sullivan
- Norma Bengell
- Angel Aranda
- Evi Marandi
Produced by Fulvio Lucisano
Executive produced by Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson

Warning: This review will surely step on some toes.

See, there’s a reason that I’ve concentrated on reviewing movies from 1970 forward. While there are some reviewers (such as the venerable Dr. Freex of The Bad Movie Report) who can honestly assess “classic” era movies, I fall into the class of people who have to avoid the twin traps of Anachronistic Standards (“Stop motion? Boy, that looks hokey in our CGI age!”) and Golden Ageism (“It’s old, so we have to bend over backwards to make allowances for its shortcomings”). And I try to avoid the latter so strongly that I’m much more likely to commit the former.

In this case, I think we have a minor gem of a movie here. However, many of its shortcomings were (I think) avoidable even in the context of the timeframe, so I’m not willing to shrug and forgive them.

Two spaceships, the Argos and the Galliot, are investigating a strange transmission source that they’ve tracked for two years to a cloud-covered planet. Mishaps occur during landing, and the crew of the Argos is knocked unconscious under 40G’s; mysteriously, their ship is caught and settled gently to the surface by an unseen force. Even more mysteriously, the crewmembers each awaken filled with murderous intent, each trying to kill the others, and it’s only after heavy dopeslapping that each comes to his senses, with no memory of his/her homicidal tendencies.

Once they’ve figured out where they are, the Argos crewmembers try to locate the Galliot, which has similarly landed some distance away. They trek across the ethereal crystal-and-fog landscape and find that the crew of the Galliot was siezed by the same mysterious impulses — and in their case, they were successful, with seven dead accounted for and two missing.

One of the Argos crewmembers, left to stand guard while the others search for the two missing, promptly disappears as well. And so do all of the corpses in the sealed portion of the ship.

Puzzled, the captain orders the accessible corpses buried, each in a shallow grave with a slab of metal on top and a thin strip of scrap metal as a marker. And that night, amidst the fog (Great Scene #1), the dead slowly push back the slabs and rise, tearing slowly through their transparent plastic shrouds.

They make yet another ominous discovery that night: sleeping crewmembers start sleepwalking, on mysterious missions to disengage the essential meteor repelling device. A system of interior guards is devised.

The next day brings Great Scene #2, and a direct influence on Alien: investigating something shining in the distance, they discover an ancient alien spacecraft, with a giant skeleton outside and another slumped over the controls inside. Apparently they’re not the first lured here by the mysterious signal.

What or who has brought them here? What is possessing crewmembers in their sleep? Where are the corpses of the dead disappearing to? Why does the captain keep posting one-man guards, even though they show a remarkable tendency to disappear without a trace?

It’s a great premise, and it’s treated with respect. Director Mario Bava outdoes himself with the foggy alien sets, and the scene with the alien skeletons is worth the price of admission.

However…

Hokiness also abounds. The model ships are incredibly unconvincing, and the black naugahyde uniforms have two weaknesses: 1) they’re maybe one degree less ludicrous than the alien suits in Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, and 2) with the full skullcap, it’s almost impossible to tell crewmembers apart. The interiors were designed with no regards to their usefulness: the main chambers of the Argos are so huge they make the oversized bridge of the NCC-1701-D look like a DC-10 restroom, and the metal floors clank constantly under the crew’s boots.

But the biggest problem for me is the pacing, which varies between subdued and glacial. I know it’s supposed to be atmospheric, and I know it’s meant to build subtle menace, but all it does for me is dilute the sense of threat that should be hanging over every scene. (I’m hard to please in the atmosphere-instead-of-pace department; as far as I’m concerned, the only two movies that ever even came close to pulling it off are Amando de Ossorio’s Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979).)

Some of these flaws are specific to the time period, such as costume and set design. (In fact, it was while viewing this that I realized that the original Star Trek, far from being incredibly campy, was actually at the cutting edge of design for the mid-60s.) Others, such as the pacing, are probably the European style of filmmaking that just didn’t translate well to science fiction.

Bottom line, I enjoyed it more for the historical importance than for the film itself, and that’s a shame, because there’s so much to like buried in here. I almost hate to say it, but this is a film that’s due for a mid-budget remake — under one of the less geeky and more accurate alternate titles than Planet of the Vampires.