PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES
Terrore nello spazio “Terror in Space” aka THE DEMON PLANET 1965, Kino Lorber, 87m 35s, $29.95, BD-A By Bill Cooke
A joint venture between Ital- ian, Spanish and American film companies, Mario Bava’s pulp sci-fi chiller features no actual vampires in its plot—and while this may seem like a cheat wor- thy of tossing your popcorn at the screen, there are enough ideas (reanimated corpses rising from fog-covered graves) and stylistic gestures (black leather spacesu- its with Dracula-like, upraised collars) for co-financier American International Pictures to squeak by with the claim. The film may be marred by some stilted act- ing, bad dialogue, and too many repetitive scenes of indistinguish- able, uniformed characters run- ning about—yet none of that seems to matter very much as the intoxicating visuals and haunting sound effects take over and lull us into a somnambulistic state of acceptance not unlike dreaming. In a plot bearing striking simi- larities to Ridley Scott’s much later ALIEN (1979), twin starships investigate a distress beacon on a lifeless, storm-swept world, only to end up stranded after a mys- terious force nearly causes them to crash. When Commander Mark Markary (Barry Sullivan) of the Argos leads a rescue party to re- connect with their sister ship, the Galliot, they find the crew all dead and in poses that disturbingly suggest they fought and mur- dered one another. Inhabited by alien spirits, these corpses soon become active again, attacking and possessing more hapless astronauts in an attempt to es- cape their dead world and in- vade another. After a few deadly
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skirmishes, the final survivors— Markary, along with crewmen Sonya (Norma Bengell) and Wess (Angel Aranda)—are able to fix their ship and take off, but strange behaviors soon spur the question: is everyone truly whom they appear to be? One of Mario Bava’s most impressive visual works, PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES is a delirious fusion of futuristic and gothic aes- thetics. Few films of its vintage brim with as many ingeniously designed effects or employ such an outré sense of style. To avoid the degraded quality of post-pro- duction process shots, Bava ex- ecuted nearly all of the film’s special effects while on set, us- ing such techniques as forced- perspective photography and the Schüfftan mirror process to join miniatures with actors and full- scale set pieces. The latter tech- nique involves the reflection of a miniature onto a silver-backed mirror, sections of which are scratched away to reveal actors and real environments behind, and is heavily utilized in Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS (1927). According to Tim Lucas’ aston- ishingly informative audio com- mentary, this process really should have been named after Bava, since the director’s father Eugenio Bava (who helped his son achieve the effects for PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES) actually employed an identical technique for CABIRIA (1914), many years before Schüfftan patented it for the Lang film. While the screenplay by Ib
Melchoir (JOURNEY TO THE SEVENTH PLANET, REPTILICUS) offers an interesting premise (one that John Carpenter would rework for his less memorable GHOSTS OF MARS), plot and characters become considerably less important than atmospheric effects built from expressionis- tic lighting, and the camera and
its loving interplay with the sets, not to mention Bava’s judicious, almost balletic blocking of figures moving within the frame. High- lights include the slow-motion resurrection of the Galliot’s dead (shrouded in plastic, they crawl from their graves in a scene that plays like a futuristic variation on the raising of Javuto in Bava’s BLACK SUNDAY); the quiet eeriness of scenes set on the Argos, as characters both innocent and malevolent creep around expansive chambers and shadowed hallways; and the film’s major set-piece, a se- quence that fans of ALIEN will no doubt recognize, as our he- roes explore the interior of a derelict alien spacecraft, only to discover a gigantic skeleton—an unwitting ancestor to the fossil- ized Space Jockey in the Ridley Scott film—sitting at the wheel. This sequence also calls to mind the Krell city of FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956), another impos- ing environment that dwarfs the humans walking through it, and where technology continues to pulsate and blink and purr with “life,” even though the beings that created it have long since perished. Bava’s love and knowl- edge of science-fiction cinema is again evident when a suppos- edly dead man on a slab mo- mentarily opens his eyes—a detail that other characters in the room fail to notice, and a nod to a similarly staged situa- tion in Don Siegel’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956). Gino Marinuzzi, Jr.’s eerie music score—a combination of electronic tonalities (again, reminiscent of FORBIDDEN PLANET) and tense orchestral passages—provides the clinching ingredient to the film’s thick, haunting mood. Full of slithering mist, bubbling bile and splashes of garish red, blue and green light,
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