Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Leofwine_draca This intriguing science fiction tale from the master of atmospheric horror, Mario Bava, is a lot different from the norm. Instead of having an alien planet packed with drooling nasties, instead we get the tale of an invisible race of alien 'vampires' who can take over dead bodies and are hell-bent on continuing their race by moving to another planet via the visitors' spaceships.As with most of Bava's films this is dripping with atmosphere, in the eerie fog-bound and wind-swept location of the alien planet. The landscape is full of bubbling lava and dark, brooding shadows cast by ugly rock formations. It's easy to believe that anything could be lurking out there in the shadows and this fear of the unknown is what Bava plays on and exploits to the maximum. It's definitely creepy if not downright scary. Any fan of the film ALIEN and the first sequel to it will notice the resemblance between the bleak, lonely planets as PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES was very influential on that particular saga. The acting is fine, especially Barry Sullivan who excels as the charismatic and commanding leader of the group, a fine leader if ever I saw one.The supporting cast is varied although a few of the faces lower down in the cast are not particularly distinctive and blend into one, serving the same purpose as the 'red suits' in STAR TREK, i.e. cannon fodder, or in this case vampire fodder. Lower down in the list you may just spot a young Ivan Rassimov before he got caught up in the cannibal films of the '70s. The outlandish costumes in this film are inevitably truly '60s in design, leather bodysuits with winged collars. The film is most frightening when dealing with our fear of the unknown, with crew members disappearing into the night, taken by a presence we do not know. When the vampires do appear as glowing balls of light, the special effects inevitably disappoint due to dating. While this might ruin the carefully set-up atmospherics, these effects are still passable and enjoyably old-fashioned, with flashing lasers and such. Bava obviously created the film on a low budget and frankly did wonders with it.The violence content is kept low, although there are some bloodied bodies which return from the dead to provide visceral impact. Actually, scenes with the bodies rising from their graves and ripping plastic sheeting from their torsos is extremely unnerving, reminding me of similar scenes in THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES where the zombified dead claw their way from the earth. There are also some great bits where three crew members discover the giant skeletons of long-dead beings, very spooky indeed. The twist ending is expected yet still hits home, and there's even a cheesy yet effective closing scene. Be warned, it is downbeat though. PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES has something for everyone, and thus excels as an example of borderline science fiction/horror.

Calenture Seriously, I kept starting awake from the sleep that this film had sent me into, and having to reverse the DVD to check what I'd missed.I watch all kinds of films, pulp, schlock and highbrow, and usually I enjoy them on their own respective levels. I've enjoyed a few Mario Bava films. Black Sunday is a favourite. The costumes in Planet of the Vampires reminded me of Danger Diabolik, which I understand Bava directed uncredited.Sadly, there's really no reason I can think of for anyone to watch this dreadful mess. The only hint of the Gothic splendour Bava brought to some of his best stuff is a giant skeleton which the spacemen find. I had high hopes of that, but it didn't actually do anything, just sort of the sprawled there... as you'd expect. Oh, and there was a bit of scenery that looked a bit like a petrified tentacle. But no-one actually seemed to notice it.In the end, there was just a bunch of talking heads. Maybe he should have made a radio play from the script. But I think it would still have sent me to sleep.

tomgillespie2002 The crews of two giant interplanetary ships. the Galliott and the Argos, head to an unexplored planet shrouded in fog and mystery after intercepting a distress signal. When landing the two crafts lose contact with each other, and the Argos, lead by the experienced Captain Markary (Barry Sullivan), lands safely after some brief but heavy turbulence. Upon arrival, the crew of the Argos inexplicably attack each other, with only Markary able to resist the strange urge to kill. After they've been knocked out of their trance-like state, they travel to the nearby Galliott to find the entire crew either missing or dead. They bury the dead they find and set out to explore the vast wasteland, but Tiona (Evi Marandi) keeps having visions of the walking dead.Though far more experienced in horror, gialli and sword-and-sandal pictures, the great Mario Bava turns Planet of the Vampires into the most gorgeous sci-fi of its era. The planet, Aura, is desolate but strangely beautiful. Using bold primary colours and going overtime on a smoke machine, Bava infuses the planet with a suitably otherworldly atmosphere, which helps distract from the relatively formulaic plot. The director's love for horror can barely be contained as the crew start to rise from the dead. Placed in makeshift tombs and wrapped in a plastic sheet, they rise like blue- faced ghouls. Free from any distracting edits and backed by Gino Marinuzzi's eerie score, it is the most visually arresting moment in the film.It often gets cited as one of the inspirations for Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), though Scott and writer Dan O'Bannon claim to have never seen it prior to making the film. While Markary and his crew's discovery of giant humanoid skeletons does bring to mind the space jockey found in Scott's masterpiece, the two share little else in common. Behind the visual splendour, Planet of the Vampires suffers from a cheesy script and wooden acting, the common bane of the B- movie. Aside from an exciting set-piece involving an escape from a locked room having its oxygen sucked out, the film is actually quite plodding when it forces us to spend time with its collection of cut- out archetypes. Beautiful, certainly, and perhaps inspirational, but mark this amongst Bava's more mediocre efforts that are still worth checking out.

chaos-rampant Bava had two talents. He could build in an interesting way, and talent number two, he was a lush painter with a camera. Seldom is this put to powerful cinematic effect. But he really was a magician in that old-timey sense, someone who has a fondness for illusory things.And this is perhaps his most pure, in the sense that you get to see the man perfecting spells in his laboratory, trying out a few new ones. The subject is manufactured vision. Okay, the story of two spaceships landing on a planet to investigate a strange radio signal is memorable but goofy, the acting is awful, the costumes cheesy, the sci-fi concoction harks back to Forbidden Planet and other films. But here's the laboratory.The spaceship is Bava's workspace. The interior is always obviously a Cinecitta soundstage, simply dressed on one side with blinks and machinery - it never convinces that this is what you see from the outside as the ship. No one really puzzled about the science of it, because there isn't any. This is the studio, the constructed space where the story of discovery of something menacing is going to be engineered.Bava was never one to think in terms of fluid composition like Tarkovsky (Solyaris) or Scott (Alien), the camera is unexciting. But there are screens inside the ship, and now and then the actors intently peer through them to the alien environment outside.This is Bava's turf. Here the camera can be static because the landscape is vast, timeless - a painter's vision of landscape. The colors and atmosphere can be gauzy because it's a new world, half-glimpsed for the first time. The story muted because it's all strange, the wandering ethereal, the focus on visual discovery. This new planet is aptly called 'Aura', it's an aural effect he's after.Here is where Bava in his capacity as engineer can try out a few cool experiments.a haunted house movie in space, in the trapdoor scene.the alien skeleton and ship, last remnants of ancient visitors.space zombies rising from tombs (someone at AIP decided these were vampires but that's not said anywhere in the film).the planet is inhabited by unseen - spectral - entities with the power to control gravity and the mind, who 'take over' their human hosts in the vein of the Body Snatchers film.all of this anchored in two spots, the device that makes 'space travel' possible as a binocular thingamajig, a cinematic device for seeing; and the shift to 'auran' consciousness happens during sleep.All this elucidates the way Bava works - story as separate from visual imagination, the latter clean, static, painterly; and the notion that for any of this to work, it has to be a dream that you slip into whose aura overwhelms the conscious mind. This is precisely what Solyaris was all about, the dream in context of memory.The difference is Italian sensibility, the belief that nature should be framed, opera instead of meditation.