Original title: Terrore nello spazio
Mario Bava, having perfected the Italian Gothic cinema and pretty much invented the modern incarnation of the giallo, that peculiarly Italian form of crime thriller with horror overtones, ventured into science fiction for the gorgeous and stylish Planet of the Vampires, an unashamed pulp space opera that has long been recognised as a major influence on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).
Based, loosely, on Renato Pestriniero‘s 1960 short story Una notte di 21 ore/One Night of 21 Hours, first published in the July 1963 issue of Sandro Sandrelli’s science fiction anthology Interplanet 3, it begins with the crews of two large spaceships, the Galliott and the Argos approaching a remore and forbidding planet, the unexplored Aura. They detect what appears to be a distress signal and decide to investigate. The crew of the Argos is driven insane by some alien presence that gets aboard the ship and cause them to start attacking each other. Only Captain Markary (American actor Barry Sullivan) manages to resist the alien intruders and snaps the rest of the crew out of their murderous fugues. On the inhospitable planet surface, they set out in search of the Galliott, finding that its crew wasn’t so lucky and ended up killing each other. They bury some of the bodies, but they are soon being menaced by their revived and with the ship damaged they’re trapped with a race of non-corporeal aliens bent on possessing their bodies and using them to leave the planet.
At times, it’s a schizophrenic film – it switches between the visually banal and threadbare (mainly the miniature effects which look crude by today’s standards) to the eerie and haunting (the eldritch Hellscape surface of the alien planet) in the blink of an eye. Bava had insufficient funds to pull off any elaborate effects but using forced perspectives, lighting and copious amounts of dry ice, he works small miracles, achieving a marvellous pulp aesthetic – the film is like watching those wonderful covers of the 40s and 50s science fiction magazines brought vividly to life. Though the effects don’t always work (the aliens rendered as fast-moving coloured lights just don’t work at all), the design of the film, from the space costumes to the interiors of the ships, is stunning.
Add to this some glorious electronic cues from Gino Mannuzzi, dialogue that, particularly in the English dub, is prime technobabble gibberish (although, unlike Star Wars (1977), primary writer Ib Melchior understand that a parsec is a unit of distance not time) and spirited performances from all involved and you’ve got by far and away the best of the 1960s Italian science fiction films, head and shoulders above the childish Gamma One films made by Antonio Margheriti (I criminali della galassia/The Wild, Wild Planet (1966), I diafanoidi vengono da Marte/War of the Planets (1966), Il pianeta errante/The War Between the Planets (1966) and La morte viene dal pianeta Aytin/Snow Devils (1967)).
Bava‘s piece-de-resistance comes around halfway through when three dead crew members, clad in plastic sheeting, claw their way out of their makeshift graves and advance on the Galliott. Despite the evocative English language title, the villains of the piece aren’t vampires at all – they’re more like alien possessed zombies, though by any name they’re quite unnerving.
Today the film, one of the best of cinema’s science fiction/horror hybrids, is perhaps best known as one of the apparent sources of inspiration for writer Dan O’Bannon and director Ridley Scott when they made Alien. In both films, the story begins with the detection of a distress signal emanating from an inhospitable planet, but the connection is never more explicit than in the moment when crew members Markary, Sanya (Norma Bengell) and Carter (Ivan Rassimov) investigate a crashed spaceship near the abandoned Argos. When they go inside they find a large skeleton standing guard over the control room, a scene repeated in the Scott film with the “space jockey” scene – in The Making of Alien book, J.W.Rinzler quotes O’Bannon as saying that he “stole the giant skeleton from the Planet of the Vampires.” There’s a weird moment here when Sanya suddenly says “look at this,” but we never seen what she’s found – what’s missing? Alien also mimics the feeling of dread that Bava threads through his film, both films being among the very few that perfectly capture the horrors of the emptiness of space, the terror of being left adrift without any hope of help turning up when things go horribly wrong.
The comparisons between the two films doesn’t really do either of them any favours. They’re both excellent films in their own right and Planet of the Vampires is just as terrifying, if for different reasons, as Scott’s film. Both feature parasitic aliens, but where O’Bannon and Scott’s predator is little more than an animal, driven by instincts to reproduce and survive, the aliens in Planet of the Vampires are intelligent and have a purpose, a purpose that is hinted at in the film’s twist ending. Often surreal, always hauntingly beautiful and frequently scary, Planet of the Vampire was a rare science fiction film from Bava but it showed that he had a real flair for it.
Crew
Directed by: Mario Bava; Italian International Film, Castilla Cooperativa Cinematografica (Madrid); Produced by: Fulvio Lucisano; Associate Producer: Salvatore Billitteri; Written by: Callisto Cosulich, Antonio Román, Mario Bava, Alberto Bevilacqua, Rafael J. Salvia; Based on the Story One Night of 21 Hours by: Renato Pestriniero published in Interplanet 3 science fiction magazine; Director of Photography: Antonio Rinaldi; Editors: Antonio Gimeno, Romana Fortini; Music Instrumentation and Electronic Effects by: Gino Marinuzzi Jr; Antonio Perez Olca [uncredited]; Costume Designer: Gabriella Mayer; Head Makeup: Maurizio Giustini; Hair Stylist: Gabriella Borzelli; Art Director: Carlo Gentili
Cast
Barry Sullivan (Captain Mark Markary); Norma Bengell (Sanya); Ángel Áranda (Wess); Evi Marandi (Tiona); Stelio Candelli (Brad); Franco Andrei (Garr); Fernando Villeña (Doctor Karan); Mario Morales (Eldon); Ivan Rassimov (Carter); Rico Boido (Keir); Alberto Cevenini (Toby, Mark’s younger brother); Massimo Righi (Captain Sallas [#2])
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