Planet of the Vampires (1965) – Review

Mario Bava was mostly known for horror and fantasy when he turned his attention to science fiction with Planet of the Vampires, producing one of the most visually striking films of the 1960s. A distress beacon, a mysterious alien world, a derelict spacecraft, and a crew being picked off one by one might sound familiar to anyone who has seen Alien, which makes Bava’s 1965 film feel less like a forgotten classic and more like a movie Ridley Scott somehow misplaced for twenty years. Scott claimed he had never seen it, but screenwriter Dan O’Bannon has since copped to the theft.

Two huge interplanetary ships, the Galliott and the Argos, are travelling through deep, uncharted space when they receive a distress signal from Aura, an unexplored planet. Naturally, the correct response to an unexplained distress signal from a mysterious alien world is to immediately go there, because apparently the future of humanity has learned absolutely nothing from horror movies. As both ships attempt to land, they encounter an immense gravitational force that sends the crews into violent convulsions, with members of the Argos crew suddenly trying to murder one another. Captain Markary (Barry Sullivan), however, possesses the constitution of a man who apparently eats gravitational forces for breakfast and manages to resist the alien influence long enough to land safely.

“You’re all lucky that I’m immune to Space Madness.”

Once on the surface, Markary and his crew discover that the Galliott has also landed, but things aboard the sister ship have gone considerably less well. Its crew have killed one another, including Markary’s younger brother Toby (Alberto Cevenini), and the survivors of the Argos are left with the unpleasant task of burying the dead. Some bodies are sealed inside the Galliott’s bridge, so Markary heads off to get the necessary tools, only to return and discover that the corpses have vanished. Because apparently dead bodies disappearing from a sealed room is not quite enough reason to abandon the planet immediately. Meanwhile, Tiona (Evi Marandi) begins seeing the supposedly dead crew members wandering about, and as the Argos struggles to repair the damage caused by its landing, more crew members start turning up dead.

Just another casual day of HR failing to manage the local zombie outbreak.

While exploring the bizarre, fog-shrouded landscape, Wess (Ángel Aranda) discovers the ruins of another spacecraft, prompting Markary, Sanya (Norma Bengell), and Carter (Ivan Rassimov) to investigate. Inside, they discover the enormous skeletal remains of an alien crew, proving that humanity is merely the latest batch of suckers to answer the planet’s distress call. Markary and Sanya become temporarily trapped inside the derelict vessel but escape, only to discover that Carter has mysteriously disappeared. Then two members of the Galliott crew, Kier (Federico Boido) and Sallis (Massimo Righi), turn up, which would ordinarily be reassuring except that they are very obviously walking corpses. Markary eventually tears open Sallis’ uniform and discovers that his putrescent body is being controlled by an Auran, a parasitic alien intelligence that has been using the distress signal to lure unsuspecting spacecraft to Aura.

Surprise! Your dead coworker is now a meat puppet for parasitic space mist.

It turns out that the Aurans are dying along with their planet, and they intend to escape by taking over the Galliott and using it to reach Earth, where they can presumably begin their new lives by possessing an entire species. Markary is understandably unenthusiastic about this proposed arrangement and leads his remaining crew to the Galliott to recover the Meteor Rejector while planting explosives aboard the ship. Dr. Karan (Fernando Villena) and Tiona are killed during the struggle, leaving Markary, Sanya and Wess as the last survivors. Markary and Sanya escape aboard the Argos, only for the horrifying revelation that the Aurans have taken control of both of them. Wess refuses their invitation to join the party and destroys the Meteor Rejector, fatally electrocuting himself in the process. With their route home gone, the possessed Markary and Sanya decide to head for the nearest planet. Unfortunately, that planet happens to be the third rock from the Sun, Earth. Humanity is about to discover that answering strange distress calls may have consequences.

What a twist!

Stray Observations:

• The crew receives a mysterious distress signal from an unexplored planet and immediately decides to investigate. This is apparently the 1965 equivalent of clicking a suspicious email attachment because the subject line says URGENT.
• The crew discovers the gigantic skeletal remains of an alien civilization, and somehow the conclusion is not “let’s leave immediately.”
• Markary is the only person who can resist the alien influence during the landing. Either he has an exceptionally strong will or the Aurans have simply decided that the fifty-something American is not worth the trouble.
• The Galliott crew kill each other, and then everyone is surprised when the corpses start walking around. Nobody seems to consider that this might be connected.
• Several characters encounter suspicious people who have supposedly died horribly and accept their explanations with a level of trust normally reserved for close family members and licensed accountants.
• Markary discovers that dead bodies have vanished from a sealed room and continues investigating the planet rather than deciding that perhaps the spaceship is a perfectly good place to remain.
• The Meteor Rejector is apparently so important that everyone is willing to kill, die and blow up an entire spaceship over it. Nobody thought to bring a spare.
• The Aurans spend the entire film trying to escape their dying world, only to wind up taking over a couple of humans and heading for Earth. Humanity has encountered its first extraterrestrial immigration crisis and responded by being completely unaware of it.
• Despite the title, there are no vampires. The “Aurans” are disembodied parasitic aliens capable of possessing living people and corpses. Planet of the Zombies might have been more accurate, although admittedly less likely to sell tickets.

Not a single fang in sight, but plenty of walking dead.

Director Mario Bava was already something of a cinematic Swiss Army knife by the time he made Planet of the Vampires. He had demonstrated a remarkable ability to work across horror, fantasy, gothic melodrama and adventure, and his films had developed a reputation for achieving an extraordinary amount with very little money. This versatility caught the attention of American International Pictures executives Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson, who had previously been content to acquire and distribute Bava’s films. They increasingly saw an opportunity to co-produce some of these pictures instead, giving AIP greater control over the content while allowing them to put their own resources behind productions they believed had commercial potential.

Turning a reputation for cheap brilliance into a brand-new partnership.

That arrangement helped produce Planet of the Vampires, an AIP and Italian International Film co-production that gave Bava a science-fiction playground without anything resembling the budget such a playground should require. AIP also provided writer Ib Melchior, whose previous credits included such modest science-fiction successes as The Angry Red Planet and Reptilicus, along with the considerably more ambitious Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Melchior supplied the screenplay’s basic science-fiction machinery, but Bava is the man who turns that machinery into something that looks like it has escaped from a particularly feverish nightmare.

Building a feverish nightmare out of basic sci-fi machinery.

The budget was only around $200,000, which would be laughable if the finished film didn’t look so damned good. Bava couldn’t rely on armies of optical effects or expensive sets, so much of the film’s visual trickery was accomplished directly in camera. Miniatures, forced perspective, lighting, smoke and carefully composed shots do most of the heavy lifting. Bava later explained just how gloriously cheap the alien planet actually was, noting that it consisted of a couple of plastic rocks left over from a mythological production at Cinecittà. His solution was wonderfully simple: fill the set with smoke. And it works. The coloured fog doesn’t merely conceal the limitations of the production design; it transforms those limitations into an integral part of the movie’s visual language.

Two plastic rocks, a fog machine, and pure cinematic genius.

This is where Bava’s genius becomes impossible to ignore. Nearly every frame of Planet of the Vampires looks like someone spent considerably more money on it than they actually did. The film is drenched in lurid reds, blues, greens and purples, with dense clouds of coloured smoke turning what might otherwise have been a collection of cheap sets into an alien nightmare. The spacecraft interiors are all strange curves, geometric shapes and oppressive shadows, while the exterior landscapes seem to exist somewhere between science fiction, gothic horror and Salvador Dalí having a particularly bad day.

The exact moment science fiction collides with gothic horror.

The cinematography by Antonio Rinaldi, combined with Bava’s own uncredited contributions behind the camera, is extraordinary. Bava was a cinematographer before becoming a director, and that background is evident in virtually every composition. He understands that a low-budget film can disguise its shortcomings through lighting, framing and colour, but more importantly, he understands that those techniques can actually become the film’s greatest strengths. The result is a movie in which the production design, lighting and cinematography are not separate elements but part of one enormous visual hallucination.

Rinaldi turning a $200,000 budget into a gorgeous nightmare.

And then there are those costumes. Mario Ronchetti’s black leather spacesuits are spectacular, looking less like practical uniforms for space exploration than something designed by a futuristic fashion house that had recently discovered bondage. They are ridiculously stylish, wonderfully tactile and instantly iconic. The costumes, combined with the Daliesque spacecraft designs, make the crew look as though they have wandered into an art-house nightmare from the future. Nobody in modern science fiction seems remotely interested in dressing astronauts this well anymore, presumably because someone decided that NASA-inspired jumpsuits were safer for merchandising.

This film has many levels of beauty.

As for the cast, Barry Sullivan makes a solid Captain Markary and provides the film with the authoritative presence AIP presumably wanted when they insisted on an American star, although his casting does raise the amusing question of why this apparently indestructible captain is considerably older than most of the people he is dragging around the planet. Norma Bengell is excellent as Sanya, while Ángel Aranda, Evi Marandi, Massimo Righi, Enrico Maria Salerno and the rest of the international cast provide capable support. The dubbing can occasionally be awkward, as is often the case with international productions of the period, but the performances themselves work surprisingly well within Bava’s heightened world.

“Young people just aren’t cut out for space travel.”

The elephant in the room, naturally, is Alien. The similarities are not merely superficial. A distress signal draws a spacecraft to a mysterious planet. The crew investigates another abandoned spacecraft. They discover the remains of an enormous alien being. Their companions begin dying one by one. The supposedly dead become a source of horror. An apparently abandoned alien vessel turns out to be part of a much larger mystery. Even the enormous skeletal remains discovered aboard the derelict ship evoke imagery that would become instantly recognizable to audiences after Ridley Scott’s film.

 That sure looks like a “Space Jockey” to me.

While Ridley Scott has maintained that he had not seen Planet of the Vampires before making Alien. Perhaps he hadn’t. Great minds can certainly arrive at similar ideas independently, particularly when both are drawing from the same long tradition of pulp science fiction and horror. But having just watched Bava’s film, the resemblance is difficult to ignore. At some point, either somebody saw it, somebody remembered it very poorly, or the cinematic universe decided that Alien needed a rather elaborate prequel that nobody would acknowledge for another twenty years. Years later, Dan O’Bannon would state, “I didn’t steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!” Which is pretty telling.

This aesthetic is damn familiar, wouldn’t you say?

The important thing, however, is that Planet of the Vampires is not simply interesting because of its relationship to Alien. It is a terrific film in its own right. Where Alien would eventually turn these ideas into a slower, more naturalistic and deeply atmospheric form of science-fiction horror, Bava goes in almost the opposite direction. His film is operatic, colourful, expressionistic and frequently surreal. Scott’s universe feels tangible; Bava’s feels like a nightmare painted directly onto the screen.

Bava was the king of bringing surrealistic nightmares to life.

In conclusion, while the ending may scream The Twilight Zone, this is a Mario Bava movie and the thing that will stay with you is not the twist so much as the imagery. From the snazzy black leather spacesuits to the Daliesque spacecraft interiors, the gigantic skeletons, the bizarre alien technology and those colourful, smoke-filled landscapes, Planet of the Vampires is a feast for the eyes. The fact that Bava achieved all of this with a budget of roughly $200,000 makes the accomplishment even more remarkable. It is a film that should look cheap, yet somehow doesn’t, because Bava understood something that many much better-funded filmmakers never learn: imagination is considerably cheaper than spectacle.

The plot occasionally creaks, the science is best ignored, the characters sometimes make decisions that would get them eliminated from the human gene pool in short order, and the dubbing can be distracting, but none of that matters when the camera starts moving through Bava’s strange, gorgeous nightmare. Whether or not Scott and O’Bannon genuinely hadn’t seen it, Planet of the Vampires undeniably belongs in the conversation about the films that helped shape the visual and thematic vocabulary of later science-fiction horror. It is a must-see for fans of early science fiction, a fascinating piece of genre history, and really a must-see for anybody who simply likes great movies.