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PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES

Around seventy percent of these movies (particularly the Corman ones) turned out to be huge disappointments, always promising some unspeakable horror but delivering only a brief shot or two of some papier-mâché monstrosity that I knew even as a little kid was totally fake. But particularly when I was staying up way past my bedtime on a Saturday night, I always managed to work up a Pepsi-exacerbated thrill of anticipation that this time I was about to see something REALLY scary. Kids my age were also damned forgiving of movies that might not have cost very much but had their hearts and minds in the right place. We knew it was our job to ignore obvious wires, rubber costume zippers and phony-looking miniatures as long as they got the general idea across and as long as the general idea was cool. Nowadays you can't get a four-year-old to sit through a Ray Harryhausen movie without them whining about the lack of multi-billion dollar CGI effects.

Well, enough griping from this old man. I'm just leading up to saying that I never got to see Mario Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES on CHILLER THEATER, but if I had I probably would have loved it. Even better, it probably would have given me nightmares for weeks. It's hard to appreciate this movie now with its terrible acting, goofy cinematic style and obvious miniature models, but even as an adult there's a certain artistry and ingenuity in how it was made that's impossible to deny.

What's extra cool about PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES is watching it (and another '50s movie I'll mention in a moment) AFTER seeing Ridley Scott's ALIEN. PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES takes place in the far future (or is it the far past?) with two sister spaceships, the Argos and the Galliat (which look like a cross between a 1966 Mercury Firebird and a horseshoe) in orbit around a seemingly uninhabited planet. They receive a distress signal from the planet and make a dangerous, storm-shrouded landing. But once on the planet the Argos' crew begins behaving erratically, and they find that the crew of the Galliat have murdered each other. That's pretty much all I need to tell you about the plot, but you should know that a third, clearly alien spacecraft is also found on the planet's surface.

You can probably see some of the similarities to ALIEN in the description above, but shots of the Argos landing, helmeted astronauts walking around one of its huge landing legs on a fog-shrouded alien world, and the eerie exploration of the alien spacecraft with the hulking skeletons of its dead crew still onboard must have been on writer Dan O'Bannon's or SOMEBODY's mind when they were making ALIEN. MGM has also just released IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE on DVD, which concerns a mission to Mars that leaves the Red Planet with a Martian monster stowed away onboard. If you combine PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES with IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE, you've got most of the plot elements and the beginnings of the visual style of ALIEN.

PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES ain't perfect. The leather costumes are ridiculous (although they look amazingly like the movie costumes for THE X-MEN) and Barry Sullivan, giving the only original performance in the movie in English, gives new meaning to the phrase "phoning it in" that having been said, his robotic delivery comes in handy later on in the film. The miniatures are beautifully lit and photographed, but nobody thought to use high speed photography to give them some scale (or more likely they couldn't afford to). Voice actor Peter Fernandez seems to dub half the male performers (you'll recognize his voice as the one behind Speed Racer and half the characters on that show), and it's pretty amazing work that's unfortunately undone by the familiarity of his vocal tones. And while Mario Bava does a fabulous job of creating an eerie sci-fi atmosphere with light, he relies to ludicrous effect on the old zoom lens. But all that means is that PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES is one of those movies that you can chuckle at and still realize that everything under the sun wasn't invented for the movies by George Lucas and Ridley Scott.

This is another in MGM's "Midnite Movies" release slate of discs, featuring only a widescreen transfer and the theatrical trailer.