Year Of The Vampire: Planet Of The Vampires And Lifeforce Took Sci-Fi Schlock To New Heights – /Film

By 1965, the veteran cinematographer and special effects maestro Mario Bava was five years into the directorial career he kicked off with the gothic horror classic "Black Sunday" in 1960. Subsequent to that the prolific Italian helmed films in a myriad of genres, including a sword-and-sandal movie ("Hercules in the Haunted World"), a Viking epic ("Erik the Conqueror"), a Hitchcockian thriller ("The Girl Who Knew Too Much"), and even a western ("The Road to Fort Alamo"). Given Bava's proficiency at being dropped into almost any style of film, it's no wonder he chose to take on science fiction with "Planet of the Vampires."

Like much of his horror output at that time ("Blood and Black Lace," "The Whip and the Body," "Black Sabbath"), Bava doused "Planet of the Vampires" (Italian title "Terrore nello spazio") in color through his trademark use of gels. This lends the story of a pair of interplanetary spaceships answering a distress beacon on a fog-shrouded planet a pop sensibility that very much apes its pulp sci-fi magazine design sensibility, with shiny streamlined art deco spacecraft and rocky planet surfaces right off the cover of "Amazing Stories." The crew of the Argos led byBarry Sullivan's Captain Mark Markary (it's "Mark" any way you look at it) heads onto the creepy planet's surface to find out what happened to their sister shipthe Galliott while also investigating the source of the beacon.

By the time Mark and company discover a big derelict spaceship housing the giant skeleton of an alien who captained the vessel, you might be having a bit of dj vu. That's because Ridley Scott's landmark 1979 sci-fi horror blockbuster "Alien" essentially stole the plot of this movie wholesale (with a little bit of "It! The Terror from Beyond Space" thrown in for good measure). Incidentally, makeup effects artist Carlo Rambaldi worked on both films. Although Ridley Scott has denied ever having seen "Planet of the Vampires" once directly to this author's face on a set visit to "Alien: Covenant" the originator of the "Alien" script, the late Dan O'Bannon, is far blunter about the film's influence, as he told the magazine Reel Terror:

"I was aware of 'Planet of the Vampires,' I don't think I had seen it all the way through. I had seen clips from it and it struck me as evocative. It had this curious mixture that you can get in these Italian films of spectacularly good production design with an aggressively low-budget mentality."

That "low-budget mentality" is precisely what made Bava such a genius, having learned many tricks of the trade from his father, the early cinema pioneer Eugenio Bava. Utilizing his skills as a painter and master image manipulator, Mario Bava squeezed every penny from his minuscule $200,000 "Vampires" budget by using in-camera techniques like miniatures, glass matte paintings, forced perspective, and even mirrors to create a lavish look that still inspires filmmakers today. If you don't believe that, filmmaker James Wan has stated directly that his forthcoming mega-bucks sequel "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom" takes its lead from this movie.

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Year Of The Vampire: Planet Of The Vampires And Lifeforce Took Sci-Fi Schlock To New Heights - /Film