Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires may not be the first Italian sci-fi film (that honor goes to The Day the Sky Exploded, which Bava co-directed), but it’s arguably the greatest, and without a doubt the most stylish. Bava’s masterful use of vibrantly colored lights, evocative set and model designs, and jaw-dropping in-camera effects lends the film more atmosphere per frame than many a big-budget sci-fi extravaganza. Planet of the Vampires also unabashedly mixes up sci-fi and horror tropes in ways that would prove hugely influential on subsequent films, most obviously Alien.
The film opens with two spaceships responding to a distress signal from the planet Aura. While descending to the surface, the crew of the Argos, led by Captain Mark Markary (Barry Sullivan), are overtaken by some unseen presence that turns them violently against each other. Only Markary’s commanding willpower allows him to overcome the invisible force and restore order. After landing, a search party ascertains the other ship, the Galliott, experienced something similar, except that its crewmembers are all dead. Soon events turn increasingly ominous as the dead go missing, and, in one of the film’s most memorable images, several bodies that had been buried under shiny metallic slabs rise up out of their graves, wrapped in clear plastic shrouds.
Though there aren’t actually any bloodsucking vampires on display in Planet of the Vampires, the filmmakers don’t stint on doling out the red stuff. The film is surprisingly graphic for 1965 in its depiction of the undead, showing them bloodied and broken in particularly nasty ways. Their shambling corpses are eerily prescient of the ones that would go on to overrun George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead a few years later. And one particularly horrific reveal involving a cadaver is a clear throwback to a similar effect found in Bava’s gothic masterwork Black Sunday, only here it’s all the more striking for being in (un-)living color.
In what is arguably the film’s most indelible sequence, Markary and Sanya (Norma Bengell) explore the interior of a gigantic alien ship that fellow crewmember Wess (Ángel Aranda) has discovered while out reconnoitering Aura’s surface. This section establishes Planet of the Vampires as a sort of middle term in a trio of films, on the one hand looking back at Forbidden Planet, especially with its emphasis on depicting truly alien technology, while simultaneously paving the way for a similar scene in Alien. The biggest difference between Planet of the Vampires and Ridley Scott’s classic is that the former utilizes odd geometrical shapes (the oddest being objects that most resemble 1950s car taillights) to embody its future tech and the latter foregrounds H.R. Giger’s surreal biomorphic designs.
Though it hardly qualifies as a slasher movie (or even a body count film along the lines of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None), Planet of the Vampires slowly but surely winnows down its dramatis personae, until only Markary, Sanya, and Wess remain. The final confrontation between these three characters leads to one truly astounding twist in the tail, one that unexpectedly aligns the film with the original TV version of Battlestar Galactica. The outrageousness of its storytelling thus combines with Bava’s unerring eye for maximum visual effect to yield one of the pinnacles of Italian science-fiction filmmaking.
Image/Sound
Kino Lorber offers Planet of the Vampires in a new 2K transfer that looks even more impressive than their already good-looking 2014 Blu-ray release, with greater clarity and depth to the image, deeper and darker blacks, and a jaw-dropping boost to the color palette; all those green, red, and purple lights now almost threaten to burn holes in your television screen. Audio comes in Master Audio two-channel mono, which provides sturdy support for the mostly dubbed dialogue (only Barry Sullivan delivered his lines in English), giving some depth to the sound effects, as well as Gino Marinuzzi Jr.’s wild electronic score.
Extras
The big draw here is a pleasingly complementary pair of audio commentaries, one carried over from the earlier Blu-ray, and one new to this disc. The archival track from Mario Bava biographer Tim Lucas is jam-packed with information about the film’s production history, cast and crew biographies, and the source material. It’s deeply researched and compellingly delivered, with Lucas at his most fascinating when describing the in-camera trickery that Bava and company utilized to almost magical effect. The new track comes from journalist Barry Forshaw and critic Kim Newman. It’s a jauntily conversational listen as they situate Planet of the Vampires within the larger sci-fi tradition, covering both film and literature. Newman has a particularly funny riposte when responding to dismissals of the film by jaded younger viewers. Elsewhere, Kino carries over two episodes of Trailers from Hell with Joe Dante and Josh Olson, 20 minutes’ worth of alternate score from Kendall Schmidt that was commissioned for the film’s initial home video release, and the original Italian-language opening credits.
Overall
Kino Lorber’s disc makes the case that Mario Bava’s vividly hued and fitfully ghastly Planet of the Vampires is perhaps the finest Italian science-fiction film of all time.
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