For many people the directors Mario Bava and Sergio Leone are the cornerstones of Italian popular cinema. They created estetic conventions which other, sometimes just as talented, directors followed. Bava's legacy not only extends to horror and thriller films but as this film shows also to the science-fiction film. For, Planet of the Vampires, is by any standard an important and influential entry in this genre. It is not without the faults which trouble several sixties sci-fi films, such as the occasionally silly sets, but Bava's feat is to rise above the American B-movie narration and create a tense, exciting atmosphere.
In a story which plays like a forerunner to the first installment of the Alien-series, two spaceships receive an emergency signal from a nearby planet and decide to check it out. Once they have landed all sorts of mysterious events takes place, such as the crew members starting to kill each other off. One of the crews manage to destroy themselves completely and its then up to the other crew, led by the captain played by Barry Sullivan, to find out what's going on. It turns out that the dead are being re-animated and possessed by a parasitic breed of aliens who intentionally lured the spaceships to their planet. And thus the battle for survival begins...
The film drags in places but is on the whole fascinating, mainly thanks to a clever story(co-written by the Danish cult figure Ib "Reptilicus" Melchior) and a tight direction by Bava. One of the best sequences is also the one which quite obviously was an influence on Ridley Scott's Alien(1979). The captain and a lower-ranking female officer goes off to explore a crashed space-ship, of course not before placing the obligatory "soon to mysteriously disappear" even lower-ranking officer on guard outside the crash site. The ship turns out to be very old and filled with giant skeletons of an ancient alien race - a technically stunning and wonderfully atmospheric creation from the filmmakers here.
Produced by American B-movie mogul Samuel Z. Arkoff this could easily have ended up in less talented hands and turned into a boring mess like Arkoffs similar sixties sci-fi films such as Journey to the Seventh Planet (also written by Melchior). Instead we got another Bava gem, which again shows him adept to shift his talents to different genres.
In a story which plays like a forerunner to the first installment of the Alien-series, two spaceships receive an emergency signal from a nearby planet and decide to check it out. Once they have landed all sorts of mysterious events takes place, such as the crew members starting to kill each other off. One of the crews manage to destroy themselves completely and its then up to the other crew, led by the captain played by Barry Sullivan, to find out what's going on. It turns out that the dead are being re-animated and possessed by a parasitic breed of aliens who intentionally lured the spaceships to their planet. And thus the battle for survival begins...
The film drags in places but is on the whole fascinating, mainly thanks to a clever story(co-written by the Danish cult figure Ib "Reptilicus" Melchior) and a tight direction by Bava. One of the best sequences is also the one which quite obviously was an influence on Ridley Scott's Alien(1979). The captain and a lower-ranking female officer goes off to explore a crashed space-ship, of course not before placing the obligatory "soon to mysteriously disappear" even lower-ranking officer on guard outside the crash site. The ship turns out to be very old and filled with giant skeletons of an ancient alien race - a technically stunning and wonderfully atmospheric creation from the filmmakers here.
Produced by American B-movie mogul Samuel Z. Arkoff this could easily have ended up in less talented hands and turned into a boring mess like Arkoffs similar sixties sci-fi films such as Journey to the Seventh Planet (also written by Melchior). Instead we got another Bava gem, which again shows him adept to shift his talents to different genres.