You, sir, are an object lesson.
Planet of the Vampires (1965) is an odd, jarring movie, because it’s a witches’ brew of ingredients. Briefly, and with trepidation, I deliver the plot to you: two ships exploring deep space detect and respond to a distress signal from a nearby planet. As they assess the planet, gravitational waves impact the ships, the crews go mad, and the ship on which this story is focused, the Argos, lands on the planet willy-nilly.
Captain Markary, who alone has been resistant to the madness, bitch-slaps his crew back to rationality, and, well, since they’re on the planet, they have to go exploring. They find it is a graveyard of ships and the remains of their crews, and for a bit they get to play with leftover alien toys.
But then they find their partner ship, also grounded, and her crew dead. Per tradition, they put them in the ground with some fancy aluminum sculpture as headstones, but soon they find that’s not good enough: The dead crew is up and running around, stealing critical equipment and generally being assholes.
But it’s not them. The native race of this planet, who are spiritual in nature, are facing extinction, and have decided to take over a spaceship and just plum leave. It seems a bit of overreaction, but there you have it.
Will they make it? What about the “meteor rejector” device that keeps going missing? And Captain Markary’s resistance to their mad plans? Is he going to …
Oh, wait.
The science, as you may have guessed, is execrable, even laughable. The acting is earnest. The story, while it is admirably parsimonious is handing out information, is ultimately not compelling, at least for me. However, I am not a horror movie aficionado; the attractions of the genre escape me.
Just a little reminiscent of Alien (1979). Or maybe the other way around.
But the special effects are not bad, except for the bubbling mud standing in for lava, and the sets! Oh, my, a surrealistic collage of color, brutalist space ships and monstrous rocks, singular headstones, in which the people scampering about, lugging guns and dying messily, create a juxtaposition that I still remember, even two weeks later. The contrast between the sterile internals of the ships vs the wild colors and shapes of the planet underlines the difference between mankind’s desire for control, and the wild Chaos which eternally surrounds it.
It’s bad, with some interesting elements. You may get more out of it if you keep that bottle of second-rate brandy nearby.
