In my ongoing attempt to become more literate in Italian horror, I’m trying to familiarize myself with the classics at the very least. I’ve watched Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Deep Red (though now that I know what I saw was a version butchered for American release I may have to revisit the latter) and Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. I feel like I’m starting to get a handle on the general style - colorful, visually striking, and a total lack of subtlety seem to be constants - but I am aware I still have a long way to go. I decided that my next step was to start checking out the work of Mario Bava. There were a few different movies I could have gone with, but I decided to use this as an opportunity to check out Terrore Nello Spazio (Planet Of The Vampires), a film that’s piqued my interest for a long time, ever since seeing a still from it in Michael Weldon’s highly influential (to me at least) book The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.
What I got was something that’s certainly interesting as a curiosity and affirms certain expectations that I’ve developed about Italian horror, but unfortunately it hasn’t really stood the test of time in many ways. I think a lot of this is down to it being a film that is both science fiction and horror, and things that make a lot of science fiction films from the 50s and 60s quaint (if not unintentionally comic) to the modern eye are working against it here.
We open on the crews of two deep-space exploration ships - the Argos and the Galliot - as they approach the planet Aura. They’ve been brought there by a distress signal emanating from the planet. It’s shrouded in fog, which is going to make landing difficult, but before they can really plan a trajectory, some force grabs the ships and yanks them down into the atmosphere. We follow the crew of the Argos as this is happening, and most of the crew blacks out from the gravitational force of the descent. Upon landing, the crew immediately turn on either other, violently assaulting each other, apparently insensate to their surroundings.
And then the attacks end as quickly as they begin, and nobody remembers what just happened.
One thing this film definitely has going for it is visual flair. It doesn’t look dramatically different from science fiction of the time, but it’s a very well-executed example of the style. The spacesuits the crew wear look more like fetish wear than anything else, and Aura is shot with the hallmark Italian tendency toward vivid, riotous color, all skies of purple, green, blue and red, shrouded in fog and covered in strange rock formations that look less like papier-mache than you might expect. The set construction for the ships themselves is remarkably good - there’s the requisite consoles and banks of computer-looking things made up mostly of blinking lights, but everything has a weight and substance to it, a solidity often missing from similar sets elsewhere in the genre. You’d never mistake it for a more contemporary film, but nor does it look as cheesy and low-budget as science fiction films of the period usually do. The effects work is also surprisingly good - optical effects aren’t treatments of the film stock (or if they are, they’re really, really well-executed ones), and much of the world is built using miniatures and matte paintings whose artificiality is well-hidden. It looks as much like actual ships on an actual alien planet as you could reasonably get in the mid-1960s.
Unfortunately, the same can’t really be said of the narrative. The dialogue suffers both from the stilted quality you get with any film dubbed from one language into another, and on top of that you have generous dollops of the meaningless technobabble you get with most science fiction films from this period. For example, the distress signal’s location is at “15 degrees felcar coaxial alfa vacuum,” they will begin landing procedures in “60 fractions of megon,” and Mark orders them to “synchronize the meteor rejector on the electromagnetic control device.” This goes a long way toward undercutting any mood or atmosphere that might develop, since even once you get past the dated visuals, as well-executed as they are, there’s still what’s actually being said, which is quaintly corny and in the modern day more likely to inspire chuckles than anything else. More than once while watching this, I thought that the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 could have a field day with this, the way they did with This Island Earth, for a lot of the same reasons. Part of any good horror film is emotional investment in and engagement with the film, and trying to keep a straight face through dialogue that’s stilted not just by the weird rhythms that come from Italian-to-English dubbing, but hilariously surreal attempts at scientific or technological language was just not possible. The needle went from “earnest” to “ironic” so fast it cracked the gauge. Characterization is pretty flat, pretty much everyone has three settings: Grimly resolute, frightened, and bemused. It doesn’t need to be a character piece, but nobody has much personality of any sort. It’s generally not a good sign when you have to review a plot summary to remember who was where at any given point.
Another big problem with the narrative is pacing – the film has a tendency to meander, and just when it feels like things are about to ramp up, they…don’t. As soon as the crew lands on the planet, they immediately go berserk and attack each other - no build-up, no subtlety, no nothing. It just happens and then they sit around for a bit wondering why they did. The first act is largely table-setting, which isn’t a problem in and of itself, and it does wrap up with a sequence that suggests that something more sinister is coming, but then it pretty much goes back to a lot of wandering and speculating for most of the second act. There’s one sequence in particular, where Mark and his crewmate Sanya wander off and discover something (a setpiece that would be echoed to much greater effect in Alien about twelve years later) that just brings what little action and momentum the film had up that point to a screeching halt. Just completely dead in its tracks. The revelation it’s intended to provide could have been managed in about half the time, and it doesn’t really slot into the overall story. It just sort of happens and then doesn’t really matter much after that. The film never really gathers steam, instead getting things that occur in isolation without much of a sense of story beyond “crew lands on alien planet, weird things happen, they wonder why they’re happening, and then other weird things happen.” There are some individual scenes which are striking and there are a couple of good startling moments, but they all exist in isolation from each other and don’t really cohere or create a sense that events are headed to any kind of conclusion. Things do pick up a bit late in the film, but it’s sort of too little, too late, consisting mostly of clumsy action sequences.
The whole thing ends on a note that’s both predictable and more than a little confusing given what we’ve seen and heard up to that point, as if someone thought of the ending without having read the rest of the script first. To its credit, I can see DNA here for films like Alien and Event Horison, but 57 years later it all just seems kind of enervated and silly. Horror and science fiction are a tough combination at the best of times, and science fiction dates faster than almost any other kind of genre film. Putting the three together is always going to be a tough sell, and I suspect I’m going to have to look elsewhere to see what Bava’s strengths really are.
IMDB entry
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