Smokey Planet of the Alien Thingys
If you're gonna steal....

I guess you could safely argue that I've come out of my funk.

I'm somewhat ready to get back to busy.

What better way to do that than with schmaltz? Really Good Schmaltz. A 40 oz. of Scmaltz liquor.

Somebody call Billy Dee Williams.

Please.

I watched Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires (1965) last night.

It was one of those "always meant-to/never got around to" kind of movies from a "meant to watch his stuff/never got around to" kind of directors. After all he's one of the Holy Trinity in Italian Horror directors: Bava, Fulci, and Argento.

Part of what put me off is that I started with Argento...and, well...it just didn't work out so well between us. But at the time he seemed a logical choice. Of the three at the time, he had the most stuff available in the U.S. Readily available that is, as in at the local video store (I didn't start as the crazed rare video chaser that I became.). Second of all, the man co-wrote Once Upon a Time in the West for God's sake (...but, then again he co-wrote the spaghetti Five Man Army).

When you start, why not start off with what's generally considered the best: Suspiria. Well, he had me right up until the end, then I started thinking 'What the hell is the malarkey?', and it was all over. I also did Opera, and Trauma, which yielded similar results. Basically I ended up thinking 'This guy's great...until the ending.' He just couldn't end a movie. The other two I took in shed a better light on him. Tenebre stayed realatively coherent from start to finish, and was a lot of bloody fun. The one that worked the best, I thought, was The Stendahl Syndrome. At the same time, even though I know it's a movie and everyone's acting, having your own daugher (Asia Argento) raped like four times in a movie is too Freudian for me. Creepy. Capitol 'C.' Capitol 'R.' Two Capitol 'EE's.' A 'P.' And a 'Y."

Well, as I love the spaghetti, I've seen a pair of Fulci's. It'd be unfair to make an assessment of his work based on that. After all, he officially made three westerns (there's a couple of others he probably had a hand in), and he made a bazillion thrillers and horror flicks (as well as a handful of entries in other genres). Four of the Apocalypse is an interesing piece that was beautifually shot, and Tomas Miliam made for an intriguing and enigmatic villain. Still, it wasn't a great spaghetti like a Corbucci spaghetti. Similarly, Massacre Time had the grimness of a spaghetti, but it just wasn't quite the right sort of grimness. Something about it didn't work. I recently read an interesting review of it, and am thinking of giving it a second chance. I still haven't seen his last spaghetti, Silver Saddle, and have seen wildly mixed reviews. Nonetheless, it didn't spur me on to tackle his horror stuff.

Bava too made a spaghetti. Just one. The entertainingly titled Roy Colt and Winchester Jack. That alone has spurred my interest, and yet the reviews aren't much of a plug either. Apparently, Bava had nothing but contempt for the genre, and it shines through his sole entry. Besides, I've heard it's kind of a comedy spaghetti, and I tend to hate those across the board. (D@mn you Terrence Hill!) In any event, the end result is that I hadn't seen any Bava.

So that all changed yesterday, and I was impressed.

Let's face it: If you get much past the 1970's, most horror movies just aren't scary. Just about anything with any kind of monster, and it has become just plain laughable. Some are better than others. Some hold up better than others. Most, though, are watchable strictly for their camp value.

This one, despite all its inherent hokiness, worked pretty well.

The Story: Two spaceships have travelled out to a remote planet to investigate an electronic signal that could indicate intelligent life. The crew of the primary ship (our heroes), The Argos, lose consciousness on their way down, but when they awake, they fly into a violent rage against one another. Eventually order is restored, and they run off to investigate the other ship. That crew is found dead, and is promptly buried. Of course, they come back from the dead, and madness ensues. The living crew fights off the possessed undead crew, and many just end up joining their ranks. Finally the survivors escape back to the stars, but there's a couple of little problems....

I'd give more details and there is more to the story, but this one is really worth a watch. Really. Ok, after a beer or two, but c'mon, it's all in good fun.

The Review: This movie is, of course, largely known for being a fairly direct influence on Alien. It's not hard to see why...you know, apart from the derelict ship with the giant skeletons in it. Besides that.

Bava manages to create a healthy dose of eerieness, and it's not just in the heavy heavy use of the dry ice. His composition particularly light and dark spaces, or light and smokey places, is quite strong in building atmosphere. What really sells it though is the incredible execution of a variety of unearthly sounds that really gets under the skin. The voice recording of the aliens in the derelict ship is expecially chilling.

I've read a couple of reviews that attacked the interior design of the ships. Personally, I liked it. It was nice to see a ship without forty million buttons and blinking lights that do nothing. Someone commented the other day about how any time anyone had to do anything on the overdone ship in the show Firefly, they always seemed to hit the same five buttons. It's not just that though. I also appreciate the lack of visual clutter. In many ways, the wide open spaces only add to the dread. It's kind of like the occasional shocking scene in daylight in a horror movie: you expect to be safe in well-lit open spaces.

The reviews are mixed on the spacesuits. I thought for the time period that they were pretty hip. The cut of them was still reminiscent of the old school spacesuit, but the black leather with orange striping kept it hip. That and those weird high batwing shaped collars with the matching skullcaps made everybody look like vampires from the get go. Some complaints dealt with the fact that you couldn't often tell who was who, but I argue in reverse that it also kept the tension high over who was friend and who was foe.

Nevertheless, there were a handful of plotholes, and pure WTF's, but it's age largely protected it. I guess in that way our kids will end up forgiving crap like Waterworld for the same reason. It became quaint. (Like my favorite bit where Costner trades some dirt for a potted plant that has more dirt in it than what he traded.)

One of the biggest happens at the end, but the big head scratcher also leads to one of the most fun final plot twists I've seen in forever. One that didn't make me think Shyamalan right away.

D@mmit, I wanna make a movie like this.

Cheers.