Planet of the Vampires
On a sliding scale of Mario Bava masterpieces, 1965’s Planet of the Vampires lands somewhere in the middle. That’s not a knock on the film itself, which is a gloriously atmospheric piece of pulp sci-fi imagination. More a result of the incredible body of work the Italian director managed to produce during his career. Although set in the far reaches of space, Bava’s film fit comfortably in the same gothic oeuvre as his previous work, substituting spaceships and foggy alien landscapes for castles and crypts. Investigating a distress signal on a seemingly abandoned planet, two ships are dispatched to the surface and immediately run afoul of a mysterious force that compels the crews to turn on one another. Those with enough will power to resist proceed to bury their dead and search for an explanation. But the dead don’t stay buried long! While the original Italian title – Terrore nello spazio (“Terror in Space”) – is generic in the extreme, Planet of the Vampires is just as misleadi...