Planet of the Vampires (AKA Terror in Space ~ 1965)
Director Mario Bava's only (I think) sci-fi/horror. Two spaceships, the Argos and the Galliott, respond to a mysterious distress call from an unexplored planet. The Argos makes a controlled landing, but the Galliott crash-lands. As the Argos touches down its crew enter a collective, mindless rage and start trying to kill each other. Only the captain manages to resist and snap the others out of it. Then, unable to raise the Galliott by radio, the crew of the Argos disembark and form a search party. Eventually they find the Galliott and discover the crew dead, with signs that several of them killed each other. The search party retrieve and bury the bodies. However, the dead soon crawl from their graves and start stalking and killing the crew of the Argos - who now also have to face the reanimated corpses of their own former crewmates.
This Italian/Spanish/American co-production has a real feel of the original Star Trek (which premiered the following year). As usual Bava manages to make a very low-budget film look like it cost a lot more. The alien planet has those signature Bava colour blocks of red, green, and purple, whilst the ground is permanently covered in a rolling, almost sentient-seeming mist (actually done to hide the lack of 'planet surface' on the floor of the set). The whole thing looks fantastically eerie and creates a strong sense of unease. Being an international co-production the film has an international cast; Barry Sullivan (American), Norma Bengell (Brazilian), Evi Marandi (Italian), Ángel Aranda (Spanish), and so on. Sullivan makes for a commanding captain of the Argos; Bengell and Marandi, whilst looking stunning are also squarely in the action right from the start, and Aranda is pretty good as this 'Enterprise's' 'Scotty' (the film also contains only the second appearance of Italian actor Ivan Rassimov, who went on to be a lead player in many giallo and horror pics of the era).
Planet of the Vampires is perhaps best known for its strong (and for a long time, unacknowledged) influence on Ridley Scott's Alien. To this day Scott denies the influence, and for a long time so did screenwriter Dan O'Bannon, although O'Bannon eventually admitted he 'stole' some elements of Bava's film for Scott's.
Parts of this are undeniably cheesy, but some parts work extremely well, and when you take it for what it is and what it achieved at the time with so little, and the influences it went on to have (even on Fox's X-Men costumes?), it's well worth a watch. 6.5/10
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