A few sci-fi/horror fans in Italy were lucky to be able to see some special screenings of the digitally restored version (from the original 35mm Kodak Eastman Color negative) of Mario Bava's "Terrore nello Spazio" (Planet of the Vampires, 1965) last year during the Turin Film Festival.
Today the film will be on at Cannes as part of the Classics Special Screenings, before being re-released on 6th July. In Cannes the film will be presented by director Nicolas Winding Refn (who introduced it in Turin as well) and by its producer Fulvio Lucisano.
The restoration (by CSC Cineteca Nazionale) and the complex colour correction via colorimetry comparison of an original 35mm positive copy courtesy of the Cineteca Nazionale were carried out under the supervision of assistant director (director and screenwiter) Lamberto Bava (Mario's son).
A constant inspiration referenced by many modern directors including Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Tim Burton, Mario Bava was a unique director with a brilliant mind and a penchant for special effects made with extremely low budgets.
In "Terrore nello Spazio" two spaceships - the Argos and the Galliot - answer a signal sent by the mysterious Aura planet, located in a distant quadrant of the galaxy. When they land, confused by the gravitational pull, the Argos' crew start fighting among themselves, but their Captain prevents them from killing each other. After landing they discover the Galliot nearby, but all the astronauts on board are dead. There is more behind the killing frenzy that has taken the two crews: Aura is indeed inhabited by parassitic creatures ready to kill and take possession of somebody else's body to run away from their dying planet.
The film can't be filed under the B-movie label for many reasons: rather than being just a sci-fi film, Planet of the Vampires is indeed a combination of fantasy, sci-fi and horror infused with gothic elements.
The scary intergalactic vampires mentioned in the English title for this film aren't actually visible, so, in many ways, the movie also hints at the dark side of human beings.
This sci-fi movie - based on Renato Pestriniero's short story "One Night of 21 Hours" and featuring a screenplay by a team including Italian writer Alberto Bevilacqua and critic Callisto Cosulich - becomes therefore a philosophical tale with ghosts, vampirical parasites and zombies, with no extreme technology involved. Modern films have got us used to amazing digital effects and visual scapes, but Bava's set is mysterious, foggy, rocky and atmospheric (even though it consisted in just a couple of rocks leftover from another film that Bava multiplied with mirrors and other effects...). Colour-wise the film is a baroque Carnival of colours, a tapestry made with lurid shades of red and violet.
Materials are also extremely interesting: the dead astronauts are indeed buried in futuristic looking graves with metal headstones and they are wrapped in basic plastic shrouds (plastic bits and pieces that were lying around the set?)
The spaceships (Carlo Rambaldi worked uncredited on this film as model maker) are almost empty, mirroring in this way the empty bodies of the dead astronauts, filled by the parasitical aliens.
Yet if the mysterious aliens are cruel, don't think the astronauts are good: their costumes - black bodysuits with yellow details matched with a yellow helmet (the original costumes for this film are perfectly intact and were modelled by a young man and woman at the Turin Film Festival screening last year) - were designed by Gabriele Mayer (who also worked on "Danger Diabolik") to call to mind fascist uniforms, becoming therefore hints at colonisation, power and rootless dictators. As the years passed the uniforms inspired fashion collections and further costumes for sci-fi films.
"Terrore nello spazio" was certainly the major influence on Ridley Scott's "Alien" and "Prometheus", movies that seem to have a similar storyline.
The final lesson to be learnt from this film may be a philosophical one revolving around humanity and power, but, as highlighted also in other posts on this site in which we mentioned the Italian director, the real lesson is hidden in an old adage: though Bava always seemed to have limited resources on his films, he was always high on resourcefulness.
In this film, for example, he used the mirror-based Schüfftan Process to combine live action with miniatures, avoiding in this way the costly matte/optical printing techniques. In a nutshell, don't let your lack of resources or financial limits stop you from being creative, but opt for the Bava method.
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