Planet Of The Vampires 4K 1965 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

An expedition exploring the planet Aura mysteriously disappears. A second ship sets out to help, but upon landing on the planet, the crew finds only the remains of their comrades. The captain orders the dead astronauts to be buried, but soon after the funeral their bodies begin to crawl out of the ground and attack the humans in search of blood.

Review 4K Movie

In the distant future, Earth receives signals from space, asking for help, coming from the planet Aura. The ship "Argos" is sent there, followed by the ship "Galliot". Upon landing, its crew members are severely overloaded and lose consciousness. When they come to, they turn violent, trying to kill one another, but when they wake up from this torment, they remember nothing about it. The crew of the "Argos" is found dead and buried along with the two dead members of their crew. In addition, an old spaceship with the skeletons of huge humanoid creatures is found on the planet. There is nothing else alive on the planet except for strange glowing multi-colored lights flying over the smoking surface. At the same time, the crew members of the Galliot continue to die one by one. But that's not the strangest part, because after the funerals, the dead rise from their graves and stubbornly try to re-enter the ship to return to Earth.

The original title of this film by Mario Bava, which he based on Renato Pestriniero's story "21 Hour Night," is "Horror in Space." For the U.S. box office chose a title from as many as 15 options and chose "Planet of the Vampires." Probably because there are no vampires in the film, but it sounds nice and promising. It would have been more correct to call it "Planet of zombies" if we wanted to base our choice on the plot, but this title has a distinct trashy flavor, that the distributors evidently decided to avoid. The plot itself is quite simple, though fascinating. The dialogues, spoken by actors whose performance also does not strike the imagination, are not very intricate either. And there's not much to play: the men are manly and resolute and the two girls know how to scream out loud with fear, get hysterical and faint, especially the pretty blonde Evie Marandi.

With a penny budget, the film's wooden sets and plywood panels painted gray with lots of colorful flashing lights look naïve today, like staged props from a school drama club. But Mario Bava's camerawork talent transforms both the interior of the spaceships and, even more so, the smoky and gloomy surface of the planet into something atmospheric, unearthly and dangerously beguiling. Playing with light and shadow, saturated with color, changing red, blue, green, and yellow backlighting, Bava makes the mountainous landscape of Aura look completely extraterrestrial. Bright colors soak into the flowing clouds of smoke and dense fog, and the soil boils, bubbles, and breathes like it's alive - then red, like glowing embers or volcanic lava, then dead blue, like snow in the nighttime permafrost.

To create all this visual luxury on the screen, Mario Bava, the legendary cameraman and excellent master of special effects, capable of creating a masterpiece from literally nothing, showed ingenuity, ingenuity and ingenuity here as well. Of all the means the director had a 50-kilogram bag of corn grits. Bava scattered some of it on the floor like the sand cover of the planet, and from most of it he boiled a huge cauldron of gruel. And still hot and gurgling, he scattered it on the floor of the pavilion, using light filters to create a completely fantastic world of the distant and eerie planet Aura. The disembodied inhabitants of Aura, who were swept through the darkness and fog as acid-bright fireflies, also required no special makeup or rubber suits, with which it was customary at that time to portray alien monsters. And thus did not require and the financial cost of their production, including savings in the salaries of actors. The costumes of the stargazers themselves are extremely simple, yet spectacular: shiny artificial black leather with zippers and numerous yellow trim rants. Evie Marandi looked especially impressive in this costume, with her captivating forms. It should be noted that after this movie tight black latex suits with bright inlays of other colors became fashionable in Europe.

Among other things, this film opened a whole new trend in sci-fi alien horror. Similar plot motifs can be seen in many films of that time and much later. After the 1979 release of Alien, many critics and audiences noted the similarity of several storylines. Ridley Scott and Dan O'Bannon denied having seen Mario Bava's film. Although later in an interview, O'Bannon said that it was Planet of the Vampires that gave him the idea that an alien monster could come to Earth in the body of one of the crew of an Earth ship. And the moment of the discovery of the spaceship with the remains of huge xenomorphs with elongated skulls and ridged bony outgrowths on their foreheads also brings back certain memories. And it brings to mind not only the long-ago "Alien," but also the not-so-distant "Prometheus. Especially in the ending of the movie, when the question arises whether it is possible to defeat the alien enemy invader or it is better to perish on this terrible planet, in order not to let the contagion out into outer space in general and our native Earth in particular. Also interesting is the idea of the alien race's alien ship doors, which open and close to the sounds of a certain pitch, frequency and tone, emitted by the electronic device of the "aliens". After all, this is an ancient and highly advanced civilization, the technology of which has left the earthlings far behind.

Just as Mario Bava's "Bloody Bay" Jallo was locally reborn as a new genre of horror - slasher, so "Vampire Planet" gave rise to a new branch of space fiction, on which the amazing fruit of the legendary Alien franchise matured. This film is worth watching already for the opportunity to see where everything began, what was the source, from which you can draw ideas to this day. And once again admire the incomparable camerawork of the brilliant Italian director Mario Bava.