Somewhere deep in the cosmic junk drawer of mid-60s genre films lies Planet of the Vampires, a movie that dared to ask: “What if space was mostly dry ice, plot holes, and astronauts who dressed like BDSM extras from Barbarella?” Directed by Italian genre stylist Mario Bava—bless him—it’s a film of gorgeous visuals shackled to a plot so senseless it could’ve been written by a space amoeba high on argon gas.
Let’s blast off into this Technicolor fever dream, shall we?
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🚀 Plot? We Hardly Knew Ye
Two interplanetary ships, the Argos and the Galliott, receive a distress signal from a mysterious fog-soaked planet named Aura. Naturally, they crash. One crew is possessed by an unseen evil force and immediately tries to kill each other (team-building exercise from hell), while the other ship is discovered full of corpses who clearly lost a very one-sided murder mystery dinner party.
And yet… despite the title, there are no vampires. Unless you count alien ghosts that reanimate corpses and look like rejected audition tapes from Scooby-Doo. The film might as well have been titled Planet of the Incorporeal Bullies, but that doesn’t quite have the same box office allure, does it?
Captain Markary (Barry Sullivan, doing his best “I’m too sober for this” face), resists the murderous impulse that overtakes his crew and attempts to lead them out of the fog, both metaphorical and literal. But Aura, like your aunt’s unfinished basement, has other plans—and they mostly involve corpses getting up, people screaming, and nobody explaining anything until it’s way too late.
🧟♂️ Undead? Yes. Vampires? Not Really.
Let’s address the cosmic elephant in the room: the movie’s title is a lie. A beautiful, pulp-scented lie. There are no vampires here. No fangs, no neck biting, no garlic, not even a single tragic cape. What you do get are alien squatters using dead humans as meat puppets, like ventriloquists auditioning for The Walking Dead: Interpretive Dance Edition.
The Aurans, invisible mind-control entities from a dying world, hop into freshly dead bodies like frat bros couch surfing across galaxies. Their plan? Hijack one of the spaceships and colonize Earth. So yes, technically the film ends with an undead invasion on its way to Earth… assuming you’re still conscious by that point.
🎭 Acting in Zero Gravity
The performances? Imagine the cast was told the set was full of explosive gas and to move as little as possible. Barry Sullivan grimaces through 90% of the movie like a man who just realized he left the stove on back on Earth. Norma Bengell does her best with the role of Sanya, which mostly requires her to look shocked and occasionally shout “Mark!” with the enthusiasm of someone reading IKEA instructions aloud.
And then there’s the rest of the crew, distinguishable only by hairstyle, deaths, and the degree to which their faces get colonized by Aurans. There is one standout moment: when a crew member finds an ancient alien ship full of 10-foot skeletons. It’s a fantastic set piece with clear influence on Alien—but like everything else in the movie, it’s dropped as quickly as it’s introduced. No follow-up. No answers. Just skeletons in space, which might be a metaphor for this film’s narrative structure.
🎨 Pretty Pictures, Dumb Decisions
To be fair, Planet of the Vampires looks phenomenal for its budget. Mario Bava was a master painter with a camera, and this is his glitter-covered canvas of colored gels, spooky miniatures, and smoke machines working overtime. If this movie were a Pinterest board, it would be a smash hit: “Alien Landscapes for Your Budget Sci-Fi Dream Home.”
But you can only smear Vaseline on a lens so long before someone realizes the movie underneath is aggressively nonsensical. The pacing lurches like a drunken sloth on a treadmill. Scenes repeat themselves endlessly: crew explores foggy rock, crew finds body, crew acts surprised, crew gets possessed. Rinse, repeat, float gently toward existential dread.
🪦 Killer Line Delivery
As with most dubbed Italian productions of the time, everyone sounds like they recorded their lines in a crowded cafeteria. The disjointed audio combined with dialogue like, “The dead… are alive!” delivers a surrealism that would make David Lynch clutch his pearls.
The narrator, when present, speaks in the tone of a substitute teacher trying to explain calculus after three shots of NyQuil. The exposition feels retroactively stapled together with Scotch tape and regret.
🛸 Final Verdict: Gorgeous Garbage from Beyond the Stars
Look, Planet of the Vampires is beautiful trash. It’s stylish, eerie, and deeply stupid—like an Italian cousin of Plan 9 from Outer Space, but with actual cinematography and slightly less visible fishing wire. As a horror experience, it’s like being trapped inside a haunted lava lamp that occasionally growls at you and asks for a meteor rejector.
But as a historical artifact? It’s kind of fascinating. Ridley Scott definitely watched this thing while half-asleep and thought, “What if we did this but, you know… good?”
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 Possessed Space Corpses
Because while Planet of the Vampires doesn’t deliver on its promise of fanged terror, it does deliver the kind of slow-motion cosmic chaos that makes you question whether we really deserve intelligent life in the universe.
If you do watch it, bring snacks. And maybe a flashlight. For the fog. And for your brain.
