Planet of the Vampires (Terrore nello Spazio)

Ooooh, look, everyone! Planets! Vampires! Terrore! Spazio! This is actually a pretty important science fiction film from 1965, directed by the legendary horror director, Mario Bava.
It is cited as a major influence on the visual style of Ridley Scott's Alien, among other things.

Planet of the Vampires is a pretty misleading title. It's a bit of a reach to call the creatures in this movie "vampires". I assume the company that released it in America wanted a catchy, eye-grabbing title that would put American butts in seats.

Terrore nello Spazio follows a crew on a spaceship who are drawn to a mysterious planet. After a crash landing is averted, everybody on the ship suddenly loses their senses and tries to kill each other. The captain, Mark keeps himself together and helps everyone else come to. They follow a distress call from another ship, and when they get there, they find the ship full of bloody corpses. And then the mystery goes deeper when they return to the ship later and the corpses are nowhere to be found. Somebody or something on this planet is messing with them.

I don't want to ruin the plot, since it kind of relies on the mystery, so I'll stop there.

Much like Spaghetti Westerns, Vampires was made in Italy on a teeny, tiny, shoestring budget, and starred slightly bankable actors from all around the world, in order to maximize international sales. It has pretty crappy dubbing, which was also just the way things were done at the time. In these old Italian movies, they didn't even record sound on set, they just worked it all out in post.

Unlike most space adventures of the period, the pacing for Planet of the Vampires is slow and suspenseful. Mario Bava adds atmosphere by filling the sets with fog and unsettling red lighting. He made do with his extremely limited resources by having minimalistic sets that can easily be reused for other locations (I'm pretty sure they only build the one ship).

The production design, cheap though it is, still has that awesome 60's aesthetic. I especially liked the crew's uniforms, which looked extremely similar to the costumes in the original X-Men movie, but with collars that go all the way up to their ears, pretty much completely immobilizing the actors' necks. There's also a cool sequence where they find an ancient alien ship with these giant, 15-foot alien skeletons in it that look pretty great.

Though interesting, the movie isn't perfect. There's a lot of the characters just going back and forth from one ship set to another on a tiny fake planet set. The repetition of this, combined with the slow pacing, started to wear on me by the end. The budget constraints prevent the movie from being great, but Mario Bava's skill in atmosphere and suspense make Planet of the Vampires an interesting watch.