PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES

Two spaceships touch down on a distant planet, their crews investigating strange signals and freakish meteorites. It becomes rapidly clear that all is not well on this planet as the travelers find themselves in the thrall of strange forces, and as they battle desperately to escape they find their numbers dwindling, and their mysterious enemy slowly forming around them.

Mario Bava's sci-fi chiller is commonly regarded as a forerunner to Ridley Scott's ALIEN. Though the later film does share Bava's Gothic spirit (and some plot details with PLANET, right down to the huge alien corpses in a derelict spaceship), I tend to believe Scott and company when they say they never saw Bava's film. The vastness of space is as foreboding as an abandoned, fog-shrouded house, and it's a natural setting for horror (just ask Lovecraft).

It's not quite as dizzying or thrilling as some of Bava's other films - perhaps the on-set language barriers (which, with actors speaking their lines in four different languages, must have been considerable) kept everyone somewhat off the same page. But the occasionally leaden pace allows our mind and eyes to wander, and there are MANY places for them to go.


Though an international co-production, the film was realized on an insanely flimsy budget, which only brought out Bava's more insane and outlandish creative instincts. Even if one of his main sets resembles a metallic (if impressively minimalist) take on a STAR TREK set...


...the whole affair, considering the lack of available material resources, is designed, lit, and paced splendidly. Which just goes to show that imagination and a horror director's eye for lighting and atmosphere go a long way in realizing an ambitious scenario. Though an attractive international cast in pervy spacesuits doesn't hurt, either.

a simple list

Sent to Final Girl Stacie Ponder for her Shocktober event, which looks to be one of the horror blogosphere's finer offerings this month, this is a simple, quickly sketched but fairly accurate list of your proprietor's top 20 horror flicks, in no order.


Suspiria -- 1977, Dario Argento
Dawn Of The Dead -- 1978, George Romero
The Brides of Dracula -- 1960, Terence Fisher
Creepshow -- 1982, George Romero
The Beyond -- 1981, Lucio Fulci
Ju-On: The Grudge 2 -- 2003, Takashi Shimizu
The Brood -- 1979, David Cronenberg
Sunset Blvd. -- 1950, Billy Wilder
The Fog -- 1980, John Carpenter
The Bride of Frankenstein -- 1935, James Whale
The Black Imp -- 1905, Georges Méliès
Séance -- 2000, Kiyoshi Kurosawa
C.H.U.D. -- 1984, Douglas Cheek



Demon City Shinjuku -- 1988, Yoshiaki Kawajiri
Carnival of Souls -- 1962, Herk Harvey
Fright Night -- 1985, Tom Holland
An American Werewolf in London -- 1981, John Landis
Outer Space -- 1999, Peter Tscherkassky
Dust Devil -- 1992, Richard Stanley
Black Sunday -- 1960, Mario Bava

THE GATES OF HELL

When a priest commits suicide in a cemetery in Dunwich, the resulting bad vibes are picked up during a seance in New York City. It becomes clear that the good father's death has opened a portal to hell, and a disparate group of folks have only three days to get to Dunwich and close the portal before a flood of demons come through it and destroy the world.

Your proprietor saw this at the house of good friend and frequent commentator Mark Nigara. Coincidentally, this film (and a few of the other notables in the oeuvre of director Lucio Fulci, including HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY and THE BEYOND) were released contemporaneously with the studio albums cut by Ronnie James Dio with Black Sabbath. Mark had been paying hommage to the late RJD all week, and some of the Dio-era Sabbath proved a perfect prelude to the Fulci double feature ahead of us (the second film seen, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, was reviewed here previously).

THE GATES OF HELL, as the title suggests, boasts enough gruesome imagery and atmosphere to fuel several heavy metal albums. Fulci sacrifices realism, production value, all but the most bare vestiges of a plot, and any sense of logic to craft a dreamlike, genuinely suspenseful descent into hellacious fantasy. Some scenes - the suicide that kicks it all off; a harrowing rescue from a premature burial; the attack on a tavern by some angry spirits - are textbook examples of suspense filmmaking.

But other scenes, man, I don't know: a makeout session ends with bloody tears and vomited entrails; Bob, the town pervert, is dispatched for scant reason with a table drill through the head; the truly baffling coda that may signal the resurgence of the damned. By all accounts Fulci embraced all manner of experimentation on his films - indeed, the aforementioned coda has been said to be the result of a free-wheeling mashup by Fulci of random footage culled in the editing room. There is an artfulness to Fulci's insanity, and every so often a gruesome scene comes from so far out of nowhere that it does feel like some 3 AM dispatch from the cinematic subconscious. Bob's toolshed lobotomy is completely unconnected to the supernatural forces gathering in Dunwich, but the sheer excess of it (I'm astonished the drill didn't bore into his eye, frankly) suggests a deeper connection to the film around it.

As unforgettable as many of the setpieces in THE GATES OF HELL are, the full-tilt approach Fulci takes to the material keeps the film from remaining unsettlingly in the mind. If figures prominently in the run-up to THE BEYOND, Fulci's masterpiece, which perfects the fantastic scope of the previous film while amping up the apocalyptic fantasy. But that's a review for another time.

THE GATES OF HELL is reviewed here under the aegis of the Final Girl Film Club, run as always by the sharp and sparkly Stacie Ponder.

HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY

After a furtive sex date in the basement of a New England house, a beautiful young woman is stabbed in the head by an unseen assailant. This house (which, spoiler alert, is located next to a cemetery) is soon to welcome some new residents: Norman Boyle, a New York academic conducting a study on old houses, his wife Lucy and his son Bob. The assignment is already shrouded in mystery (a former colleague of Norman's committed suicide after living in the house), yet Bob's parents ignore his assertions that a young girl has offered him dire warnings to avoid the house at all costs.



A mid-career opus from Italian horrormeister Lucio Fulci, House by the Cemetery is less epic and apocalyptic in scope than Fulci's best-known masterpieces (ZOMBIE, THE GATES OF HELL, THE BEYOND). It's as dreamlike as those films (in other words, it makes little sense), but the more intimate setting of the film gives it a healthy dose of comparative realism. Clearly influenced by films like THE AMITYVILLE HORROR and THE SHINING, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY taps more human fears. The zombie-populated hellscapes of his other works are gorey fantasias that return us safely to our lives, but here Fulci plays with still -palpable childhood fears. Though this film was certified a video nasty during a censorious period in British cultural history, it's no more vicious than a fairy tale. The fear of the bogeyman in the basement (and of parents who ignore our warnings) is something we all share, and Fulci knows it.

BLACK SABBATH

A lone woman is terrorized in her apartment by increasingly disturbing phone calls. The caller is closer than she thinks.

A travelling nobleman is taken in by a family in a remote cottage, who find themselves under attack from supernatural forces.

And a nurse called to prepare a dead body steals a ring from the corpse, without heed to the considerable consequences.

Mario Bava's anthology horror film BLACK SABBATH adapts a trio of short stories (including Tolstoy's "The Wurdalak"), using devices from literature, theatre, and film. The stories play linearly, with each more suspenseful than the last. Each story unfolds at its own pace, but adds to the whole of the film. But despite the differences in scope of each tale, Bava employs similar visual strategies for each one, adding to the unity of the whole. All three stories are suffused with ominous purple backlighting. Doors and windows uniformly conceal something dreadful, but never for long - something or someone horrible peeks through a frame in each tale, and the sound of a creaking door is always bad news.



Horror icon Boris Karloff delivered several memorable performances in the twilight of his career, and in addition to appearing in the central tale here Bava deploys him as a playful narrator in the film's framing sequence. Karloff's iconic weight helps seal BLACK SABBATH's classic status, but he returns the favor by happily playing along with Bava's more freakish impulses. The downright Brechtian final shot features Karloff riding away into the night, and you can't help but laugh with him as the artifice of the film is slowly, hilariously revealed around him.

BLACK SABBATH is very much a 60s horror film, but I don't remember any other horror movie firing so assuredly on so many fronts. Its free-spirited, even genial qualities don't detract from its thrills (and some genuinely terrifying moments, particularly in the final episode), but instead add up to a unique experience, even in the varied history of the anthology film.

(This review created for the Final Girl Film Club, run as always by the talented and terrific Stacie Ponder.)