Italian Director and Cinematographer Mario Bava, best known for giallofilms such as Blood and Black Lace and horror movies like Black Sunday, in 1965 released the stylish is somewhat misnamed science-fiction horror film Planet of the Vampires.

A pair of spaceships, the Argos and the Galliott arrive at the planet Aura investigating signals that may signify intelligent life. When the ships, after being unable to observe the plant’s surface due to a constant impenetrable could layer, attempt to land they are subjected to a mysterious increased in gravity that renders all of the crew except for the Argos’ commander Mark (Barry Sullivan) unconscious. As quickly as it arrived the mysterious forces dissipates the Argos lands perfectly but when the crew awake, they are overtaken by violent impulses and nearly kill each other. With their wits gathered the Commander must locate and rescue the Galliott and discover the terrifying secret of planet Aura before everyone is killed by the planet’s mysterious force.

I first saw Planet of the Vampires, and there are no traditional vampires anywhere in the story, when I was a young teenager. A late night ‘creature feature’ broadcast the film, particularly its ending, stayed with me from the 70s through the 2000s when I obtained first a DVD and then later a Blu-ray release. While the characters are threadbare serving plot rather than dramatic functions the film is immensely stylish and unforgettable in its beautiful cinematography. All the more impressive when it’s known that the entire budget was less than that of two episodes the original Star Trek series. There are very few optical effects in the film with most of the ‘special effects’ captured in-camera and yet quite credible and lovely. Set design, though impractical for an actual starship, is modern, for the mid-60s, and immersive.

It’s difficult to accurately judge the acting of the movie. Planet of the Vampires was produced in the International Style used by many Italian productions of the period where the multinational cast all delivered their lines in their native languages, often without know what the other characters were actually saying, and then the rest of the cast would be dubbed into various language for other markets.

Based on an Italian SF short story One night of 21 hours the movie’s ending, which I will not spoil here, is one of the scenes that managed to stay stuck in my memory over the decades. Even during the years when the film’s title had faded from recall the ending remained.

This film is not to everyone’s taste, you must be able to accept style over plausibility, but if you do you will be rewarded.

Planet of the Vampires is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Being a universally beloved and known property that exits in the Public Domain there is rarely a shortage of adaptations, reinterpretations, and extension of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.

The last really big elaborate adaptation came from producer Francis Ford Coppola and director/star Kenneth Branagh with 1994’s Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. I remember seeing this one in the theater and being, well, underwhelmed.

It has a fantastic cast, Branagh as Frankenstein, Robert De Niro as the Monster, Helena Bonham Carter as Elizabeth and a slew of other great actors of the period, but that couldn’t put the film over the top leaving it as just a couple of hours of entertainment.

I think there’s an element that James Whale and the four writers of the 1931 Universal classic Frankenstein got correct that many later editions failed at and that is getting straight to the point of the story.

The 1931 film opens with Frankenstein’s fiancé concerned because she hasn’t seen her love in sometime. After collecting a mutual friend and an old instructor they head to his lab and barge in on the night of creation. Bam! We’re off and running.

1994’s adaptation returns to the novel’s framing device of an arctic explorer coming across Frankenstein, near death, and hear the tale told as flashback. (A flashback that violates Point of View with Frankenstein recounting details of scenes he never witnessed, but the novel does this as well.) We sit though extended sequences of Frankenstein’s life, his loves, his slowly building obsessions until finally we get to him creating life.

The truth of the matter is we don’t care about the backstory. It holds no suspense. Ask nearly anyone what happens in Frankenstein and they’ll tell you a scientist makes a living monster from dead body parts. This exploration of growing obsession is pointless. We know where he ends up, we know what he is going to do, and unless you have invented a unique take wholly divorced from the source material, you’re just boring us while we wait for the subject matter that brought us to the theater.

This week my sweetie-wife and I re-watched 1972’s Horror Express starring those icons of horror film Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing with an additional appearance by America’s favorite lollipop loving detective Telly Savalas as Captain Kazan.

In 1906 Alexander Saxon (Lee) boards the trans-Siberian express heading West with a secret and astounding scientific discovery he found in remote Asia. Also aboard the train is Dr Wells (Cushing) a rival English scientist though not a villainous one, a Polish Count and his wife along with their mad priest very much in the style of Rasputin and an assortment of other curious and dubious characters. Even before the train departs the station a thief attempting to breaking Saxon’s secretive crate mysteriously dies with his eyes suddenly turned an opaque white. En route more terrifying deaths occur turning the passenger cars in a slaughterhouse. Really, for Lee and Cushing movie from the early 70s this movie has an astoundingly high body count. The express stops briefly to board Captain Kazan and his men apparently dispatched on orders from Moscow to deal, ineffectually, with the crisis.

In genre story construction a general rule, particularly in film, if that you ask the audience to accept only one truly fantastic thing in your story. The filmmakers of Horror Express have utterly no regard for this concept. Among the out of the world elements pushed into the plot are, beings frozen in ice reanimating after millions of years, alien visitations, the telepath absorption of someone entire mind, and mind transference. Despite the ‘junk drawer’ approach to genre story Horror Express is a fun watch. Lee and Cushing are great together and unlike many films where they share billing the movie centers on their relationship rather than using the actors as mere advertising props. Savalas revels in playing the cruel Cossack sent to sort thing out and the cast in general are quite enjoyable.

Horror Express is currently available as a VOD rental from Amazon for the princely sum of 99 cents.

With the pandemic closing exhibition theaters movie watching has transitioned to on-line model and experience and the selection of feature on-line is expanded from what would normally be available at the local megaplex showing mostly tent-poles movies with a very few scattered smaller films in the smaller auditoriums. This weekend a friend and I discovered a Russian science-fiction horror film that had been released August 14th for Video of Demand and not at the ‘theater at home’ price of $20 but a mere 7.

Sputnik is set in 1983 during a time when the Soviet Union still existed and competed with the Americans both globally and beyond. Dr Tatyana Klimova, (Oksana Akinshina) a brilliant but unconventional psychiatrist is summoned to a remote facility on the steppes of Soviet Kazakhstan to treat the sole survivor of a recent orbital mission, Konstantin (Fyodor Bondarchuk). Konstantin suffers from specific amnesia and can’t recall what happened during the mission, the return to earth, of is even aware that his fellow cosmonaut was killed. Convinced that she has not been given all the pertinent facts Tatyana forces the officer in charge Col Semiradov, to reveal what has been kept from her and the reason that everything has been located in this isolated facility, Konstantin did not return alone but now harbors an alien parasite but all attempts to separate the cosmonaut from the creature have failed and Semiradov fears that Konstantin is withholding something from them all.

When we rented Sputnik based on the strength of its trailer, we honestly expect nothing more than mediocre Alien clone but the film exceeded our expectations. While it is far from a perfect film Sputnik is competently written, acted, and directed taking its time to reveal the horrors both alien and human as secrets drip from the script like water from a leaky faucet. Akinshina is well cast as the troubled doctor and Bondarchuk manages both the ‘Hero of the Union’ aspect of his cosmonaut while slowly revealing the character’s more human and sometimes darker nature. The cinematography is atmospheric and moody with the visual effects of alien credible in every scene.

While I would seriously hesitate to recommend this as an expensive ‘theater at home’ rental, for a more usual video on demand rental fee I was quite satisfied and willing to suggest this to fans of moderately graphic SF horror.