PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES @ 60 (Mild spoilers)

A pair of exploration ships respond to a distress beacon while in deep space. As they approach the planet and prepare to land the crews suddenly start beating each other up. Captain of the Gallio Markary, manages to control himself and breaks up the fights and the crew return to normal, reporting feelings of being manipulated. The landing goes well and the atmosphere and gravity are hospitable. Locating the other ship, they find the crew, including Markary's brother, dead and an essential piece of equipment intentionally damaged. Once buried, the remaining crew, set about finding the source of the beacon, now considering it an act of hostility. Could it have come from the crashed ship with the giant skeletons over there? Guess not. They aren't stranded but they also might not be themselves, effectively binding them to the planet. Things to do.

Mario Bava's 1965 eerie sci-fi is a triumph of artistry and vision over meagre means. Bava had already put in some serious service by inventing the giallo crime thriller and answered Hammer with a continental version of gothic horror in films that remain impressive. The Bava name stretches back to his father, a cinematographer from the early silent era, and forward to his son Lamberto, himself no slouch in giallo and horror in the '70s and '80s. Planet comes near the mid point and, as we'll see, reaches into the past and future.

One of the persistent issues with this film is that 1979's Alien ripped it off. You'll get that with the giant skeleton in the old crashed ship and the false beacon by themselves. You could go further. The twin phallic engines of the Gallio and its genital front door (made more labial under H.R. Geiger's design) as well as the ribbed interiors and jagged, misty landscapes. What's missing is the physical alien, the xenomorph that becomes the plot of Ridley Scott's film. That's not really a massive steal.

What we do get is much more like John Carpenter's 1982 re-adaptation of The Thing where the alien could be anybody. It's actually a little scarier. The crew are effectively parasitised by an ethereal consciousness that intends to travel inside the crew back home and transform the planet into a colony. They've all but destroyed their own planet, which should tell you a little about their character. But this is not Star Trek (which hadn't been broadcast at the time), it's a space opera by the writer-director of Blood and Black Lace; Markary and his dwindling company aren't interested in civilising the insidious colonisers but shaking them off and fleeing the scene. That, after a little gore unusual for its era, is what they set about doing.

The mention of Star Trek there might have set off some images. Yes, this very cheaply made movie was shot on sets that could have been from a '60s TV show. Bava joked that the landscapes were made out of a couple of plastic rocks reused over and over. But that's false modesty. There are many shots that involve optical illusions that Bava's father used in the early years of cinema. So, yes, the space ship in the credit sequence looks like a bath toy against some starry wrapping paper but as soon as the ship lands and the scene changes to an alien world things lift dramatically. One of the durable techniques is to shoot a mirror reflecting a miniature set, with a cutout through which cast members can be seen performing. It is more seamless that the dioptric shot in Jaws of bad hat Harry and the beach, within the aesthetic, it looks realistic. Bava uses this for interiors, as well, rendering the ship gigantic. The ringed entrance to the crashed alien ship is a marvel of forced perspective. The gore effects might surprise you.

The score is solidly electronic but not the weird and wonderful symphony of Forbidden Planet (itself a wonder) but a low key moody series of drones and growls. If anything, I could have wished for a lot more of it (although it occurred to me, when watching it for this blog, that it must have been a slog getting what sounds we did get in the first place: see also Delia Derbyshire's work for the BBC). It's not just a theremin and a few kazoos. John Carpenter almost certainly saw this film near its release and would have cause to recall the sounds of its atmosphere.

That said, Planet of the Vampires drags Bava's '60s rap sheet with its slow pacing through some fairly obvious revelations and the stiffness of the international cast who were speaking their lines in their own languages. Post-sound was normal practice for Italian cinema well past this point and the resulting Babels of on-set voices was never considered a hurdle. This was the first time I chose to watch it in Italian with subtitles and preferred the experience to hearing the strangled dubs (even though the Italian is also a dub). But I'd still recommend the curious sci-fi fan or cinephile seeking it out for the atmosphere building and wow-factor of the resourcefulness on display. Bava's space horror, for all its creakiness, remains a treasure.

Viewing notes: I've had this on a non-anamorphic DVD and a slightly better Blu-Ray but I watched it most recently on Radiance's stunning boxed Blu-Ray with a squeaky clean remastering. The thing looks a little too good when coming up against some of the model work and effects but most of what is on screen is a notch above what you'd see in the remastered Star Trek and so quite easily adjusted to. There is a possiblity of a 4K but I can't see it doing all that much more than here (then again, I've said that a lot). This might have once been available locally but not at time of writing, so the only way of getting it (not on streaming either) is to shell out for a physical copy. The box set I bought is prohibitive for taking a punt so ebay for a DVD might be the go. Sorry I can't be more help.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER @ 65

Young Phillip Winthrop rides all the way from Boston to the mansion of the Usher family to fetch Madeline, his betrothed. When he gets there, she's almost in a coma and her severe brother Roderick wants him gone. When she appears at the door and the lovers meet again, Phillip gets a foot in the jamb and his own furnished room. Madeline is not well enough to travel. In the meantime we get the story of the Ushers and the apparent curse upon the house. Does Phillip really want to marry into them? I mean really really?

Roger Corman's film of the classic Edgar Allen Poe tale was the first of his string of Gothic hits in the '60s. All low budget and glossy looks, these were training manuals in style on spare means as Corman and his cohorts worked some serious magic. They gave their mid-century audiences a near antiquity the way that Poe himself set his tales in a long forgotten Europe that his American readers could thrill in. So much could be said under the guise of distant culture that would alert the censor if set contemporaneously. Twilight Zone alumnus Richard Matheson on the typewriter helped greatly with this.

Today, you might think they look like creaky old tv shows but spare a thought for the people who first saw them. Even by 1960 colour cinema was a rarity, especially on the skid row end of the spectrum. Colour horror movies, even rarer. Chuck anamorphic widescreen into the mix and your ticket is getting you some big time value. Usher cost $300K and made three times that in its first weeks. Creepy atmosphere, Vincent Price and the bankability of the ever popular Edgar Allen Poe had the title raking it in. Did they care about the big obvious painting of the house itself and how the interiors were lit for Jane Austen rather than Poe? Not a bit, everyone was used to it. It even added to the fantasical atmosphere. When Phillip requests that Roderick light a candle in the gloom, the flames don't make even a tiny difference. But if, by that, you haven't taken your cue to imagine more than you are seeing, the way you must in live theatre, maybe you shouldn't be watching this. Corman's disturbed home is one of old order in decay, silk on its way to dust before the house itself is swallowed by the mud of its foundation.

And yet, this is a film about something as vivacious as sex. You get only the slightest suggestion of physicality from the screen but it's there. If the dark vulval fissure on the side of the outside wall doesn't make you think of sex then Myrna Faye's woozy depiction of Madeline will. But this isn't steamy, sultry seduction, it's the sex of private thoughts forbidden from action, the grimy impulses and fetishism that allow Roderick's saucer-eyed protection of his sister look like some very dark matter. Phillip in his muted Regency finery gazing up at the crack in the wall gives us a barely more acceptable form of this. It's not that his thoughts turn sexy, anyone's would, it's that he can't tell the difference between the love he professes and the possession he effectively means.

And if the decadence of all that hazy desire weren't enough, Corman reveals a secret weapon. Roderick shows Phillip a range of ancestral portraits that come with narrated bios dripping with slave trading, addiction, sex trafficking and worse. Each of the paintings seems flown in from much later in the 1960s with their distorted faces and psychedelic colouring. These extraordinary pictures were created by commercial artist and fantasy painter Burt Shonberg whose work feels like a kind of bubblegum Beksinski but no less troubling for that with the damnation and chaos of their faces and settings. This goes perfectly with the atonal lute music that Les Baxter provided to give the Usher's achievements an unsettling sound.

If the younger cast, Mark Damon and Myrna Fahey, sound like they come from the same beach as Annette Funicello and Fabian the dour turn by Vincent Price puts them in perspective. Price uses his emotional elasticity within a narrow range, less abrupt shifts than localised stretches from his dour base demeanour. He's not just fighting the youngsters' rawness but the brightness of the interiors. Then, when the Gothic gets going in the crypt and everything gets a little gloomier, he turns it down to speak matter of factly of the horror of his family. When it is time to reveal Poe's explosive finale, all that camp and affectation are squeezed off screen by the now perfect lighting, close ups on eyes wide and crazy when they should be incorporeal, works as well as anything from the past few decades and almost approaches that scene in Black Narcissus for intensity. Corman saved the gem for last.

And then set the set on fire and then used that footage in every one. Well, it was costly to shoot and by the next one and all after that, who remembers what it looked like? It's the same with the colour and the bright interiors: he paid for it and he'll flaunt it. The fire at the end is disproportionate to the scene the way that waves in a water tank never look like ocean waves. But that's the story and the glory of the audacity. Shoot small and aim high. This model continues to serve those whose movies are made with little but who dream large.

Roger Corman employed scores of creative people in his extended stable and most of them went on to careers including Scorsese, Coppola, Jack Nicholson and many more and whether the title was from Poe or seemingly generated from a theme card shuffle like Monsters of Skull Reef, it was headed for a real cinema and seen by many. As with many working on the fringes, Corman's works found a haven in late night TV and home video. His recent death (2024) left a wake of a massive filmography and waves of influence.

The House of Usher was made the way it was when the dollar for the microbudget exploitationers he'd started with dried up and he needed a new channel of inspiration. In one of those moves that made careers of Wes Craven and John Carpenter, he took a breath, retooled the workshop and changed the way his movies looked and felt. For all the stagey performances and chipboard walls he fashioned worlds that felt like themselves. There are other titles just in this Poe cycle that are held in loftier regard and I can see why. Nevertheless, it's Usher's brashness and energy that remembers when it must step back and breathe before delivering its chills, that draws me back again and again. 

Viewing notes: I watched my Arrow Blu-Ray from the Six Gothic Tales box set which is a must for Corman/Poe movies (though by no means complete). Available to rent through AppleTV.

BANDE A PART @ 60

Franz and Arthur, young and aimless in Paris, add Odile who is in the English class who mentions that her Aunt's tenant has a pile of cash at the house. That turns into a scheme and the rest is hysteria. Well, it might be but this is a film from the early years of the Nouvelle Vague or New Wave in French cinema wherein the heavily American influenced movies of young directors on the rise were beaten out of shape in pursuit of the new. So, when we get to the botched robbery, it neither plays like a well oiled plan nor is a morally redemptive disaster, it just kind of falls into confusion and  heads into inconsequence.

Jean Luc Godard's seventh feature film finds him back in familiar bohemian Paris with bright young folk quoting Rimbaud, hanging out in cafes, staring through the fourth wall and even stopping the action to make points. Along the way, the robbery which would have been at the centre of an audience's attention, is blithely left in the background as the trio negotiates its life, affinities and so on. Sounds twee and precious? It isn't. Some of the dialogue strays into philosophy but there is a greater appeal to popular culture and the three effectively imagine themselves in the movie that we are watching.

While Godard did have serious points to make, having emerged from three much harder films about terrorism, war and fame's exploitation, this outing with its sprint through the Louvre, testing people's tolerance of silence on screen (the duration of which is just over half the claimed minute but feels interminable) and a parade of other conceits that might have ended up cute in the hands of another filmmaker. Godard is yet again showing his audience how fiction is fabricated, how actors are quoting and how the action centrepiece of a noir plot is both farcical and serious.

Anna Karina as the yet again self-illuminating centre provides us with a young woman willing to approach her life as a jam session. She leads an impromptu dance with the boys in a cafe which looks improvised but was choreographed that way. She brings the action to a halt by demonstrating the minute of silence. She struggles with the attentions of Arthur but admits her attraction early. Next to her complexity, the philosophy spouting romantic Franz seems like an overdressed lightweight and the puggish Arthur a directionless drifter. That means that when the robbery comes up, the mishaps are sometimes comic and sometimes grave, all in one extended scene (there are actually two attempts at the robbery but let's relax that for the point). When bumbling action is intruded upon by fatality, the transition suddenly feels natural. After all that whimsy and lightness, Godard has brought it together to give us a high stakes climax.

The film auteur's most popularly celebrated film is his debut feature A bout de souffle (Breathless) which is a playful noir. I much prefer this in the same vein for its confidence and the more assured use of that kind of play. I enjoy Breathless but I'm compelled by Bande a part. Godard had covered musicals in extraordinary fashion with Une femme est une femme, tough politics in Les carbiniers and Le petite soldat and self reflexive cinema production in Le mepris. His return to noir showed him stronger this time around the loop. This would continue until his political commitments drove the narrative out in preference for harder essays from 1966 on to the extent where he collectivised his film production and presented the results of his demolition of conventional cinema (at least for his own work, of course).

That made him a personal hero to me in my undergraduate years when I even started smoking lung ravaging French cigarettes and claiming a preference for the later, less watchable films (while always preferring the easier ones). It also exposed me to a world of ridiculing normies who thought they were being witty when launching attacks on any kind of cinema reset and how feeble the counter argument was and is. Godard's efforts in tearing convention to shreds influenced everything those folks celebrate about the New Hollywood of the '70s or Tarantino's self-avowedly derivative work (his production company name Band Apart is lifted from this movie). If you are familiar with Godard's early career but find it variously too cute or arcane, track this down. Of all the milestones and audacious taunts at convention, Bande a part remains the solid sweet spot. If you can't come out of this something like a sigh of pleasure don't investigate Godard any further, it won't be for you. If you are pleased by it, you have a world of endeavour before you, a lot of it tauntingly difficult but most of it worth every second. Start here.