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 Astronauts intercept a "distress call from a distant world" but is all as it seems? The planet they land on is described as "shadowy" and they run into aliens who want to "conquer the universe" by "controlling the crew's minds." 1965, 88 minutes, Widescreen DVD
This is a well aged slice of sixties Italian sci-fi cheese from Mario Bava (Hercules In The Haunted World, Baron Blood) that tells the horrifying tale of some astronauts who get in a whole heap of trouble on the mysterious planet of Aura. There are two spaceships involved here, the Galliot and the Argus. The movie starts out with these ships using their space TVs to contact one another regarding their mission. It seems that there has been a radio signal emanating from Aura. This means either one of two things - that there is intelligent life there or that there is intelligent life there that is laying a dastardly and nefarious trap to enslave the human race.
Naturally, we need to check into such things. Around this time the various crew members start blabbering about their supercool gizmo that protects them against meteors by detecting them and deflecting them or something. They have given this piece of hardware the scientific name of "the meteor rejector." To further illustrate how important this is, one crew member states that if it wasn't for the meteor rejector, they'd all be "Swiss cheese." As opposed to the Italian cheese they already are. I must note at this point that this life saving device when unhooked from its stand resembles a pair of very large binoculars. As you might guess, this meteor rejector is going to play a big part at the end of the movie.
Suddenly contact with the Galliot is lost! Then the problems aboard the Argus starts. The gravity on the ship increases dramatically. This forces the actors to make pained expressions with their faces and move with great difficulty. You can almost hear Mario saying, "okay, you're really heavy! I mean really heavy! That's it! Make love to the camera with your heavy and stretched out face!"
Now since the gravity has been drastically increased, some superduper button needs to be pushed to save everyone. I think I also heard the captain say that he needed to switch the ship to manual so that he could get all the credit if they somehow managed to survive this crisis. It always amazes me in these spaceship movies where something has gone haywire or a real special maneuver has to been done that the captain demands to have the controls switched over to manual. Most of the time, it was the captain's dumb commands that got everyone into the crisis in the first place. Why would you want your worthless captain, who was the one that thought sailing into the black hole after the Klingons or SpaceGodzilla was such a great idea in the first place, to have control over the ship now?
So the captain of the Argus makes a heroic effort to stretch his arm (and face) toward the control panel (I assumed it was a control panel because it had a bunch of blinking lights and switches) and punches a button and then the ship seems to be okay and they land, but the trouble is just beginning because the crew decides that now would be an excellent time to mutiny. I should make you aware at this point that the captain's name is Mark and he looks and sounds like the K-Mart version of Lloyd Bridges. If you signed onto a ship with some fossil named Captain Mark, you get what you deserve. The crew starts beating each other up and tries to ruin equipment and all that good stuff before everyone settles down and wonders why they were just trying mutiny on poor old Captain Mark. God only knows what that did to the Depends he wears under his space suit!
Once on the planet, Captain Mark sees the wreck of the Edmund Galliot over yonder and decides that something isn't quite right about it, so he takes a squad of cannon fodder crew members and goes to take a look. Once there he sees that everyone is dead and that there are some pretty bad wounds on the corpses and it's clear that they were fighting amongst themselves just as the crew of the Argus had been. Of course the Galliot wasn't blessed with Captain Mark and his heroic efforts, so they are all dead. Captain Mark decides that these people should be given a proper burial and all that jazz and also notes that some of the crew are missing, but he wasn't their captain, was he?
They bury these people, but strange stuff is still happening. Now Captain Mark's crew members are disappearing and there are weird sounds and lights all over the planet. Also some of the dead crew members have gotten up out of their graves, ripped their body bags off, and started to wander around to intimidate the crew members that are still alive. Captain Mark knows his crew is looking to him for answers so when he spots another wrecked ship, he figures the heroic thing to do is head over there, check it out, and see if he can't rustle himself up some mysterious planet trouble.
He takes two other crew members with him. He has the male crew member stand guard outside the ship while he and the female crew member go into the ship. I'll bet Captain Mark is going to switch the controls to manual while he's in there, if you smell what I'm cooking. They discover large alien skeletons inside and outside the ship. That's odd. It's almost as if this strange race was lured to this planet years ago and met some heinous fate. Probably nothing, plus you can almost see in Captain Mark's expression that he knows they didn't have Captain Mark to bail their sorry alien butts out of trouble, like everyone on his ship has.
Once inside the ship, Captain Mark manages to touch a glowing object that shocks him, accidentally hits some switches that gets he and his lady friend trapped (the doors close and the oxygen gets sucked out!) and then tries to escape using a tuning fork! (It didn't work.) So he throws the tuning fork down and it hits something that eventually gets the door open and they escape. That's the kind of leadership you can't teach at Starfleet Academy.
Eventually things get really out of control as dead crew members keep showing up trying to lay the smack down of the living crew members and some of the live crew members try to sabotage the meteor rejector. Finally, one of the living dead crew members explains everything. The beings that live on Aura are whining about their sun burning out, so they use this radio signal to attract dunces like Captain Mark so that they can possess their bodies and use their ships to go back and take over the victims' home planet.
I'm guessing that no one has bothered to tell these freaks from Aura that messing around with the meteor rejector will just get you killed. If the plan is to take over the ship and fly it off of Aura, why try and screw up its vital components? There's some more fighting and then there's only three people left - Captain Mark, a woman, and a male crew member. Of course it turns out that Captain Mark and the woman crew member are now possessed. Like you couldn't tell since they talked like those body-snatched losers in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Rule of thumb: when you are in space and there is a evil being that can take over someone's body, anytime your buddy talks to you real slow and deliberate like and with no emotion, it's not just because he's fatigued.
The last guy who isn't possessed is determined to prevent these goons from taking over his planet so he wrecks the meteor rejector. So the possessed Captain Mark decides they will need to set down on another closer, more primitive planet. Looking through their space TV, you can make out the continents...of Earth! Oh man! Shock ending! I suppose that there was a time when these endings were shocking, but now it seems kind of standard. And am I really supposed to sweat that exactly two aliens are going to be able to take over an entire planet? What were their super powers again? Possessing six billion bodies at once?
This is a micro-budgeted affair that manages to generate a fair amount of chills and eerie alien atmosphere in spite of that fact. Mario does a good job with lighting as is usually the case and the set design give it an odd sort of look. The usual sci-fi space suits that are bulky and cumbersome have been replaced with these tight black leather suits that gives everything a fetishistic feel, like these guys are all headed out to the leather bar for the annual ball instead of investigating mysterious radio signals from mysterious planets. These suits looked like they would be really warm to wear and since they all had these hoods that surrounded their necks like those things they put on dogs after surgery so they don't eat their stitches, I couldn't really tell anyone apart except for Captain Mark, the blonde girl and the brunette girl. Guess whose suit was least flattering of that group?
The spaceship was interesting because of its apparent size. These guys must have been flying around space in a giant warehouse because you could never see the ceilings, even in long shots, and there was so much space for everyone to roam around in, I was thinking that they should put up a couple of basketball hoops and get together a pickup game against the mysterious alien presence. Mario also used the equipment in the space ship to good effect, adding in colored globes and various shaped equipment that emitted different colored lights along with the standard control panels of switches and dials.
After having seen this only on the Orion Home Video VHS, getting a chance to watch it in widescreen with the original music intact was quite a vast improvement. The digital upgrade is well worth it since Mario put such a premium on using colors and lighting, along with sweeping shots inside the ship that necessitate the widescreen to fully appreciate what he was attempting. The colors here are sharp and the absence of the annoying synthesizer score that had replaced the more traditional score in the previous VHS release only add to a movie that succeeds a lot more than it probably should have.
The emphasis here isn't on a ton of action (there's a lot of Captain Mark babbling about what to do next), but there is a mounting sense of dread as the surviving crew members try to figure out what's going on. The influence this movie had on the other "alien possession" movies that followed it (most notably Alien) is obvious. You've got aliens taking over people's bodies so that you don't know who you can trust. There's the evidence of prior unlucky souls who blundered into the trap. And this movie even sports an ending that so many movies would rehash later on, where the bad guys seemingly win. Yes, the sets are straight out of the original Star Trek TV show and the space ships aren't too convincing when they fly around or land, but scenes like the one where Mario uses slow motion when the dead break out of their graves are particularly effective and show his ability to wring as much as possible out of what he was given. It's really a very effective and creepy film, with a memorable look that's perfect for late night viewing and good warm up for some of its later (and more violent) imitators.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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