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| Die, Monster, Die! / Planet of the Vampires; September, 1965 | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 10:15 AM (164 Views) | |
| Laughing Gravy | Dec 5 2014, 10:15 AM Post #1 |
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![]() And tonight we're off to the Starlite Drive-In in beautiful Akron, Ohio, for this fall offering. They don't have in-car heaters, so we're gonna have to cuddle up, peoples. Having mined Edgar Allan Poe's vein pretty well, AIP turned to H.P. Lovecraft in 1965, and assigned Karloff to play Nahum Witley, patriarch of a cursed family, in Die, Monster, Die! (adapted from Lovecraft's The Colour out of Space). American TV star Nick Adams is the young hero, who arrives in the town of Arkham looking for his college sweetheart (Suzan Farmer) and finds that she lives with her cranky, deranged scientist father, scarred invalid mother, a butler who appears to be twice Karloff's age, and a greenhouse full of monsters. Not as good as it could've been, mainly because director Daniel Haller is no Roger Corman (this was Haller's first job as director; he was, of all things, set designer on the Poe pictures) and because the romantic leads are mean (him) and dull (her). Adams' New York accent is delivered with so little passion that every line of dialog seems to indicate his extreme distaste for the project. Karloff keeps things moving as best he can considering he's in a wheelchair for nearly the entire running time of the film; in the end, he turns into a monster (whose makeup seems to consist of Reynolds Wrap) but that's obviously a stuntman. The plot of the film seems to have been lifted more from Corman's The Haunted Palace than from Lovecraft, which makes perfect sense if you know that The Haunted Palace was based, not on Poe, but on a Lovecraft story. In any case, Die, Monster, Die! was Karloff's final film for AIP (well, except for Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, obviously). After the coming attractions (the hot dogs in the snack bar ad look rather green, and the next feature here is The Sound of Music, oh, sure, THAT appeals to THIS crowd), we're up to our second big hit, Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires. AIP had done well with Bava's Black Sunday and Black Sabbath and why they didn't call this Black Planet I dunno, but they co-produced and co-financed this thing and gave him Barry Sullivan as his star. Two spaceships land on the hitherto-unknown planet Aura, and the astronauts and astronettes on Ship One (the only ship we care about) immediately are seized by an unquenchable desire to slaughter each other. Well, Cap'n Sullivan is able to stop them from doing that, but when they find Ship Two, they discover the crew had totally slaughtered themselves, and quite effectively, too. After a mass burial, though, the crew of Two hops up, tears off the body bags, and begins stalking the crew of One. They're technically not really vampires, you see, in fact more zombies than anything else, but the bottom line is that the life forces on this dying planet need corpses to inhabit. If anyone tells you this is a good movie, they're a liar and you should slap them. As with all Ib Milchior-written films, it manages to be both wildly imaginative and astounding stupid at the same time. The low budget shows in every frame, and if there were mice nibbling at the sets they couldn't look any cheesier. THAT SAID... The movie is a wonder to look at, very colorful and with odd lighting and interesting effects (such as they are). Outside the ship is one big soundstage so Bava just COVERS it with smoke (and a couple of rocks). All of the special effects were done "in camera", meaning you frequently get a focused foreground and background while the stuff in the middle is out of focus, adding to the dream-like quality of the whole thing. The space suits are what the Nazis would've designed for their astronauts had the Third Reich lasted a bit longer, God forbid. The international cast speaks their own languages and were dubbed as needed for worldwide release. As was I. One scene in particular is a grabber: our crew discovers a building filled with the skull and bones of a giant, and the whole sequence was copied by Ridley Scott for Alien, although he denies ever having seen this movie. He's a liar, too. Back in the year 2014, both of these movies, which are interesting entertaining if not really GOOD movies, are on separate Blu-rays from different companies. Die, Monster, Die! lacks extras, but Planet of the Vampire is loaded with 'em. Both movies, but particularly Vampires, look great. |
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| The Batman | Dec 5 2014, 12:20 PM Post #2 |
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Die, Monster, Die! - again, I enjoyed this one more than you did, perhaps I enjoyed the interpretation of Lovecraft, which is always a treat to see how filmmakers will visualize his quite florid prose. I haven't seen PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, yet, but a buddy did just pick up the new Blu-Ray, so I will borrow that off of him. It sounds like a one-watch, which I don't need to own. Know what I'm sayin', Jazzy? |
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6:33 AM Jul 11