Planet of the Vampires (1965)

In the spirit of fellow 1965 release Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, which didn’t have Frankenstein in it but DID have a Space Monster, Planet of the Vampires features no vampires but does include at least one planet—its Italian title, Terrore nel Spazio, aka “Terror in Space”, is more non-specific but probably more accurate. It also features a great meeting of some of the minds discussed in previous posts: an international production headed by American International Pictures (who put its North American debut on a double bill with previous subject Die, Monster, Die!), directed and co-written by influential Italian horror auteur Mario Bava (several years after his work on Caltiki – The Immortal Monster), with an English language script written by Ib Melchior of Angry Red Planet and Journey to the Seventh Planet (alongside Louis M. Heyward, who was a producer of many other horror productions of the era like the Vincent Price classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes.) On a conceptual level, it feels very close to Melchior’s previous tales of astronauts terrorized by mysterious alien life forms on other planets, but with Bava’s visual sense, it goes from a mere suggestion of interplanetary Gothic horror to a pure representation of it—its alien planet feels truly menacing and not just inhuman, but anti-human. It’s likely for this reason that this movie became as unexpectedly influential as it has, very likely serving as another one of the inspirations for the Alien, which offered an updated conception of a space exploration haunted by inexplicable monstrosity over a decade later.

“It Crawled Out of the Woodwork” (S1E11)

Unlike “Corpus Earthling”, this episode has a proper cold opening, rather than just a preview of a scene from the episode itself—and it’s a real humdinger of a cold opening, jolting viewers with a bizarre sequence that makes them ask just what this thing is going to be about. It starts out mundane enough, with a cleaning lady vacuuming in a lab and coming across a particularly large and stubborn dust bunny in the corner, and eventually leads to an abstract splotch exploding out of the vacuum. Needless to say, we are dealing with another strange “bear”, and it’s a particularly ingenious idea to just have it appear in full as early as possible, while making the audience wait to learn just what the heck they’re dealing with. As it turns out, the inexplicable nature of the monster is maybe part of the point.

Space Amoeba (1970)

We now travel from the early days of Toho monster movies to their waning days, with increasingly diminished budgets and increasingly diminished audience numbers. Space Amoeba (called Gezora, Ganime, and Kameba: Decisive Battle! Giant Monsters of the South Seas in Japan, and alternatively titled Yog – Monster From Space in North America) turned out to be the penultimate monster movie directed by Ishiro Honda, and while at this point these movies were expected to mostly cater to monster-loving kids, it carries on a number of his recurring themes, and even has a surprising number of parallels to Varan, despite the twelve years between them. This could have potentially been his last go-around in the genre, so it was entirely possible that Honda wanted a chance to get as much of the old gang back together, including several actors and composer Akira Ifukube, to make one of these—and while at times it, like Varan, feels like a composite of other movies, its place in the history and the ideas it utilizes make it interesting all the same.

Horror Express (1972)

This really does feel like one last hurrah of a particular kind of horror movie, the quaintly lurid and darkly humorous sort that typified the genre in the fifties and sixties. Horror Express has many of the stylistic hallmarks of those films, not the least of which being that it’s a period piece that stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing—it even has a science fiction conceit that also feels of the previous era (it was produced by Bernard Gordon, who had a major hand in Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and Day of the Triffids). The early seventies was basically the transition point from these sorts of movies (which had mostly been dominated by Hammer Productions, and mostly starred Lee and Cushing) to more contemporary and hard-edged ones—this came out the same year as Last House on the Left (…and also Frogs), and a year before The Exorcist. It’s pretty clear that something like this wasn’t the kind of terror people were looking for in the theatre. Still, you probably couldn’t have asked for a better send-off than this, which is entertaining and stylish, all the more impressive because Spanish director Eugenio Martin had no previous experience in horror.

Killdozer

In memory of the late B-movie master Larry Cohen, I’d like to direct you to my post about his monster classic Q—The Winged Serpent from a few years ago.

Sometimes, a great title is all you need to have any sort of longevity—the name “Killdozer” is so blunt and over-the-top that it has somehow maintained some kind of cultural cache for over seventy years. There’s a band named after it, and to make doing video and image searches for it more difficult, there was even a real killdozer that went on a rampage in 2004. “Killdozer” probably got itself ingrained in the culture purely by being a fun thing to say, and so irregardless of its origins it kept being repeated, to the point where I knew the title without ever knowing where it came from.

Where it came from, though, is itself fairly interesting. The original “Killdozer!” novella was written by preeminent science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (the guy who originally said that “ninety percent of everything is garbage” and was the inspiration, at least in name, for Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout) in 1944, one of the many influential stories he wrote over his six decade career (another important monster story by him was “It” in 1940, which introduced the world to the concept of a monster made of decaying vegetable matter). It’s a quintessentially pulp concept, but also brought to us by one of the SF genre’s most important innovators, so I knew there had to be something more to it than just a story of a possessed bulldozer. I mean, a story about a possessed bulldozer (with a title that uses an exclamation point for emphasis) probably would have been embraced by the SF-reading kids of the forties regardless, but still.