Reptilicus (1962)

Early 1961 saw an unusual uptick in European-made giant monster movies: over two months, Gorgo and Konga premiered in Britain and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, while the Danish-made Reptilicus debuted in its home country. This represented a rather singular mad rush to cash in on the success of Godzilla and other Japanese-made monster movies, but it sputtered out as soon as it began, leaving us with only a few very odd attempts to recreate the kaiju film with different sensibilities. The rest of the world got their chance to partake in Denmark’s only giant monster movie after a year-long delay, as instead of simply dubbing the existing movie, our old pals Sidney W. Pink (acting as director and producer) and Danish expat Ib Melchior (as co-writer) essentially remade the movie, originally directed by Poul Bang, with most of the cast returning. The final product became rather infamous, ending up a modern Mystery Science Theatre 3000 punching bag and finding its way onto “Worst Movies of All Time” lists—by my estimation, it’s not even the worst Sid Pink & Ib Melchior movie I’ve watched, but there are definitely some issues that may be worth formally addressing.

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.

Journey To the Seventh Planet (1962)

Three years after The Angry Red Planet, Sid W. Pink and Ib Melchior’s film productions had been shipped off to Denmark, where they collaborated again to produce another interplanetary horror show in Journey to the Seventh Planet—the difference here is not only which planet we visit, but also that it’s Pink in the director’s chair this time. While one could accuse the two of lightly reusing their own ideas for this movie, many other scholarly viewers have accused it of stealing ideas from other, more famous Science Fiction works: the first is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, which saw its first publication in 1961—although it seems unlikely that either Pink or Melchior read it in its original Polish early enough to crib the idea of planet bringing men’s secret desires to life; the far more likely inspiration is Ray Bradbury’s short story “Mars is Heaven!”, which was integrated into The Martian Chronicles in 1950. Regardless of where the story came from, the appeal of it is quite apparent—extraterrestrial life attacking human interlopers with things pulled right from their subconscious, playing on human emotions in ways far more sinister than just employing space monsters as in Angry Red Planet. Obviously, this is done in a significantly…significantly…less thoughtful manner than in Solaris, and to be honest, it might even be less thoughtful than Angry Red Planet.

The Angry Red Planet (1959)

Let’s do some retroactive projection: The Angry Red Planet was released in November 1959, making it the very last Sci-Fi monster movie of the fifties, the decade where the form flourished. There would be more films approximating that style made in the sixties, but the space age obsessions that animated them, both the exaggerated optimism and the equally exaggerated fears, would be gradually replaced with new ones as the genre film business moved on. Completely unintentionally, this movie serves as a sort of denouement for the decade’s monster movies—so, now that we’ve put The Angry Red Planet in the hot seat, what does it have to say about the whole mess? As it turns out, it’s a lot of the same things these movies had been saying since the beginning of the decade.