VAMPIRE MEN OF THE LOST PLANET (1970)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

The most interesting thing about this PLANET is that despite its crapulous quality, it actually made money, presumably on the drive-in circuit. Maybe back in the day it benefited from good ballyhoo, but in any case, PLANET provided Al Adamson with some "street cred" for this early success. 

A few newly shot scenes establish that Earth suffers from a "vampire plague," represented by a few guys with fangs attacking innocent people. This peril is so catastrophic that the government sends a small crew to another world to look for a cure for the plague. Most of the spacefarers are bare stereotypes, except for lead scientist Rynning (John Carradine, who never leaves the ship). Once the ship lands, the other crewmembers begin wandering around taking samples, and supposedly looking for solutions to the vampire plague (though I didn't hear the matter raised again).

For this movie Adamson patched together money-saving sequences from at least six films, including David Hewitt's WIZARD OF MARS. But the biggest contributor was a black-and-white Filipino film from 1956, TAGANI, which involved a conflict between two tribes of cavemen. One tribe sports vampire fangs but does not act vampirishly in any way. For most of PLANET's running time, the film alternates between episodic scenes of the two tribes fighting each other and scenes of the astronauts puttering about. The only "bridge" between the two arcs is the cavewoman Lian, played by Filipino actress Myrna Mirasol in the TAGANI scenes and by Jennifer (FEMALE BUNCH) Bishop in the Adamson scenes. Mirasol gets some okay fight-scenes with bad fanged cavemen, while Bishop only gets to have an unrequited love-relationship with one of the spacefarers. (At least the guy's not putting the moves on the alien girl; no sci

The other major feature of PLANET is that, in order to bring together both black-and-white and color footage, the script had to come up with some sci-fi blather about "chromatic" effects that cause certain scenes on the alien world to be tinted red, blue, or whatever. Arguably these scenes make the film look cheesier than if it had all been black-and-white.

Since TAGANI seems to be lost, PLANET's greatest asset may be that of curating footage that would have otherwise been lost. As I've not seen everything in Adamson's oeuvre, I can't claim that this item is his worst effort, but I think it's probably in the bottom five. Some of the director's "patchwork" jobs, like DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN, proved lively enough to make "good bad movies," but PLANET is just a "boring bad movie."