MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*
Imagine that in the sleaziest era of Roger Corman's career-- I'll say the eighties, just for fun-- someone gave Corman, free and clear, the script to Mario Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES. Of course Corman would monetize the gift by making his own version of PLANET, with not only vampires but lots of tits and blood, and a few scenes swiped from his 1981 New World messterpiece, GALAXY OF TERROR.
That's what writer-director Darin Wood put together with PLANET OF THE VAMPIRE WOMEN, with numerous STAR TREK in-jokes as well. Surprisingly, I liked this goofy thing despite its extremely derivative nature. It's crap, but it's lively crap, and the quantity of cute actresses willing to provide upper-body nudity didn't hurt.
Quick summary: a crew of colorful space-pirates led by Capt, Richards (Paquita Estrada) raid a mammoth space-mall and escape with their booty. Space cop Falco in his own ship pursues the pirate craft, so Richards steers her ship onto a mysterious forbidden planet. Richards pays for her rashness, for some sort of energy-beings infect her, and she becomes a fanged space-vampire. She kills a couple of her crewmates and sabotages the ship. After she flees, the other pirates do recon on the planet. They find it's inhabited by such weird creatures as flying stinger-bugs and bipedal boar-people. Cop Falco also lands on the planet, but though he wants to arrest the pirates, he soon realizes that the vampire is creating more creatures like herself and thus is the greater cosmic danger. The cop and the pirates-- those don't get vampirized-- make a truce to get away in his ship, which proves extremely necessary because there's an ancient computer system on the planet that comes alive, attempting to destroy the whole planet to keep the vampire beings from escaping. However, Richards and her allies escape in the other ship and head for the space-mall, where they begin randomly killing people. The cop and the pirates join forces to save the day, but alas-- saving the day is not in the cards.
In addition to boobs and blood, there's a lot of fighting in the film, and though none of it is well-done, Wood and his costumers make the whole thing look super-colorful, not unlike the day-glo look of Sixties Batman. It's such a pleasure to see a cheapo SF-film that looks fairly pleasing to the senses-- even not counting the nudity--that I give PLANET extra mythicity points just for getting across the look of a PLAYBOY style future full of cheerful degeneracy. And besides-- who can hate a movie that shows space vampires shooting lightning from their eyes?
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