Welcome to Tubi Tuesday. An ongoing experiment where we dig into some of the weird, underrated, and downright abysmal movies we don’t think our real life friends would let us talk at length about. At the time of writing, this movie is streaming for free on Tubi, the home of Super Bowl LIX!
I don’t have all day to write about 60’s Italian movies and you don’t have all day to read about a barely organized essay, so let’s just all agree I can use POTV for the entirety of this article instead of the title.
POTV (look how much time we’re actively saving. I’m going to be able to do laundry today because you let me use that abbreviation) is a decently well-known Italian 60’s sci-fi horror film directed by schlock icon Mario Bava. It’s biggest claim to fame is that it is often cited as the movie that inspired Alien (which will be typed as A for the rest of this… I’m just kidding). I can remember in late high school when I was first getting into film (often called “movies”) and also getting into being really annoying about said films, fun facts like “Alien is actually a remake of a 60’s sci-fi movie” were like diamonds to me. I would have been interested in telling people that as much as possible. I would not have been interested in actually watching POTV.
Now that I’m a smart, not annoying, well-liked by everyone, adult film fan, I have watched the movie (pause for applause). And good thing, too, because this movie actually rocks, and, you won’t believe this, clearly has some of the DNA for A in it. There isn’t an alien killing machine in this one, but the exploration of the titular planet is very similar in design and aesthetic. They even find massive corpses implying a gigantic advanced race lived and died here before they ever arrived.
I found this one to be genuinely creepy, without lacking the 60’s cheese that I want from any movie called “Planet of the…” In fact, this post wasn’t going to be about the actual movie or it’s quality at all, but I liked it so much I just kind of tossed these first paragraphs on here. This article, which I fully conceptualized before watching the movie, was and is supposed to be about the film’s title.
The only thing I knew about this movie outside of the Alien comparison, is that there are no vampires in POTV. There are alien bodysnatchers that could be described more accurately as zombies. It reminded me a lot of the semi vague creatures of Horror Express, that sort of operate like zombies, but are directly inspired by Who Goes There.
So, how did this movie land of the title of Planet of the Vampires?1
Well, this is an Italian movie dubbed and retitled for American audiences. It’s original title is Terror in Space (often called TIS). It’s clearly a inaccurate retitling that happened when it was distributed in the states, but I genuinely want to know why. I tried to find a concrete answer, but there isn’t much outside of the co-producing company American International Pictures wanting to make the movie sound more sensational to attract drive-in patrons.
Fair enough, but why is the new title “better” for that? Well, this is all just me hypothesizing because I really thought I’d find a clear answer and did not do any research before committing to writing this and I’m in too deep to stop now!
The 50’s and 60’s were chock full of movie titles that simply described the planet the movie was going to take place on. There were movies about angry red planets, prehistoric planets, petrified planets, planets of lost women, and even prehistoric planets of lost women. I haven’t checked, but I’m also confident nearly all of those movies are also AIP redubs. Most are probably redubs or the same original movie.
When I started digging into this list, I assumed Planet of the Apes (or as you’ve likely heard it called, POTA) was the catalyst of this trend, but it actually came out a few years after all the others. I find it interesting that it uses the exact title convention of POTV but becomes such a successful franchise that it basically squashes the trend of naming films like this. You have to wonder if that film’s success is because the movie does, in fact, have apes in it.
My other uninformed theory is that “vampires” must have been putting butts in seats at the time. It’s such a specific idea, versus the hyper common vague terror these types of movies usually went for. They could easily have said monsters, demons, horrors, etc. but they went for a tangible pull. This could be because Hammer was finding huge success with their Dracula films, or because AIP had released a vampire film the year before that over-performed.
Or maybe they just earnestly consider the alien menace in the film to be a form of vampire. I was truly dreading landing here, but it’s worth considering that the mind controlling evil force that sustains itself via parasitic body infiltration is a form of vampiric enemy, or at least was in 1965.
Earlier I noted Horror Express, another horror movie about a body collecting “alien.” I want to point out that right now if you pull that film up on Apple TV, the description reads “Horror icons Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee race to stop a prehistoric vampire.”
I am almost positive they don’t say “vampire” in that film, which can mean only one of two things.
- My understanding of “vampire” has been hyper-contextualized by the flood of media that came in the decades following these films, and my entire understanding of what that entity is has been filtered through the rules and tropes that I grew up with.
- The person who wrote that description is the same person who had the job of retitling Roger Corman movies in the 1960’s and he’s still doing good work.
It’s unfortunately impossible to know which.
- It’s in a full ass heading so I’m allowed to type it out. ↩︎