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Poe's "The Gold-Bug" elucidated by way of Wilcox's Forbidden Planet, or, simply, Dante in space. The crew of the Argos follows a distress signal from fellow cosmic explorers, and the visual contrast is set between metallic interiors and gaseous atmosphere. The planet is populated not by vampires but by an expiring breed of parasites aching for a new environment, i.e., the bodies of the astronauts, the square-jawed captain (Barry Sullivan) assesses the situation: "If there are any intelligent creatures here, they're our enemies." Stranded in a crater-cracked world, Mario Bava decorates it until the sulfur in the air glows—voluptuous swirls of red and green smoke creep over jagged rock, the bluish wreckage is adorned with turbines positioned on opposite sides of the screen like glowing eyes. The pictorial highlight is a slow-mo tableau of freshly mutilated crew members rising from graves, tearing away cellophane body-bags, and skulking out of the frame. "I confess now," the captain records in his log, "I am experiencing fear." A harbinger of Star Trek and, in the mammoth intergalactic skeleton slumped over ancient control panels, Scott's Alien. A peerless example of a bravura visual imagination abstracting sets and miniatures into grand psychedelic textures, a hallucination of "the madness that's touched us" closer to the Herzog of Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes than to sci-fi. In Bava's haunted cosmos, the moral is voiced by a desperate alien wearing a victim's mangled corpse: "On your planet, you humans have fought and killed down through the centuries. Did you really expect us to be any different?" A certain "primitive world" lies in the crosshairs at the close, just another orb devoured by the phantasmagoric camera. With Norma Bengell, Angel Aranda, Evi Marandi, and Stelio Candelli.
--- Fernando F. Croce |