Captain Barry Sullivan and crew, square-jaws squeezed into leather jumpsuits, receive a distress call from fellow explorers and steer their Deco spaceship to the eponymous orb, populated not by vampires but by an almost-extinct breed of parasites aching for new environments -- namely, the astronauts' bodies. Mario Bava's ethereally ominous sci-fi, packaged and released as an American International quickie, is treasured mostly by buffs as one of the unacknowledged sources of Alien, that more prestigious exercise in intergalactic pestilence, and indeed there are some half-buried links, particularly a super-sized skeleton sprawled inside an alien space galley. Bava's feeling for the primacy of the visual precedes Ridley Scott's, however, and the director turns the chintz into an essay of pure mise-en-scène, hypertheatricalized textures rubbing against one another, sleekly geometric metal and jagged phosphorescent craters, blue smoke belched against crimson skies, and at least one scene of literally otherworldly beauty -- three freshly offed crew members rise out of their graves, push their way out of plastic body bags, and lurch out of the undercranked frame. Yet it's far from a journeyman assignment for the horror master -- reversing his usual scheme of the grotesque invading the "normal" world, here he has the human heroes intruding upon an alien form that differs in form, if not in spirit. Whereas the menace of Scott's film simmers from manifestations of a perversely sexualized Other, Bava's futuristic spook house stresses the thinness of the line separating the survival-predatory nature of both sides. Thus, a parasite's j'accuse, voiced through a possessed body, cannot help but reflect the filmmaker's: "On your planet, you humans have fought and killed down through the centuries. Did you really expect us to be any different?" With Norma Bengell, Angel Aranda, Evi Marandi, Stellio Candelli, and Fernando Villena.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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