By Jason Sacks

Last weekend I took my girlfriend down to our local drive-in theatre, the good ol' Puget Park Drive-in, to catch a delightfully moody double feature of sci fi scares. Die, Monster, Die and Planet of the Vampires are perfect drive-in fodder. Both films offer atmospheric adventures accentuated with dread and tension, presented in vivid color that adds to the fear created in each scene. We were surprised by how much we enjoyed both of these flicks and I hope I can persuade you to catch them when they come to your town.

Die Monster Die!

The first movie on our double bill was Die Monster Die! This flick, released by our good friends at American International Pictures, is apparently a loose adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft story "The Color Out of Space" and co- stars a cadaverous Boris Karloff along with Nick Adams and Suzan Farmer in a thoroughly entertaining, moody tale that has some powerful moments influenced by the horror master of Arkham, Massachusetts.

When American Stephen Reinhart (Adams) travels to Arkham, England to visit his fiancée Susan Witley at her family's strange mansion, he clearly has no idea the kind of bizarre adventure he will find there. From the moment Reinhart leaves the train, he meets surprising resistance to his getting to the Witley home. A taxi driver refuses to take his fare, a bike shop owner refuses to rent him a bike, and Reinhart is snubbed by villagers for even suggesting he wants to travel to visit his fiancée's family. The countryside around Arkham is scorched with a deep crater, and it's pretty clear the crater has left scars in the villagers' minds along with their town. Is the crater related to the fear of the pariah Witley family? As we'll soon discover, there is ample reason for the villagers' fears.

Stephen marches to the Whitley mansion on foot. When the intrepid American finally arrives at the house, he begins to understand why the villagers think him crazy for wanting to spend time there. The once-stately home has fallen into a state of deep disrepair. Its gate is rusted, plants grow wild in the yard, and the whole place seems to need a new coat of paint. This slow unfolding of deepening confusion transitions the viewer into a sense of dread about what Stephen will find at the house, and makes the viewer concerned about the people living there.

Meandering quietly into the house, Reinhart nearly stumbles over the wheelchair-bound patriarch Nahum Witley (Karloff), who tries desperately to frighten our American hero away. Karloff is wonderful here, with a deep sense of gravitas, but he also carries some real sadness, as his advanced age and significant medical problems are clearly on display. Nahum keeps his reasons vague, but his words make it clear that there are true horrors there, including dread creatures that imperil everyone.  Just as it seems Nahum is ready to literally push Stephen out of his house, his lovely daughter intervenes. Susan Witley (Farmer) is the opposite of her father: welcoming, kind and optimistic.

It's obvious from the first moment we meet Susan that she and Stephen will soon find themselves in opposition to Nahum. Less obvious is the looming presence of Susan's mother Letitia (Freda Jackson), a woman seemingly at death's door who speaks to Stephen in foreboding murmurs about meteors and monsters, bewildering descriptions of seemingly indescribable objects and events that leave our hero deeply confused. Letitia's body also appears to be rotting away, and perhaps Stephen wonders if her mind is rotting as well. To  show her physical rot, we get a few weird glimpses of Letitia's body, including a hand that seems to lose its flesh the longer we watch it.

The movie cuts from Letitia to Nahum and his trusty aide Merwyn (Terence De Marney) as they wander into the basement of the mansion — and it is in this scene that the horror starts to become clear. Amidst smart set decorations of distended faces and glowing neon colors, it's clear that Nahum and Merwyn have a deep and dreadful secret, tied to the strange glowing thing locked in that basement, the thing that alternately scares and interests Nahum.

From there, the movie begins to really take off into its own creepy territory, a smart mix of Lovecraft with the darkest work of Edgar Allan Poe along with a few AIP stylistic flares. If you've seen the trailer for Die Monster Die!, you've seen the wonderfully strange monster below which indeed seems to come right from the typewriter of the great Mr. Lovecraft.

I was legitimately creeped out by that otherworldly monstrosity and the eerie keening noise it made. As the secrets of Nahum's home become more and more evident, this monster proves to be just one of the many horrors living there. We encounter living plants, see a shockingly dark end to Letitia's life and eventually get another chance to see the great Mr. Karloff made up to be a frightening killer. By the time we witness a strongly Poe-influenced ending to the film, viewers have witnessed some real strangeness on screen.

My girlfriend and I both really enjoyed this flick. Karloff is at his classic best here, providing his character with real depth and pathos. Despite his obvious illnesses, Karloff frankly thoroughly out-acts his counterparts on the screen. Adams and Farmer are an attractive couple, but they are two-dimensional. We learn little or nothing about either one of them, and Stephen mostly exists in this film as a plot device rather than a real character. Similarly, Susan was a character with great potential as a woman with one foot in the supernatural world and the other in our human world, but she is never given much to do beyond being Stephen's sidekick.

I also would have loved to see more about the villagers' fears, and explore the meteor's impact more, but all of my complaints about depth are kind of moot here. As the front half of a double-bill, Die Monster Die! had to be about an hour and fifteen minutes long. And as a movie of that length, it triumphs. The photography is excellent, Karloff is loads of fun, and the monsters are spooky.

Planet of the Vampires

After grabbing some popcorn and jujubes, we got back in the front seat of my Mustang for the second film of the evening. Planet of the Vampires was the perfect film companion to Die Monster Die. Both movies are spooky, atmospheric tales with lovely colors and intriguing acting.

In fact, most everything I enjoyed about Die Monster Die! is done even better in Planet of the Vampires. The great Italian director  Mario Bava (maybe best known in the US for his brilliant and terrifying debut film Black Sunday) journeys into space to deliver one of the most deeply upsetting movies I've seen in a while.

Two ships, the Argos and the Galliot, are exploring deep space together. When the rockets receive a distress signal from a nearby planet, they must land on that planet to investigate. On the way down to the planet, the ships' crews begin to go crazy, as if possessed by an alien force, and try to kill each other. The captain of the Argos, Captain Markary (Barry Sullivan), keeps his wits about himself and is able to force sanity and stop the fighting on his ship. The other ship… well, we shall soon see their fate.

Both ships land on the surface of the planet, and what a strange surface it is. Eternally shrouded in fog, with glowing rocks and mysterious sounds, the planet seems wrapped in deep mystery, and as the crew investigates the planet and the fate of the Galliot, terrible horrors begin to bedevil both crews in their ships and on the planet itself. We soon discover the bodies of the Galliot's crew, shredded and bloodied. But despite their seemingly life threatening damage, the bodies rise again and begin walking around. The bodies even go outside the spaceship and spread their terror to both crews.

Bava does a brilliant job with many elements of this movie, elements which add smartly to the viewer's deep feeling of disquiet. The astronauts' uniforms are beautiful. The cast wears well-fitting leather jumpsuits with high collars that seem practical but also strange. The cockpits of the ships are surprisingly spacious, with a lot of open space on them, which gives a strange sense of alienness to anyone used to cramped rocket capsules. The film is also deeply, eerily quiet, with just a few electronic noises to accentuate the horror. The deep silence seems to accentuate the tension, making viewers feel a deep sense of unease.

The creatures on this planet aren't vampires in our usual sense of the word (perhaps they're energy vampires or body possessors or something else slightly ineffable). But that lack of definition makes the creatures more frightening. These vampires are a constant, eerie threat that both viewers and crew can't quite understand. We all know a cross and stake will kill Dracula, but we have no idea how to kill these vampires. That uncertainty makes the film more frightening. There seems to be no easy way out, and the ending helps reinforce that concept.

In fact, Bava and his crew also do something delightful in this movie: they deliver a twist ending, then another twist, and then yet another twist.  Each of the twists feel earned because they are well foreshadowed and yet completely surprising. I want you to be surprised, too, so I won't ruin the fun. I will say this, though. For my money the best twists are the ones that leave the viewers giggling, and my girlfriend and I laughed our heads off at the twists.

It seems the budget for this movie was incredibly small (a piece in last month's Famous Monsters reports it cost roughly $200,000 in American dollars to film this movie in Italy). It's intriguing how director Bava worked with his international cast. There are actors from Brazil, Italy, the US and Spain, and each spoke their native languages on set. Bava's team then dubbed their lines in the local language for prints distributed around the world. Brazilians heard Portuguese, Spaniards hear the movie in Spanish and Americans in English. Because everyone spoke a different language on set, the movie has an often dreamlike feel, as if the actors are speaking around each other. That feel helps give this film its unique and wonderful energy.

And though Bava didn't spend a lot on the sets or ships, he gets real value for his lira. Maybe it's the eternal fog that makes the planet surface so compelling, or maybe the colored lights, but the planet of the vampires looked way better than it should have. I felt pulled into the mystery of this movie because of its low budget. Now I want to see more Bava films!

Driving Home
On our way to her home from the drive-in, my girlfriend and I couldn't stop laughing about all the fun we had watching these movies. There's a certain thrill to finding out a movie is way better than you expect it to be. In fact, we had that excitement with both movies last weekend and I think you will, too.

Hop in your Chev, Plymouth or Pontiac and catch these flicks at your local drive-in while you still can.