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© Richard Gary / Indie Horror Films Blog, 2012
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Planet of the Vampire Women
Directed by Darin Wood
Seminal
Films, 2011
95 minutes,
USD $19.95
This
film reminds me of three overlapping horror and sci-fi sub-genres. The first is
from the 1950’s low-budget B-line films that used laughable props and minimal
sets. Some classic examples are Queen of Outer Space (1958)
and Cat-Women of the Moon (1953).
The
second is more of a ‘70s and ‘80s post-VHS intro of then-smoldering fantasy,
like Galaxina (1980) or the British obscurity Spaced Out (1981). This was mostly fall-out from the
post-Star Wars (1977) success ride-the-wave glut. These last
two made John-Boy’s Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and the
original Battlestar Galactica (1978) look like Titanic (1997).
The
last is from the millennium period, when a series of women-based films, often
with lesbian fantasy sub-themes (though mostly watched my teen males), that
took traditional storylines and changed them to fit the format, such as The
Vampire’s Seduction (1998) or The Lord of the G-Strings: The
Femaleship of the String (many of which starred the likes of the
lovely Tina Krause and Misty Mundae).
Planet
of the Vampire Women is a pleasant and quite rightfully ridiculous
throwback to that style that looks like some of the cheaper sets on the first
season of Star Trek, where boulders were easily identified
as paper mache, clothing was tight, and creatures were either puppets or people
in hairy suits. Welcome back!
You
may ask yourself, “How cheap is cheap?” Well, for example, the film opens in a
casino / strip joint (of course), and the liquor (opium rum) bottles are
written in a strange language… in magic marker. Yep.
Our
heroes, as it were, are space pirates (no, the loveable kind, not Somalian),
led by Capt. Miranda Richards (Paquita Estrada; for some reason imbd.com has
her listed in two films from 1934 and 1933!). Her crew robs the casino (a scene
of blood and boobs, as I wrote in my notes) in a set piece that’s a tad too
long, and then they tear out of there via their spaceship, which is maneuvered
by a steering wheel. Did I mention the word cheap? Oh, and I don’t want to
forget the bobble hula girl on the dashboard. As they zoom off, Richards
officially states, “Captain’s log, star date…whatever.” I love a film that
doesn’t take itself seriously, and had lots of nods to its time-binding predecessors.
All
is well and good until a mysterious face in a cloud shoots a lightning bolt
into the good captain’s eyes, turning her into the first of said vampires
(around the 24 minute mark). This does not bode well for the rest of the crew,
which includes: Astrid Covair (Stephanie Hyden), a smarter-than-she-looks “pleasure
clone” who can change into any raunchy outfit (and does often) or to anyone, with
a twist of her body that would make Samantha Stevens proud (one of her best
lines is “I read a lot between fucking and sucking!”); the driver is Ginger
Maldonado (Liesel Hanson, who ironically plays Liesel on the TV show Galen), the hardcore Tank Girl type; Pepper Vance (Ashley
Marino) plays the drugged out scout; and the only male on board, Automatic
Jones (Keith Letl), who is part android and most likely a nod to the various
“robots” in the Alien franchise. Chasing them – and
eventually joining in, of course – is lawman and Cuba Gooding Jr. lookalike,
Val Falco (Jawara Duncan). You know he’s a cop because he has flashing red
lights on his sunglasses; he also has one of the better recurring lines: “Now
look, I’m not saying what we saw were vampires…all I’m saying is there was some
kind of undead creature that was sucking the blood out of the living and shot
lightning out of their eyes…”
They
are all forced to land on a hostile planet filled with electrical storms and blowing
dust (another Alien [1979] reference?), where they encounter
– in part – a paper mache dinosaur (wisely only seen in short spurts) and
digital space bugs that look like the zomBEES from auteur filmmaker Bill
Zebub’s The Worst Horror Film Ever Made (2008).
Of
course, this all end up back at the stripping casino (obviously shot at the
same time as the opening scene) for the final battle between good and evil,
living and undead.
Shot
at Black Cat Studios in Sacramento, strangely, the entire film is one chapter
on the DVD, so the viewer has to fast forward to wherever they left off.
Look,
it is impossible to watch a film like this with the same mindset of, say, Lord of the Rings (2001) or even Me, Myself and
Irene (2000). When you get down to this level, it’s a completely
different semantic environment, and the rather than expecting the best and
taking away points, the viewer must expect the worst and add from there. Using
this paradigm, this film was sheer stupid, obnoxious, and a ton of fun. This
isn’t a cinema discussion group material to discuss how it reflects to Kant,
but rather you should get some bodies in the same room, turn it on, and party. You’ll
groan, you’ll hoot, you’ll point out all the continuity errors and how
amateurish the sets and creatures truly are. You might even be the one to say,
“Man, I could do it better than that.” But most likely you won’t; rather you’ll
have to settle and kvetch while getting a lot of amusement seeing this.
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