Say what you will about its CGI today, but if we didn’t have 1998’s Blade, we may have no Marvel Cinematic Universe. Let me tell you, there was probably no cooler hero than Wesley Snipes at this point in time. Ah, it’s still pretty rad today.

New Line almost made this movie as a comedy, but after Snipes couldn’t get Black Panther made, he was able to get the main role in this one. To me, the best part of the film is the relationship between Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) and Blade, but I’d still be interested to see what it would have been like if Patrick McGoohan or Marc Singer had taken the role.

As for the main bad guy, Deacon Frost, Jet Li, Mark Wahlberg and Skeet Ulrich were all up for the role, but it belongs to Stephen Dorff. You kind of have to respect a bad guy so evil that he keeps the hero’s mother a vampire for decades.

Actually, all of the vampires are great here, even in the minor roles for Donal Logue, Udo Kier (who has been in the vampire films Blood for Dracula, Spermula, Die Einsteiger, Modern Vampires, Shadow of the Vampire, Dracula 3000 and Bloodrayne) and Traci Lords. Director Stephen Norrington (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) was supposed to play Morbius the Living Vampire, but the part was cut.

N’Bushe Wright also makes a great partner for our hero as Dr. Karen Jenson, as she works to determine a cure for Blade’s vampirism. But hey — he’s the Daywalker. He pretty much will always be a vampire determined to kill all the others.

How cool is it that Marvel’s first big movie success came from a side character from the 1970’s Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan The Tomb of Dracula series? Sadly, while those creators got a “based on characters created by” credit, they didn’t make any extra money. Such is how comics has always screwed creators.

Two vampire movies came out in 1987.* One became a celebrated big-budget film that launched the careers of the Coreys and Kiefer Sutherland, with songs that people still sing, shirtless saxophonists and quotable dialogue about why there’s no need for a TV when you have TV Guide. The other movie was in and out of theaters in the time it took to read the last sentence and has stuck in my mind forever since.

Kathryn Bigelow had never directed a movie before. She was given five days to succeed or be replaced. She wanted to make a Western, but they weren’t popular. So she combined the vampire genre — the word is never mentioned — and hired three of the actors from her future husband James Cameron’s recently completed Aliens, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein.

Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar) falls for the mysterious Mae (Jenny Wright, who is another beyond cult horror film that few discuss, I, Madman) but then learns her family — Severen (Paxton), Jesse Hooker (Henriksen), Diamondback (Goldstein) and Homer (Joshua John Miller) — are a roving band of RV driving maniacs given to acts of merciless terror.

The only problem that I’ve ever had with this film is that I have always seen the normal people in the world as the real monsters, despite the hints that Jesse and Severen set the Great Chicago Fire. The blood transfusions that save the beautiful people seem way too easy of a way out of the hell that the gang promises.

Biglow would go on to make the equally well-made Blue Steel. Most of the cast went on to fame, at least in the circles of people who read our site. And if you look close enough, there’s a picture of a torn-apart Severen on my fridge.

If you’d like to learn more about the films scored by the band who gave this movie its unique soundtrack, check out our article Exploring: 10 Tangerine Dream Soundtracks.

*We know that A Return to Salem’s Lot and My Best Friend Is a Vampire also came out in 1987. For the sake of poetic license, we hope you understand why we juxtaposed these two films. Ironically, both movies have a son of The Exorcist star Jason Miller in their casts, with Joshua John Miller is in Near Dark and his half-brother Jason Patric in The Lost Boys.

BONUS: You can hear Becca and Sam discuss this movie on our podcast.

Way back in 1897, a man named Dumas (Mark Bedell) loses his sister Roxanne (Kennedy Johnson, Tomb of the Werewolf) to the fangs of Diana Ruthven (Gloria Anne-Gilbert, who hosted a series of releases as Morella Ghost Hostess with the Mostest, including House of Evil, The Blood Seekers, Disciple of Death, Blood Vision and Terror In the Crypt). Turning to Padre Jacinto (yep, Paul Naschy, in America no less), they use a cross, Holy Water, a Bible and a silver stake to take out Rebecca, Diana and her brother Lord Ruthven (Arthur Roberts, Not of This Earth), which empowers the priest to stay alive until the evil of vampires has been erased from our reality.

That’s right — Paul Naschy in his first American film and…well…it’s a soft-core porn pretty much. Now, the two vamps are after the reincarnation of their lost love — yes, they’re fine despite dying earlier — in a movie written and directed by Donald F. Glut (Tales of Frankenstein).

That’s because Count Dracula (Tony Clay, who has shown up in more than on of Glut’s movies) has sent his daughter Martine (Eyana Barsky) and thrall Renfield (Del Howiso, continuing the role from The Erotic Rites of Countess Dracula, another Glut movie that has William Smith has Dracula) to pull that stake out and find the vampire’s bible.

The big issue is that the silver dagger has cursed Ruthven to never be able to drink human blood, a fact that he learns when he tries to suck the neck of a stripper named Lilith (she’s played by Lolane, who was in plenty of BDSM tease videos with great titles like Criminals Who Use Cholorform!). His sister has none of these worries, so she soon seduces the very same exotic dancer. All manner of sibling rivalry and sapphic shenanigans ensue.

Imagine a sub-par VCA vampire film — at least Ejacula has Lois Ayres, Patricia Kennedy and Rocco Siffredi in it — without the actual penetration and you have this. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that a vampire sex movie would be so boring, which is either me growing up — no, I screamed like a maniac every time Naschy was on screen, all eight minutes worth — and more that this is not a good movie.

If you want to see a much better Naschy vampire movie, check out Count Dracula’s Great Love.

PS: To further throw in some adult film references, Belinda Gavin is in this. She’s better known as Kylie Wyote in X-rated movies. There’s also a girl named Bella Donna who plays a hooker, but she is not Michelle Anne Sinclair, which would be amazing to have her in the same movie as Count Waldemar Daninsky.

American-International Pictures had made some money in the U.S. with Mario Bava’s Black Sunday and Black Sabbath. It just made sene for Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson to gain more control by producing the films themselves instead of just buying the rights.

Working with Italian International Film and Spain’s Castilla Cooperativa Cinematográfica, AIP provided the services of writer Ib Melchior (The Angry Red Planet) to create the American version of this movie, which was based on Renato Pestriniero’s short story “One Night of 21 Hours.”

This movie was quite literally the Tower of Babel, as each major cast member performed in their respective languages: Barry Sullivan spoke English, Norma Bengell spoke Portuguese, Ángel Aranda Spanish and Evi Marandi Italian. And the low budget would have made a cheap-looking movie with any other director, but Bava was the master of in-camera effects and flooding his sets with color and fog. In a Fangoria article, he would say, “Do you know what that unknown planet was made of? A couple of plastic rocks — yes, two: one and one! — left over from a mythological movie made at Cinecittà! To assist the illusion, I filled the set with smoke.”

When 1979’s Alien came out, those that had been exposed to Bava’s work would let people know that many of the ideas in that film came directly from this modest film with its $200,000 budget — I know Joe Bob, everyone lies about budgets. While Ridley Scott and Dan O’Bannon would claim for years that they had never seen this movie before, the writer would later say, “I stole the giant skeleton from the Planet of the Vampires.”

Want to know how I know those claims are true? From the very start of this film, two large ships — the Galliott and the Argos — in deep space respond to an SOS call and are lured to a planet where alien beings either take their bodies over or murder them. The crew of the Argos instantly begins murdering one another — with only Captain Markary (Sullivan) able to pull his crew out of madness. When they arrive at the other ship, everyone is already dead, including Markary’s brother.

Soon, the bodies of the dead are walking as if alive, the ships are damaged beyond repair, and crew members are getting wiped out (look for a young Ivan Rassimov — later of the giallos The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and All the Colors of the Dark, and the Star Wars clone The Humanoid — as one of them!).

While this film is 55 years old, I have no interest in ruining the ending for you. Instead, I want you to sit and bask in its colorful glow, awash in fog and mystery, with pulpy science fiction heroes running around in fetishy costumes and discovering skeletons that could in no way be human. It is everything that is magic about film.

Atlas — the comic company that tried to challenge Marvel and DC in the 1970’s — combined I Am Legend with this film to create the comic Planet of the Vampires. Much like all of their books, it only ran three issues, but the first one boasts a cover with pencils by Pat Broderick with Neal Adams-inks and other issues have great work by Russ Heath. The first issue was also written by future G.I. Joe mastermind Larry Hama. I have no doubt that Atlas did not pay AIP for the rights to this.

— Sam Panico

In 1972 Marvel Comics founder and publisher Martin Goodman left Marvel, selling the company in 1968—a company which he founded in 1939. When Marvel failed to honor Goodman’s retirement agreement to allow his son Chip to run the company, Goodman Sr. created Seaboard Periodicals and the Atlas Comics imprint in June of 1974 to go head-to-head with Marvel.

And by April of 1975—it was all over.

During Seaboard’s ten short months of existence, they published between two to four issues across 31 titles (comics and magazine-periodicals) for a total of 72 issues. In addition to creating original superhero characters, Seaboard attempted to acquire the rights to Japan’s Toho Studios’ stable of monsters, such as Godzilla, along with TV’s then popular Kolchak: The Night Stalker (check out our “Exploring: Dan Curtis” featurette) and a series of pulp-action spy novels.

Another one of Seaboard’s choices for adaptation came courtesy of Charlton Heston’s back-to-back hits with Planet of the Apes (1968; check out out “Ape Week” of reviews of the franchise), The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973) (check out our September 2019 “Atomic Dustbin” of Apoc film reviews)—so began the legal processes to acquire the rights to and create a comic book version of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.

And Matheson refused.

So Seaboard’s staff of writers and artists came up with their own variant of Matheson’s tale: a hybrid of Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man that also bared a striking similarity to Yul Brenner’s New York-based post-apocalyptic entry: The Ultimate Warrior (1974). And, of course, as Sam pointed out, the writers at Seabord dumped a heaping, radioactive helping of the Master Bava’s Planet of the Vampires into the atomic dustbin for good measure. (You don’t think so? Check out those black leather-yellow piped uniforms in Bava’s film against the white-blue piped uniforms of the Ares IV crew.) And, as with their rips of those 20^th Century Fox and Warner Bros.’ apoc properties, Seaboard didn’t pay AIP a dime for the rights.

And while surely John Carpenter was influenced by those four films, an apocalypse film critic can’t help but wonder if Carpenter read those three mid-1975 comic issues of Seaboard’s Planet of Vampires in creating his vision of a dystopian Big Apple for his own game-changing science fiction film: Escape from New York (1981)—all that was missing was The Empire State Building’s use as an architectural spine to support a domed city on the isle of Manhattan.

But at least we got the awesome Michael Sopkiw as Parisfal in 2019: After the Fall of New York out of the deal.

And Sergio Martino didn’t pay AVCO Embassy a dime.

And, as Sam explored, a whole bunch of people ripped off Alien (read a rundown of his reviews of those Alien rips HERE and HERE) . . . which ripped off Planet of Vampires . . . and no one paid Dan O’Bannon a dime. So it all evens out. Bava wins the apoc sweepstakes.

You can watch Bava’s incredible film on Amazon Prime.

— R.D Francis

About the Authors: Sam Panico is the proprietor of B&S About Movies. You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S Movies.

Martin Cruz Smith may be best known for his Arkady Renko books, which start with Gorky Park, but he also wrote the book that this vampire bat movie is based on. It has the tagline “Day belongs to man, but night is theirs!” and is much closer to Jaws than any Dracula film.

Arthur Hiller directed and he was behind plenty of great comedies, like the Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor vehicles Silver Streak and See No Evil, Hear No Evil. He was also the Alan Smithee who directed An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn and his last film, perhaps ignominiously but hey, we all need to work, was National Lampoon’s Pucked, which starred Jon Bon Jovi.

Youngman Duran (Nick Mancuso) is a deputy on a New Mexico Native American reservation who is investigating a series of cattle mutilations, which seemed to be happening all the time in the 70’s (or maybe all I did was watch In Search Of and horror movies, so perhaps I was more attuned to it happening).

His foster father — a medicine man — reveals that he has conducted a ritual to bring about the end of the world and his body is soon found drained of all its blood. There’s also a tribal council member named Walker Chee (Stephen Macht, who teaches ethics at Harvard) who has found oil and plans to keep it all for himself.

With the help of a British scientist named Phillip Payne (David Warner!) and medical student Anne Dillon (Kathryn Harrold, the only actress I know who has been paired with both Arnold Schwarzenegger (Raw Deal) and Luciano Pavarotti (Yes, Giogio). Strother Martin shows up, too!

This is perhaps the only vampire movie to feature “Lucille” by Kenny Rogers and “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” by Crystal Gayle on the soundtrack.

While this movie was destroyed by critics in 1979, it has acquired somewhat of a cult audience ever since. If you’re looking for a slow boil about ecology and the plight of our indigenous peoples that suddenly gets awesome when bats swarm a campfire and an old woman gets set ablaze, good news!

Luca Bercovici was behind The Ghoulies and The Granny as well as this movie, where a 400-year-old vampire named Ralph Lavie (Dean Cameron). He lives alone with his mother Phoebe (Toni Basil!) and is suffering from a curse. It turns out that every time he falls for Mona, she’s killed on Halloween by a pirate with a giant hambone. Now, he plans to stay locked up in his room so that his heart doesn’t get broken again.

Our hero is somehow friends with Bo Diddley and survives getting hit by a car driven by Mona (Tawny Fere), who in this lifetime is a singer managed by her ex-boyfriend Stanley (Thomas Dolby!). Ralph starts a band, called Rockula, falls in love again and has to save his love.

Susan Tyrell shows up as a bartender, which should really be all the reason you need to see this movie. Well, that and the end, where an Elvis-dressed Ralph busts out of a mirror and performs. The song are pretty silly, the story is kind of dumb, but I still found myself enjoying this.

You can get this from Shout! Factory.