aka: La Morte Viene dal Pianeta Aytin
(lit. Death Comes From Planet Aytin)
I Diavoli dello Spazio (lit. The Space Devils)
company: Mercury Film International,
Southern Cross Films and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
year: 1967
runtime: 90′
director: Antonio Margheriti
cast: Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Ombretta Colli,
Enzo Fiermonte, Halina Zalewska,
Goffredo Unger, Renato Baldini,
Wilbert Bradley, Furio Meniconi,
writers: Renato Moretti and Ivan Reiner
cinematography: Riccardo Pallottini
music: Angelo Francesco Lavagnino
not available on home video
This concluding entry in the Gamma One franchise, a series of four low budget Italian / American co-productions that spawned the swinging cult masterpiece Wild, Wild Planet, is, in a word, forgettable. Whatever funding had existed for the earlier Wild, Wild Planet and War of the Planets had dried up by the time of The Snow Devils production, along with director Antonio Margheriti’s enthusiasm for the increasingly formulaic material. Though the credited director for the project, Margheriti was busy preparing another film when shooting for Devils was underway, leaving his assistant director Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust, appearing just as disinterested in the material as Margheriti had become) to pick up the bulk of his directorial duties. There is a minimum of fun to be had with Devils, the lack of imagination and dearth of action leaving it feeling like a pile of second unit footage with no real movie to fall back on.
Giacomo Rossi-Stuart (The Day the Sky Exploded) returns as Gamma One Commander Rod Jackson, fresh from his conquest of a living, farty planetoid in the earlier Planet on the Prowl (or not – any narrative connections between the films of the series are tenuous at best), and his faithful aid Captain Pulasky (Goffredo Unger, playing a character who had perished in Planet on the Prowl) are put in charge of investigating strange happenings in the remote Himilayas as the rest of the world suffers disaster after disaster. Massive storms, floods, and melting Arctic ice threaten the very foundations of civilization – what could be causing such widespread stock footage devastation?
The answer to that is one of the very best things about The Snow Devils, and perhaps its best hope for reserving even a shaky spot in the memories of genre devotees. Escaping from their distant and dying ice-planet home are the Aytians, a race of space yetis in leotards and furry boots who look to make our beloved Earth their new favorite hang-zone. Their plan is simple: change the planet’s climate to melt the ice caps and drown all of the pathetic Earthlings they can before blowing the thermostat and turning our temperate world into the third snowball from the Sun.
Commander Jackson is no fan of the star-yeti’s devilish scheme and, with their villainy firmly (furrily?) established, sets out to enact a mass interstellar genocide against them. Hooray for the free-nations of the Earth, and death to all yeti kind! Jackson and a small crew made up of the faithful Pulasky, suspiciously suspicious guide Sharu and hottie Lisa Nielson (Ombretta Colli) raid the Aytians’ Himalayan hide-out with ether concocted from the Aytians own supplies and then fly out to the far-flung Jovian moon Calisto to level a more final judgment. A few well-placed meteor strikes turns the Aytian base of operations to dust, ridding the Universe of the Yeti scourge forever. Their extermination of an entire civilization complete our heroes return home, piling into a futuristic four-seater and laughing their way to a celebratory picnic.
The potentially disconcerting notion of securing world peace by ridding the Universe of everything not us and the prescient topic of climate change aside, The Snow Devils is a pretty uninteresting affair. The endearingly cumbersome space-yeti invaders appear only for the final third of the picture and then only briefly, and are given little to do but share their fiendish plot with the film’s heroes and die. The human cast is given even less, trekking about the Italian Alps for a brief location shoot and mucking around in sets leftover from prior Gamma One outings. The climactic showdown cuts repeatedly to Commander Jackson’s higher ups, who waste their valuable screen time lamenting the physics of long-distance space communication. “Pity they’re so far away, as any message we send won’t arrive for minutes. Best we do nothing.”
Doing his utmost to salvage things is composer Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (Gorgo), who seemed at a loss for devising anything appropriate for the mind-numbing inaction and opted, instead, to just write something good. His theme for The Snow Devils is funky and fantastic, among the top pieces he scored for the Gamma One series, and is repeated as many times as the editor could stand. Coupled with the casting of the lovely Ombretta Colli its almost enough to make the film tolerable, even enjoyable! Lavagnino’s music for the Gamma One series is arguably more popular than the films themselves, having been released to CD as a compilation album while the films (Planet on the Prowl, the only entry not distributed by MGM, aside) remain woefully unrepresented on home video.
A dull slog with little in the way of genuine entertainment value, The Snow Devils is still one of the elite few members of the space-yeti sub-sub-genre, and that’s got to count for something right? Lavagnino’s music remains the only recommendable aspect of the production and I’ve linked to it below. Those on the hunt for a disposable genre time-waster could certainly do worse (keep an eye open for infrequent airings on TCM), but most would do well to stick with the more accomplished early entries in the Gamma One cycle.
