Vampires from Outer Space! (but not in a good way)

#15: Lifeforce

Space vampires.

Another Watching Hour movie at Starz. In this one NASA and a UK space agency launch a joint interplanetary space shuttle mission to investigate Halley's Comet. However, when the shuttle gets there the astronauts discover an abandoned alien ship, looking a lot like a space fallopian tube, wedged into the head of the comet. Inside they find a collection of dessicated man-sized bat skeletons and, beyond that, three glass caskets with three perfect, and perfectly naked, people inside. The astronauts do what any red-blooded humans would; they decide to bring the caskets on board!

When the shuttle, the Churchill (seriously), arrives back at Earth it is an abandoned, burned out shell filled with dessicated man-sized human corpses. The only survivor is the American captain who ejected himself from the dying ship in the single-occupancy escape pod. However, the rescue team also finds three glass caskets containing three perfect, still perfectly naked, people. What to do other than bring them to Earth?

Space Vampires.

But instead of blood these lycanthropes sustain themselves on human "lifeforce" which seems to be a bluish electrical soul that can be spewed out of the mouth. Instead of terrorizing an English manor these folks focus their mayhem on downtown London. The space fallopian tube is a kind of collector that concentrates the souls for intergalactic travel. And the vampires have been here before; the vampire myths are all distortions of their prior visit. Oh, and the female space vampire is stunningly beautiful and spends most of the movie wandering around naked looking for souls to acquire and has a (gasp!) "special bond" with the surviving shuttle captain who is tearing around London with his HRH's Special Air Services sidekick whose fundamental purpose is to convince us that the Brits can be as badass and droll at the same time.

This movie is filled to the brim with unlikely plot twists, cheesy special effects (hold your judgment until you see the clearly animatronic head of Patrick Stewart --yes, that Patrick Stewart-- spew blood out of its eye holes. Better yet, hold it until you've seen the exact same effect footage spliced into the film four times), gratuitous nudity and violence that has no plot purpose, and a naked space vampire lap dance/lifeforce abduction climax.

Written by Dan O'Bannon (Alien) and directed by horror autodidact Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), this film has legitimate genre DNA but some combination of inattention to detail (shouldn't the BBC presenters have British accents?) and not even enough pride to try write in an explanation for the space vampire's nudity (are we to infer a plot point from her gravity-defying tits?) turns this film into a sloppy mess. The budget at play here could not have been small. Overcoming the odds, Hooper did not let the size of his budget get in the way of making a crappy, intelligence insulting, low-budget flick.

Really. Space vampires?