Space Vampire Comedy Double Feature

Cosmic coitus is just cheeky.

The Turner Classic Movies cable TV channel sometimes shows classick movies.

The other night TCM presented Lifeforce and Queen of Blood.  Oh boy, space vampires handled in a hamfisted way.

Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce is just as amusing the second time around.  It's based upon Colin Wilson's book The Space Vampires. 

Astronauts encounter a strange mothership heading towards the earth and after making contact a beautiful female space vampire ends up on the loose on Earth.

Actress Mathilda May [1] portrays the lovely almost-always-nude vampire in question.  How nude is she?  Well it's obvious that Space Girl (as she's called in the credits) doesn't shave, a trend that came later after this 1985 disasterpiece.

Space Girl ends up unleashing a plague upon London, turning humans into zombie energy vampires.  The movie ties in these energy vampires with the legendary bloodsuckers: the aliens have visited before to harvest lifeforce.

At the end of the movie Lifeforce is being sucked up at a central location, a display of incredible energy.  Using iron as a weapon stops the menace.   Hey, this plot sounds familiar.  It should be since it rips off the general storyline of Five Million Years to Earth/Quatermass and the Pit.  But despite Lifeforce's bigger budget the story isn't as polished as Nigel Neale's script.

There's the feeling they were constantly rewriting the script as filming proceeded, ending up with a wacko mess that I couldn't follow.  In fact I won't bother to try to concisely summarize the plot because my life is too short.

I will say if you like to see Patrick Stewart (or a cheap dummy) have his blood drained out of his eyes, nose and mouth to form a floating gory image of Space Girl then this is your movie.

Many critics panned Lifeforce.  And the biggest critic was Colin Wilson who witnessed his SF novel being trashed on the big screen.  There's the story that author John Fowles stated the movie based on his novel The Magus was the worst film ever created.  Wilson told him via postcard that Lifeforce was one up over The Magus, thus being the worst movie. [2]

On the bottom of the double bill was Queen of Blood (1966), a movie with a cheaper budget but easier to follow and just as entertaining.  To save money footage from a Soviet film Mechte Navstrechu (A Dream Come True) was used, new scenes created around the imported excerpts.  In stark contrast to the cheap American segments the Soviet film has superior special effects with eerie color tones.

In the future -- the year 1990 to be exact -- Earth receives an interstellar radio message saying that visitors are on the way.  Later another message is received that the alien's ship has crashed and they need to be rescued.

So astronauts blast off and rescue a female lone survivor on the Martian moon Phobos.  Besides her green skin the survivor has silver plastic hair pushed back to a point, her hairdo evocative of an acorn or a condom tip. 

A scene with the almost snickering Dennis Hopper.

The astronauts head back to Earth, not suspecting their passenger has a particular taste.  After she kills one astronaut they try to keep her under control by feeding her plasma.  Guess how well that works out.

Dennis Hopper portrays one of the endangered astronauts.  At one point he's  suppressing a snicker while uttering his dialogue.  No surprise to learn he thought the script was stupid and he had to force himself to keep a straight face [3].  As a viewer I wasn't under such a restriction:  I could let out a good laugh. 

Queen of Blood wraps up with a classick ending by laying an egg -- actually, many eggs. 

I recommend this movie as a goodbad film.  And if you don't find a goodbad film to be worth a few laughs there are still the haunting scenes lifted from A Dream Come True.


[1]  Mathilda May also stars in the disturbing Spanish film The Tit and the Moon (La Teta y la luna) 1994 [ https://www.amazon.com/Tit-Moon-DVD/dp/B000BH2U64. ]  The plot involves a preteen boy who wants to get suckled like his baby sibling.  Maybe I'm not sophisticated enough to be unbothered by a couple of scenes.  At one point the boy stands in front of bare chested May and she squirts her breast milk into his gaping mouth.  (May must be the titular character.)  Later there's a scene where he suckles May and then another woman on a outdoor balcony    Doesn't Spain have child protection laws?

[2]  https://reprobatepress.com/2018/12/03/attack-of-the-space-vampires-the-story-of-lifeforce/

[3]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Blood