LifeforceMuch maligned movie from the 80's. Accused of being cheesy, exploitative and schlocky. Mostly due to Mathilda May being nude for most of her scenes.
Summary: Astronauts exploring Hayley's Comet (Hayley's Comet comes up in a few movies of the time, due to it's real world passage near the earth) find a seemingly derelict spacecraft 150 miles long. They investigate and find a bunch of "dead" bat aliens and three nude humans whom they take to earth. Turns out they're space vampires who suck the life force from other beings.
I remembered this movie fondly, and recently bought it on Blu-Ray. On rewatching, I still love it, warts and all. And there's a lot of warts.
A lot of the dialog is goofy. Many important plot points happen off-screen. And the story goes off into a pointless goose (vampire) chase for the middle of the film.
I'm not going to use spoiler blocks for a 30 year old film.
But there's so many great scenes! One of the most memorable is when they're flying back to London in a helicopter, and the space vampire girl creates a body out of the blood and goo from two bodies they were transporting with them. The bodies are clearly mannequins and look terribly fake, but the blood-body is very convincing and freaky.
There's some very shitty FX, but a lot of good stuff too, especially for the time. And it's all practical, of course. None of this fake, glossy CGI crap.
I love the end where London is in flames, soul explosions everywhere, and it gives a proper creepy end of the world vibe.
One thing I noticed on rewatch is one of the last scenes is Carlsen and the space girl flying up into the alien ship as disembodied "life force", and there's a quick scene, only lasts a few seconds, where they show the crystal coffins reform full of space babies. It's at that point, 30 years later, I realized the space girl was
mating with Carlsen.
Another small detail is, at home on blu-ray in high-def, you can see the vampires and their "zombie" victims have spiral contact lenses on their eyes.
So, I thoroughly reccomend this flick. I bought the Blu-Ray because it's only occasionally available on streaming services, and I especially wanted to make sure I got the Director's Cut, because the US theatrical release was butchered.
Watch the crazy space vampire movie!