This review is long overdue. I had seen this film years ago, and recently got as a gift the book it was based on. I read (and enjoyed) the novel, and watched the movie one more time. The novel is called THE SPACE VAMPIRES and is written by Colin Wilson. Wilson, like Whitley Strieber later did in THE HUNGER, gave the vampire a science fictional rather than a supernatural background. Again, like Strieber, he had the vampires drain human's life force rather than blood. Wilson's novel was a mixture of criminal psychology, sex, alien invasion, vampirism, and a touch of Lovecraft.

Tobe Hooper (the director of the film) took the superficial aspects of the novel and made a Grade B monster movie out of it. What is surprising is that Hooper was quite faithful to the ideas, concept, and many of the details of the novel. Nevertheless, the feel of the film was that of a simple monster movie.

The plot is simple enough. It’s a mix of Ghostbusters, Night of the Living Dead, Space Vampires, with a bit of Halley's Comet (the harbinger of evil, called 'disaster,' the word for 'evil star'). It's the year of Halley's Comet, August 9. The space shuttle Churchill, on a joint British-American mission, approaches the comet. When an alien vessel is found 'hidden' in the comet's cone, Colonel Tom Carlson investigates to find big dead bats and three humanoids in suspended animation. The humanoids are brought to the shuttle but, when the shuttle returns to earth, the crew is dead, the cabin is burnt; only the aliens are intact. They are sent to the European Space Research Center in London where they are watched over by Bukovski and Fallada. When the spacegirl awakens and sucks the life out of a guard, she starts a 'plague' which spreads geometrically. Each victim must in turn suck the lifeforce from another human every 2 hours or die. If this progression is not stopped, earth is doomed.

Meanwhile, in Texas, the Churchill's escape pod is found with Carlson still alive. He tells a story of the crew being drained one by one, culminating with Carlson setting afire the shuttle cabin and escaping in the pod. Under hypnosis, Carlson reveals mental contact with the spacegirl. Carlson and Doctor Cane trace her to the body of a nurse (Ellen) at the Ristone Hospital for the insane in Yorkshire however this was only a ruse to lead them away from London. In fact, London is in shambles. The two male aliens have escaped and been 'feasting' on Londoners. Fallada kills one of them with a lead shaft through his energy center 2 inches below the heart and theorizes that these are vampires, perhaps the vampires of legend, having visited earth once before.

The story would have been fine, but I had three major quibbles. First, that Fallada, the Eminent Scientist, constantly lept to wild conclusions about the aliens with no evidence to support him. The novel had such, but the details of his (and Commander Carlsen's) investigation were skimped over in the movie. Secondly, the vampires were dispatched in so hackneyed a manner. And thirdly, the whole Halley's Comet bit was just too topical. What bothered me about it was that it sets the movie in 1986 rather than some nebulous near future, which strained my credulity a little too much. Face it, we just don't have the technology for a manned trip to Halley's Comet.

The acting, other than that of Fallada (played by Frank Finlay, Porthos from the Musketeer movies) and Colonel Kane (Peter Firth whose name is familiar, but I can't place him), was abysmal. Mathilda May, who played the lead vampire, wasn't a very good actor, but she had an unearthly (very appropriately) beauty that was quite striking. The special effects were uneven, but when they were good, they were spectacular! The animation of the corpses (especially the scene where one of the corpses fills out back into life while his victim shrivels up into a new corpse) was terrific.



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older