Lifeforce

The director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper, working with a script from the man who wrote Alien, Dan O'Bannon, with Captain Picard in a supporting role... how is that not awesome?

That's the kind of crazy Lifeforce is, based on the Colin Wilson novel Space Vampires.

The Churchill, a British/American space exploration vessel, is investigating Halley's Comet when they discover another ship in the comet's coma.

Of course they investigate. Inside, there's lots of corpses of bat-things and three nude humans, two men and a woman, in glass coffins.

Of course they bring them back.

But something goes wrong... the Churchill never makes it home; they send in the Columbia to investigate the derelict shuttle. There was a fire on the Churchill, killing all the crew, the glass coffins are brought back to London. The sole survivor from the Churchill ejected in a escape-pod and is brought to London as well.

The survivor is played by Steve Railsback, a favorite of mine from his appearance on the X-Files as Duane Barry (s 2.5 & 2.6) as well as his particularly chilling performance as Charles Manson in the 1976 mini-series.

The girl wakes up and feeding on the life force of people, draining them dry- literally desiccating them. The bodies she feeds upon re-animate and begin to feed as well.

Chaos ensues.

Railsback's character is effective as a Renfield to the aliens, while Patrick Stewart plays a doctor who becomes possessed by the girl alien in a particularly surreal piece.

The effects are pretty good.. the desiccated corpses looking as realistic as such things could; the light show at the end, when the aliens create a circuit built made up of the re-animated bodies and their lifeforces, is pretty magnificent.

I like the fact that Lifeforce works the bat iconography into the aliens- their true forms- and takes them from the world of magic and superstition into the realm of science fiction.