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The 1985 movie Lifeforce was on my “to watch” list more out of curiosity than anything else. I knew it wouldn’t be a great movie, but I wasn’t prepared for how bad it was.

Whatever the producers spent their money on, it wasn’t special or visual effects. The spaceship “Churchill” was a 1980s NASA space shuttle with ridiculously long solar panels. That was made even more silly since the spacecraft was nuclear powered.

The crew is on a joint UK/USA mission to come into contact with Halley’s Comet which visits the inner solar system about once every seventy-five years.

There were tons of technical errors I won’t get into but in the first five minutes, I regretted spending three dollars and change to stream this turkey.

The astronauts, including the Churchill’s commander Col. Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback) discover a 150-mile long needle shaped spaceship inside the comet’s coma. They also mysteriously lose contact with Earth, which is never a good sign.

A number of the crew including Carlsen enter the alien craft. It looks to be a derelict with the crew all dead. We assume it’s the crew who are thousands of human-sized bat-like creatures floating in the airless interior. The alien craft “reacts” and almost “grabs” the Churchill with an umbrella-shaped structure which suddenly stops. Carlsen and a few others see a bright light and follow it to a connecting chamber.

Inside they see three transparent chambers containing two male and one female nude humanoids. The woman (Mathilda May) is absolutely gorgeous (the actress was 18 years old at the time and very lovely) and the males on the team are captivated with her, especially Carlsen. Oddly enough, the females are not attracted to the two male occupants and even find the male astronauts and their attention to “space girl” amusing.

Of course, they take the three capsules back to the spacecraft where, as you can imagine, things go horribly wrong.

Churchill makes it back to Earth orbit but still has no contact with their control in the UK. The Columbia is launched and docks with Churchill. They discover a fire had occurred inside. Everyone is dead however, the three alien capsules remain untouched. Of course, they are taken back to Earth as you would expect in a horror movie.

They do note that the single escape pod is missing but the crew’s body parts are so scattered about that they can’t be sure if one was missing. As an aside, on a ship with a crew of about a dozen, why do you only have one single-occupancy escape pod?

Anyway…

The three capsules are taken to space headquarters and the female alien is left on a table covered only by a blanket and with a single male guard. The guard gets curious and goes inside the room. He touches the girl’s face and her eyes pop open. She sits up revealing to the audience her beautiful naked body (horror meets soft core porn). She kisses the guy sucking all of his lifeforce out, leaving him a burned out husk.

Dr. Leonard Bukovsky is monitoring the room from his office and sees all this. He doesn’t call anyone, he doesn’t hit an alarm, he doesn’t initiate a lockdown. Instead, he runs down several flights of stairs and confronts naked space girl alone. She kisses him as well which leaves him alive but weakened.

Dr. Hans Fallada (Frank Finlay), who is fascinated with death, sees this on the monitor when he enters Bukovsky’s office and DOES get help. But by the time they get down to the chamber, the girl is gone.

She leaves the building with ridiculous ease, mainly because the security force are a bunch of idiots. She uses some super force to shatter the windows and walks away into the darkness.

Special investigator Col. Colin Caine (Peter Firth) is called in at more or less the same time as Col. Carlsen is discovered in the Churchill’s escape pod which has just landed in Texas.

The two try to track space girl with the help of Carlsen’s newly acquired psychic connection to her.

Turns out space girl stashed her original body in a hiding place and has possessed that of a nurse named Ellen (Nancy Paul). In his vision, Carlsen sees Ellen locate a man changing a tire in the countryside as she manages to get a ride from him. She seduces him and when the police find him, he’s exhausted but happy. Space girl is sucking energy but not enough to leave behind a trail of corpses.

Oh, the corpses reanimate after two hours and need to suck lifeforce out of a live body. Failing to do that, they explode into dust.

Ellen is traced to a mental hospital run by Dr. Armstrong played by Patrick Stewart (yes, THAT Patrick Stewart, pre-Star Trek the Next Generation). Carlsen and Caine interrogate Ellen alone in her room and Carlsen all but sexually assaults her. He says Ellen is secretly a masochist and enjoys it. Caine, very unlike a real military investigator, sits down and enjoys the show. I mean, we can understand Carlsen is disturbed by his mental link with a space vampire, but what’s Caine’s excuse.

Carlsen discovers that space girl’s spirit exited Ellen but has possessed Armstrong. He and Caine assault him with drugs and in the resulting psychic and physical storm, one of their companions (Aubrey Morris) is killed. The spirit exits Armstrong who also dies.

During the helicopter flight back to London, their bodies spew a bunch of blood creating a bloody representation of space girl who explodes but doesn’t cover everyone in gore.

They get a call from Dr. Fallada who says he’s discovered how to kill the vampires using a “cold iron” sword.

Oh, the two male vampires escape. Fallada kills one but the other is on the loose.

The alien spaceship leaves the comet and enters orbit over London. It uses the male and female vampires as conduits to start sucking up lifeforce from London’s inhabitants, leaving them violent zombies. This includes the Prime Minister and many heads of state. While Carlsen feels himself summoned by space girl to the crypt where she’s beaming energy up to the ship, Caine tries to contact Fallada. The good doctor is now a more intelligent zombie who Caine manage to kill. He grabs the sword and starts looking for Carlsen.

Lots of cheesy zombie scenes with bad prosthetics. Lots of explosions with a very bad models of parts of London (or more likely something generic).

Carlsen finds space girl. Her human form was created out of his dreams and she says he’s like them, a vampire. We are never told why Carlsen is supposed to be a vampire. I guess every seventy-five years, a fresh load of vampires from space has been coming to Earth which, in ancient times, gave rise to our vampire legends.

That doesn’t make sense if whole cities are supposed to have been turned into zombies so their energy can be beamed into space, but whatever.

Both space girl and Carlsen are naked and engaging in soft core porn sex. Caine, having dispatched the other male vampire, arrives with the sword and passes it to Carlsen. Carlsen uses it to impale both space girl and himself stopping the energy flow to the spaceship. They are sucked upward and the spacecraft leaves (apparently not needing the comet anymore).

The zombies all die, the “plague” has stopped, and Caine is lucky to be alive.

The end.

I wonder how Patrick Stewart feels about his role in this terrible flick these days?