Sometimes, it becomes painfully clear how and where a movie that sounds good on paper goes disastrously off the rails. I mean, here you have legendary horror director Tobe Hooper making a movie combining aliens, vampires and zombies, and it’s based on a well regarded novel by Colin Wilson (even if it was published after he entered the woo-peddling phase of his career.
And then the first image you see on screen is the Cannon films logo, followed by the names Golan and Globus, and you know that you’re going to be in for a rough time.
To start with, we get a long, slow pan over a spaceship exterior that is clearly meant to evoke Star Wars. And then we get organic spaceship interiors that are meant to evoke Alien. And then we get the full frontal female nudity. And honestly, that’s really what the movie is about. Oh, sure, we can probably find some film critics who will gussy up a review of the film with some commentary about the “male gaze” and the use of feminine signifiers and homoeroticism as monstrous invasions of the male psyche. And that stuff is there, buried deep within a movie that uses soft-core porn imagery to tell the story of a naked woman from space who nearly destroys the world.
It’s a gloriously bad film. Enormously entertaining, in that way that bad films can sometimes be, but the mish-mash of elements never really works out. There’s one genuinely good line in the film, “it’ll be less terrifying if you just come to me”, an absolutely brilliant line in context, but that’s really it. You can see Patrick Stewart hamming it up in a particularly ill-conceived career move and that’s the limit of the star power. But you can’t look away. There’s something horribly compelling about the over-wrought acting, the soft-core nudity and comical “seduction” scenes, the sheer incompatibility of the vampire and alien and zombie tropes in the film. It can probably be chocked up to the strange ability Golan and Globus had as film producers to make something that connects with the audience at a visceral level, no matter how horrible the actual filmed product is. You see those opening scenes, with those curious shots that put you in mind of science-fiction films you did enjoy, and then get thrown the batshit crazy premise of “Vampires! In Space!” and you have to see what comes of this.
And it turns out to be mostly boobies and you feel like you just wasted an hour and a half.
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In the book the space vampires were squids or something.
The story behind this film gets even more epic and ludicrous when you know someone who was involved with the production. As insane as the film buisiness is anyway, anything Golan & Globus got involved with went a magnitude further into mad fuckin’ shit territory — and that’s without Tobe Hooper in his stinky leather pants wandering around out of his head while the final writer on the film, Michael Armstrong (who directed MARK OF THE DEVIL years before) not only went nuts trying to keep the rewrites coming but ended up actually directing bits of the film himself (and he wasn’t the only draftee.)
I went to see the thing when it opened in L.A., with Michael along for the fun of it. He spent the entire movie more or less drunk, which is, frankly, probably the best way to see it.
This film used to be a staple of late night movie filler on commercial television here in Canada, and was one of the rare films that they cut the nudity out of, so we didn’t even get that. But Patrick Stewart is great in this!
My favorite thing about the movie is how they react to finding the alien beings: they stick them in a storeroom with one guard. They’ll keep until morning, I guess. No reason to lose any sleep over the most momentous discovery in human history.
Best line in this movie: “Well… here I go!” (Poof!)
I recently watched this again, remembering how tacky it was — a sort of Full-frontal Space 1999.
On the other hand, they WERE nice boobies to look at, if memory serves. That was about the only redeeming thing about the movie, at least from my view.
Someone gave me their copy. After watching it, I understood why.
An hour and a half of boobies is never a wasted hour and a half.
This is perhaps my all-time favourite “Worst Movie Ever”.
I love it. It’s so bad it goes beyond the realms of anything I have ever seen!
Space-Vampires! Two catagories that, unitl this move, had never been put together. Watch this film, and you’ll see why! lulz
I’ve never seen a theme like this, is it custom?