Space Vampires !!!

Queen of Blood (1966): written and directed by Curtis Harrington; starring John Saxon (Brenner), Basil Rathbone (Dr. Farraday), Judi Meredith (Laura), Dennis Hopper (Grant), and Florence Marly (Alien Queen): 

Queen of Blood writer-director Curtis Harrington got a title homage from Jim Jarmusch this year as Jarmusch's zombie film The Dead Don't Die took its title from a 1975 TV movie directed by Harrington and scripted by genre great Robert "Psycho" Bloch.

Here, Harrington assembled a new film using a lot of spaceship footage from two Soviet sci-fi films. The story is all his, though it resembles more than one antecedent -- perhaps most notably C.L. Moore's 1930's science-fiction horror story "Shambleau."

Basil Rathbone supplies what is basically an extended cameo as Basil Exposition. The redoubtable John Saxon is the lead astronaut. Dennis Hopper, counting down to Easy Rider, plays the least convincing astronaut in cinematic history. And Florence Marly plays the silent Alien Queen, our eponymous Queen of Blood.

The movie chugs along pretty enjoyably. It ends somewhat abruptly, suggesting a sequel that never materialized so far as I know. The Alien Queen is suitably sinister, but it's her eggs that are especially disturbing. Certainly not a great movie, but an entertaining one. Recommended.

Lifeforce (1985): adapted from the Colin Wilson novel The Space Vampires by Dan O'Bannon, Don Jakoby, Michael Armstrong, and Olaf Pooley; directed by Tobe Hooper; starring Steve Railsback (Col. Carlsen), Peter Firth (Col. Caine), Frank Finlay (Dr. Fallada), Mathilda May (Space Vampire), and Patrick Stewart (Dr. Armstrong):

As crazy as this movie is, it's far superior to its over-rated source material, Colin Wilson's ponderous, pseudo-intellectual 1970's novel The Space Vampires. Why the producers didn't keep the title of the novel is beyond me -- it's way better than the generic (though descriptive) Lifeforce.

Tobe Hooper directs ably and the actors are all solid if occasionally wonky in this tale of a NASA expedition to Halley's Comet that encounters a giant spaceship in the cometary core filled with dead, giant, bat-like aliens and three mysterious, perfectly preserved human bodies. Needless to say, the expedition soon loses contact with Earth. The silent ship returns to Earth orbit. Aboard it is a dead crew... and those three mysterious human bodies from the spaceship.

Steve Railsback, best known for playing Charles Manson in the 1970's TV adaptation of Helter Skelter, here plays cinema's second-least convincing astronaut ever. Though his constant freak-outs do make sense given that he's the sole surviving astronaut from that cometary mission -- and that one of the suddenly resurrected bodies found on that ship now has the hots for him. And a psychic connection.

Lifeforce was one of the great box-office bombs of the 1980's. It's a shame because the set design and prosthetic monster effects are terrific, and the narrative is generally quite gripping. Peter Firth does solid work as the world's most unflappable SAS officer. Captain Picard shows up as a psychiatrist. Unknown Mathilda May acquits herself admirably as the alien 'woman' with the connection to Railsback, especially as she's stuck playing roughly 75% of her scenes buck naked. Recommended.

Dark Places (2009) by Gillian Flynn

Dark Places (2009) by Gillian Flynn: Flynn gained fame and fortune and a bit of controversy with her third published novel, Gone Girl, and its movie adaptation which she scripted. Once a TV and film critic for Entertainment Weekly, Flynn's writing in this novel seems aimed at film adaptation, though none is as yet forthcoming.

Dark Places is a dark romp occasionally undercut by its glibness and by an ending that seems aimed at some sequel down the road. Its strengths are its strong though sometimes programmatic characterization, especially of its protagonist, Libby Day.

Day was the sole survivor at age seven of the 1985 massacre of her mother and two sisters in their small Midwestern town. Her 15-year-old brother went to jail for the murders, primarily because of Libby's coached, fictionalized testimony. 

24 years later, a bunch of wonky murder hobbyists who debate various solved and unsolved homicides online and at conventions pay Libby to appear at one such convention, where she discovers that the "Kill Club" believes that she lied on the stand and that her brother is innocent.

Libby may have lived a horrid life of depression and mania and seclusion, but the lure of money gets her out of the house. Initially that's because her inheritance is about $500 away from running out. So she negotiates various fees with the Kill Club in exchange for her visiting anyone and everyone who might know something about the murders that the police never investigated. The quest will ultimately involve meeting with her brother in jail after not talking to him in 24 years, as well as a meeting or two with her absent, alcoholic, deranged father.

Libby is a great character -- wounded, acerbic, cynical, self-lacerating, other-lacerating. The novel alternates her first-person, present-day narration with third-person chapters focused on brother Ben and their single mother, depressed and beaten down and poor and about to lose the family farm to the Bank.

Aside from that ending, Dark Places also has a problem more peculiar to Hollywood movies than novels: its mystery is compromised by the novelistic equivalent of a combination of Chekov's Gun and the 'Unmotivated', secretly Motivated Close-up that reveals the identity of the killer or the mole an hour before that character steps on stage (see: the cook in The Hunt For Red October). 

One seemingly random bit of conversation early in the novel reveals a major late-novel revelation. It screams for attention because there's no other similar information surrounding it. There might as well be a flashing neon sign pointing to it. 

The rest of the mystery seems to be telegraphed about halfway through the book by virtue of several Neon Moments of Fore-shadowing. Oh, well. I guessed the major plot revelation of Gone Girl before watching the movie without ever reading the novel. Flynn maybe needs to work on this. Or not. Certainly a lot of people like her stories just the way they are, ready to hit the screen and partially predigested when it comes to Twists.

In any case, Dark Places is a mostly fun, fast read. Its level of mystery will probably depend on just how many mysteries you've read and seen. Its narrative use of the 1980's Satanic Cult scares that put a lot of innocent people in jail doesn't quite work as commentary because there are actual Satanists in the novel, no matter how puerile. Though that's almost paid off by Libby's discovery that the Satanic teenager of 1985 becomes the feed-store operator of 2009. Recommended.

Darklings (1985) by Ray Garton

Darklings (1985) by Ray Garton: Zippy 1980's horror novel from Ray Garton seems to have been read by the makers of 1987's The Hidden. When a dying serial killer arrives in a California ER, he gives the hospital a bonus: an eruption of squiggly, wiggly worms that possess people and cause them to act on their basest impulses. Very, very basest. 

A doctor, a nurse, and a lab technician team up to uncover the mystery behind the mind-worms -- and hopefully the source. Garton moves everything along briskly and entertainingly in this early novel. Characterization is deft, and the novel is rewardingly tight -- there's no bloat here. Scenes of graphic horror are not for the squeamish, but Garton's work never feels exploitative. It's the 1980's, so there's a whole lot of smoking and mustaches. Recommended.

The City at the End of Things

Walking on Glass by Iain Banks (1985): Banks' second quasi-mainstream novel (as opposed to his science-fiction novels as Iain M. Banks) follows three seemingly, initially unconnected narratives through to their conclusive collision.

Or maybe not entirely a collision, because while two of the narratives herein are set in 1983 England, the third is set in some weird, distant future. The possibility exists that this third existence has been imagined by one of the protagonists of the other two narratives, but nothing is clear. The third narrative may simply be the fictional conclusion of the imaginative journey of the second narrative's protagonist. Or not. Elements of surrealism and absurdism occur throughout the third narrative; the other two narratives seem to be relatively straightforward realism.

In any case, Walking on Glass does a fine job of depicting time, place, and various states of mind. While the protagonist of the first narrative finds himself pining for a platonic love, the second protagonist appears to be a paranoid schizophrenic caught within his own self-created delusions of persecution and otherness.

In the third narrative, warriors from opposite sides of some cosmic battle find themselves imprisoned in a Kafkaesque castle until such time as they can correctly answer the question, "What happens when an irresistable force meets an immovable object?"

But to earn the right to answer the question once, they must successfully play and complete a game for which they have no rules: one-dimensional chess and invisible dominoes being two such games that we see, with the successful completion of each allowing for one answer. Should the answer prove wrong, they must start again at a new game. Rinse. Repeat.

While assorted postmodern games abound within the narrative and its metafictional tropes as well, the plights of the various characters are nonetheless compelling and even tragic. One thing that a awful lot of critics seem to have completely missed is the basic importance of the last name of the middle protagonist, Grout.

Like grout, his story binds -- in this case, it binds the other two narratives together; they meet only through his story. Make of that, and an assortment of other peculiarities and oddities, what you will. The last fifty pages or so are quite harrowing, for all the game-playing that has gone on before, and for all the revelations of other games that will come before the end. Highly recommended.