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.
Demons (2002) by John Shirley: Really a two-part novel with the halves composed about a decade apart. Demons starts as a splattery supernatural horror novel before metamorphosing into a reality-bending adventure about 100 pages in. One day in the near future, thousands of apparent demons of seven different varieties invade Earth and start killing, torturing, and acting like dicks on the Internet. And that's just the beginning.
The novel shifts into Philip K. Dick territory, and then shifts further into the sort of metaphysical science fantasy that Colin Wilson hit people on the head with back in the 1970's in bait-and-switch novels like The Space Vampires and The Mind Parasites. The philosophies espoused here are much more palatable than those in Wilson's novels. Moreover, Shirley keeps his characters fallible and the ground-level stakes in view. The scenes of horror towards the end of the novel are more Zombie Apocalypse than Demonic Invasion, but they're repeatedly framed in terms of human loss and sorrow.
I liked Demons a lot. Your response may vary depending on how much mystical lunacy you're willing to withstand. Recommended.
The Space Vampires by Colin Wilson (1976): Wilson mentions Canadian Golden-Age science-fiction great A.E. Van Vogt in this novel's acknowledgements section. That reference clarifies a lot of the zaniness of this novel's construction, not to mention its philosophizing.
Even in his first short story, "Black Destroyer" (1939), one of two Van Vogt stories that allowed him to get a settlement from the makers of Alien (1979), the Winnipeg revelator combined horror, science fiction, and some exposition-heavy stretches of philosophizing about human society and social engineering. And a lot of Van Vogt's protagonists ended up as supermen in the end.
The Space Vampires starts off, much like the later Alien, with the discovery of a derelict alien ship by an Earth ship. We're at the end of the 21st century, and humanity continues to explore the solar system. These first fifty pages or so give us an effective shot of cosmic horror and wonder. The derelict is cyclopean in size and mysterious inside. Humanoid aliens rest in what seem to be tombs. But if the crew was human, why does the interior scale of the ship, like the exterior, suggest a dark cathedral made for giants?
And what's up with the frozen, alien octopi?
So far, so good. The horror elements remain effective when the explorers return to Earth with three of the preserved alien bodies. A horrific event occurs in London, England, which for some reason seems to be the headquarters of Earth's space command (shades of the Quatermass series and Doctor Who!).
And then Colin Wilson does the writerly equivalent of crapping his pants over and over again in an explosive diarrhea spout of increasingly ridiculous theories spouted by talking heads that only occasionally pause so that the plot can lurch along for a few pages in its inevitable path to a Deus ex machina.
What's impressive about Wilson is that his writing keeps one reading throughout the later stretches of the novel, even as one's suspension of disbelief fades and the tedious stretches of his philosophizing go on and on and on.
To condense everything into a few lines, everything that lives has a life-force. Male and female life forces are like the negative and positive leads on a battery.
The ultimate sexual characteristic of a woman is to submit to the male, which allows for a balancing of the male and female sexual forces. Somewhat counter-intuitively, Wilson's system means that men suck power from women at the moment of orgasm. Among other things, that last bit explains why old men with young wives are virile powerhouses who age more slowly than puny, ordinary men who are stuck with wives their own age (or, I guess, gay men).
There's a whole lot more where that came from, all of it increasingly dire and laughable as the novel shudders to its close. The eponymous aliens can suck the life-force out of anyone, though the learned man can turn the tables on them. So of course our protagonist rapidly goes from alien food source to sex-powered Superman.
Then he learns more about space vampires from an anomalously virile and sexy nonagenerian with three sexy young women living with him. He also realizes that all women are simply expressions of the Eternal Feminine, and that they're there to give him power because he's a man, and men receive power from women either telepathically or sexually because That's the Way It Is! Ha ha whee.
Even though the protagonist is married, he bangs one of the sexy young women because the space vampire is messing with his mind from a great distance because Telepathy! He also mind-melds with another guy's wife to such a level of intimacy while they're just holding hands that she contemplates leaving her husband. Also, she offers some of her life-force energy to him because That's What Women Do! They enjoy having their life energy drained by, um, a man's ejaculating penis. Or just a manly man reading their minds. That's enough. Oh, baby, take my lifeforce!
If nothing else, one can see why film-makers re-titled the movie adaptation Lifeforce. And the movie, wacky and bad as it was, is far superior to the book. By the last fifty pages of the novel, I was hoping the space vampires would kill the protagonist and that annoying nonagenerian (or maybe he was just a late octogenerian. Really, who cares?). Because they are so sexy and virile and hyper-competent. And they'll tell you all about it.
Not recommended unless you stop reading at the 50-page mark and then go off and write your own, better conclusion to the novel. Or if you enjoy masturbating to weird metaphysical/biological fantasies of male sexual power as being an expression of the Infinite.
The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson (1967): English writer Colin Wilson started off critical of H.P. Lovecraft. But after being challenged by Arkham House founder August Derleth to try to write a Lovecraftian piece of fiction, Wilson ended up writing at least three Lovecraft-tinged novels and one novella.
However, what makes The Mind Parasites one bonkers addition to the Mighty Lovecraft Tradition is Wilson's own life philosophy, sometimes described as 'optimistic existentialism' or 'phenomenological existentialism.' Basically, human beings need to be positive. And we can map subjective experiences of the mind as if they were objective and quantifiable phenomena. And...
Well, Wilson pushes these concepts in The Mind Parasites into the realm of super-powers that the right person can attain, basically, by thinking real hard for a few days.
This leads to a lot of philosophical discussion, much of it bat-shit crazy, and all of it in service to a plot in which ancient 'Mind Parasites' have been keeping humanity from reaching its super-powered potential for at least 200 years.
Lovecraft gets name-checked along the way, his stories re-imagined as dream visions of the way the universe operates. Whatever horror there is occurs early in the novel, before people start developing earth-shaking super-powers. It's the early stretches that are most Lovecraftian, as details accumulate and parallels with Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" are most prominent.
The main events of the novel take place in 1997, 30 years after The Mind Parasites was written. Wilson gets a lot wrong about the then-future. Indeed, it isn't clear until the climax why the novel had to be set in the future. Then we find out. Oh, brother, do we find out!
The basic set-up of the novel -- in which a few plucky, intelligent men In the Know must band together against a massive menace -- recalls some of Lovecraft's works, as well as a lot of other science fiction (Robert Heinlein's Sixth Column, a.k.a. The Day After Tomorrow, much resembles this work, though there the menace is human and the super-powers used to combat it derived from new engineering and scientific discoveries). One also sees the echoes of Eric Frank Russell's Sinister Barrier, in which humanity faces hitherto unseen alien enemies. It's very much a science-fiction trope, and Wilson's heroic cadre of super-thinkers become that old stand-by, The Secret Elite, in order to save humanity.
Wilson's exposition can be heavy-going at times. And while ostensibly inspired by Lovecraft, the novel very quickly moves into the more optimistic Derleth Branch of Lovecraft-inspired fiction: these evils can not only be combated, but utterly annihilated. Brian Lumley's 1970's HPL-homages in his Titus Crow novels would go down this same path, turning Lovecraft's grim cosmos into a backdrop for zippy, pulp-fiction heroics. And while there's a lot more philosophical talk in The Mind Parasites than in Lumley's early work, the last fifty pages or so head straight to Pulp-land, Destination: E.E. "Doc" Smith. Surpassingly odd but lightly recommended.
