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.

Black Mirror

Oculus: written by Mike Flanagan, Jeff Howard, and Jeff Seidman; directed by Mike Flanagan; starring Karen Gillan (Kaylie Russell), Brenton Thwaites (Tim Russell), Katee Sackhoff (Marie Russell) and Rory Cochrane (Alan Russell) (2014): Competent horror thriller that uses some fairly effective narrative tricks rather than 'found-footage' for its scares. It's not easy to make a seemingly haunted mirror into a worthy antagonist, but Oculus manages this feat.

The leads are all solid, the reality-bending games are sometimes startling, and the stupid decisions made by Karen Gillan's character are totally explicable within the cinematic universe. She has motivation for how she does what she does, and all motivation in the film is suspect: the mirror manipulates people subtly as well as through illusions. If only someone had brought a fire extinguisher. Recommended.


Land of the Dead: written and directed by George Romero; starring Simon Baker (Riley Denbo), John Leguizamo (Cholo DeMora), Dennis Hopper (Kaufman), Asia Argento (Slack), Robert Joy (Charlie), Eugene Clark (Big Daddy) and Joanne Boland (Pretty Boy) (2005): George Romero's fourth Dead movie gave him a mostly name cast and a decent budget; Romero's own quirky muse caused him to use these things on what wasn't a horror movie at all, or at least not the horror movie the studio thought it would be getting.

Instead, Land of the Dead is part-satire, part-social commentary. The zombies aren't really the villains any more: indeed, they don't seem to have any interest in hunting humans until the humans piss them off. And piss them off, they do. I don't know that the movie benefitted from having known actors in some of the roles, though I am sure that this was necessary to secure funding. Dennis Hopper just seems miscast as a scheming businessman, but Leguizamo, Baker, and Asia Argento are all fine. But the real hero is the massive zombie (former) gas-station owner dubbed Big Daddy. He's the Robinson Crusoe of zombies. Recommended.