This review was written as part of the Final Girl Film Club.

[WARNING: I can't be troubled with trying to withhold spoilers. We've got bigger fish to fry.]

“Lifeforce” doesn’t aspire to be anything surreal, but it is one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen. Not so much because of what’s in the movie, but because of what was left out.

Director Tobe Hooper, who’d blown people’s minds a decade before with “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, had just come off “Poltergeist” in 1982. Rumors that producer Spielberg had guided Hooper’s hand were refuted, but also made a lot of sense. Really – You watch “TCM”, “The Funhouse”, and “Poltergeist” back to back to back and then tell me which one doesn’t belong. My guess is you’ll choose that one that is “E.T”, but with ghosts.

Spielberg and Hooper both denied these rumors and three years later Hooper helmed “Lifeforce”, which was his chance to show that he had all those “Poltergeist” chops. “Lifeforce” certainly has some Hollywood polish on it, but visually and emotionally, it’s just not in the same ballpark.

The story goes like this – a crew of astronauts on a mission to check out Haley’s comet find some space bats and a trio of naked people encased in crystals. It’s not long before this crew is never heard from again. Another crew goes out to check on the first crew and finds them burnt and dead, though the naked people in crystals are totally fine. This new crew tows them home. Once back on Earth, the naked lady – credited as “Space Girl” – wastes no time in making out with anyone she can get her hands on, turning her victims into skin and bones – and, eerily, eyeballs and teeth and hair.

Space Girl hits the town to spread her brand of inter-dimensional vampiric cheer and in the meantime, several British men follow her trail of destruction, trying to figure out what’s going on. It turns out that each victim turns into a lifeforce-vampire themselves about one hour after they’ve been attacked. If they don’t suck lightning out of someone’s face around that time…

…they’re done for.

As interesting and as naked as all of this is, I wasn’t all that wrapped up in what was going on. I knew it was an interesting set of circumstances, but was watching them from the outside. I was still on my couch.

That’s when it hit me – this movie has no hero.

For realz – 35 minutes in, we’ve met about 24 characters and no one has a story to follow. At the top I figured it would be Col. Carlsen (Steve Railsback), the American in charge of the Haley’s comet mission. But then he’s disappeared 10 minutes later, presumed dead with the rest of the burnt crew. The next guy we meet – Dr. Bukovsky (Michael Gothard) – is a youngish government man who is following the whole dead-crew-naked-folks scenario. But then he’s attacked by the naked lady and soon he’s sidelined, too. Luckily, we have a couple more stand ins – Col. Caine (really? You couldn’t come up with a non-”C” name to follow Col.? So… Col. Carlsen and Col. Caine. Should I even bother trying to tell them apart?) and Dr. Fallada, an older, rather expository scientist who likes to drop the science about life and death.

Judging from the poster, Railsback’s Col. Carlsen should be the lead guy, but again, he disappears, only to be found in an escape pod around the 40 minute mark. The next best thing to a protagonist that we have is Col. Caine, but we know absolutely nothing about him except that he’s following this case. It’s a movie with a vacuum right at the center and how it continues on is kind of a miracle.

Anyway, Col. Carlsen reveals that he’s in love with the Space Girl, the deepest, most profound love he’s ever felt, which is why it was so hard for him to set the ship on fire and take off. She revealed to him that she is “the feminine of your mind”, which is kind of a cool concept. If a being could see into your deepest thoughts and create themselves in the image of your perfect mate… that would be kind of a tough thing to deal with, especially when you’re being told by British doctors that you need to run an iron spike through that mate.

But that’s the plan, and so the Col. C’s and another scientist / doctor / smarty pants whose name I refuse to remember on the grounds that he didn’t matter, hit the town, trying to find our Space Girl and stop the spread of the space vampire disease. On the trail, they visit a home for the criminally insane, where the director, Dr. Armstrong (Patrick Stewart), reveals himself to be possessed by the Space Girl! In a bid to catch her and destroy her, they load her/him full of sodium pentathol and she/he (Patrick Stewart, now) proclaims her/his love for Col. Carlsen.

If there’s a scene in this movie worth watching, brother, this is it.

Well… the mission to save London fails really, really hard. The town is in chaos, the disease has spread to just about everyone and the government drops a quarantine on the whole joint. The military makes no bones about it – if this disease doesn’t die out pretty soon, they’re gonna nuke ol’ Londontown.

Col. Carlsen, slave to love, meets up with Space Girl in a cathedral that is ground zero for the soul broadcast to the space vampire ship hovering above the Earth. The two of them “do it” and Caine (who proclaimed himself a “natural voyeur” earlier in the movie, interestingly) shows up and throws an iron spike to Carlsen, who then shoves it through himself and Space Girl, causing lights to shoot out of their butts, thereby saving humanity.

When this movie came out 20 years ago, it tanked but good. I imagine it was due to a combination of 1) a British setting, 2) a is-it-or-isn’t-it dead subtle spoof-ish tone and 3) no discernible hero. Really, it’s a helluva a B-movie, better at being a B-movie than most. It takes itself seriously, but not pretentiously. It doesn’t seem to think it’s taught you a lesson at the end. It just tells you that a naked space vampire came to Earth and this is what happened and it’s no laughing matter.

I say: rent it.