Director: Tobe Hooper
Writers: Colin Wilson, Dan O’Bannon
Stars: Steve Railsback, Mathilda May, Peter Firth
Run Time: 1 Hour, 41 Minutes
Synopsis
The Churchill is outbound to study Halley’s comet. Radar spots something at least 150 miles long in the comet’s coma. It’s artificial. They can’t contact the Earth because of interference. Colonel Carlsen says they need to check it out because it won’t be back for another 76 years.
Four men fly over in space suits to check it out. They find thousands of giant bats floating in the zero gravity, but they’re all dead and completely dried out. They do bring back a specimen. Something starts to deploy on the ship that looks like a giant umbrella. They continue exploring and find three naked human bodies, two men and a girl, perfectly preserved. Carlson feels affected by them. They are somehow hypnotic. They bring them back as well.
Thirty days later, the Churchill returns to Earth orbit. The ship doesn’t respond to communications, so they send the space shuttle Columbia to intercept them. Columbia docks with Churchill and finds the ship has had a fire. The alien pods are intact. They bring them to Earth for further study and the pods open by themselves. People still find themselves drawn to the three corpses – especially the girl – , again, almost hypnotically.
A guard goes in the room and the girl wakes up. She kisses him and sucks all the life out of him. Dr. Bukovsky is mind controlled and only partially drained, and the girl escapes. The guards corner her in the main lobby, but she gets past them easily.
Colonel Caine from the SAS arrives to take charge. They talk about the Churchill, and that the escape pod had been launched before the fire. Dr. Fallada says his specialty is death itself; he’s a thanatologist. He talks of a life force that exists in all things, and he thinks that girl drained some of it from Bukovsky and all of it from the guard.
The two male aliens wake up to escape too. The guards shoot them repeatedly with such heavy machine gun fire that they are blown to bits. A doctor begins an autopsy on the dead guard, who sits up like a zombie. It hypnotizes the doctor and sucks his life out which restores him to health again. The formerly-dead guard freaks out, and they lock him in a cell.
They get a call, the girl killed someone in the park and stole her clothes. After two hours, the formerly-dead guard in the cell starts screaming and shrivels into dust; it’s not a permanent resuscitation, they need more energy to keep going. The doctor who was attacked has a similar fate. The girl from the park as well.
They get a call from Texas, the Churchill’s escape pod has landed on Earth. Inside, they find Colonel Carlsen. He explains what happened in the comet and the ship. The crew began to die on the trip home, one by one, drained of life like the others. He set the fire on board the ship, hoping everything would die and not make it to Earth. Then he ejected himself in the pod. He seems to still be telepathically connected to the girl.
The alien ship breaks off from Halley’s comet and starts heading toward Earth. It’ll arrive at Earth in two days. Carlsen has an erotic dream about the girl, but it wasn’t just a dream. Fallada wants to hypnotize Carlsen. Carlsen connects to her mind and explains that the girl has switched bodies and wants to find a man to draw away just a little energy from him.
The girl is heading to Thurlstone Hospital for the criminally insane. They meet Dr. Armstrong, who runs the place. Carlsen and Caine track down the girl the alien had been in, but she’s gone now. They go to question one of the mental patients, but Carlsen and Caine grab Armstrong instead; it seems he’s the one who’s really possessed by the alien girl. They sedate him and he goes berserk. After some questioning, the vampire girl breaks loose from Armstrong.
Caine thinks maybe they didn’t find all her victims and that the vampirism is still spreading, so they head back to the space center. Fallada calls and explains that the two males didn’t really die; they can jump from body to body, but Fallada killed one of them with leaded iron.
Carlsen comes clean about what really happened on the Churchill. It was he who caused all the trouble. Meanwhile, the BBC reports that thousands are rampaging through the streets of London; all Hell has broken loose with vampire-energy zombies everywhere. Caine and Carlsen go to see the Prime Minister, but he’s already been infected. Martial law has been declared, and the military takes over.
All the lifeforce in London is floating up to the spaceship, which is collecting souls. The males are collecting energy and funneling it through the girl to get to the ship. Carlsen runs off the be with the girl, and Caine chases after him
Caine goes to see Fallada, who has become a vampire himself. Caine kills him and takes the iron sword. Meanwhile, Carlsen tracks down the girl, who is laying in the basement of the cathedral. Caine kills the male vampire and sees its true form, that of a big bat. He continues on inside. Carlsen ends up stabbing the girl and himself, ending the invasion. The alien ship heads back to Halley’s comet.
Commentary
And once again, aliens from another world target London for their shenanigans. Why is it always London?
The beginning parallels “Alien” quite a bit. They find the mysterious ship and explore it, the ship has many mysteries, and they find an alien and bring it back. It’s written by Dan O’Bannon, the main writer of Alien, so that’s probably not coincidental. It also incorporates a lot of tropes from other vampire stories, and Fallada is a not-too-subtle Van Helsing clone.
The mummified bodies and really well done. They’re obviously dummies, but they look really good. Some of the spaceship effects look a little dated, but not bad overall.
We watched the newer director’s cut, and I don’t think the added footage helps at all. It drags a little in places, where the original theatrical release moved fairly quickly. There’s more to see in the longer version, but I think the original is a little more coherent and the pacing is better.