This sci fi horror film is pure 80’s. It has some very fun puppetry and animatronic effects, a thin story and lack of characters. Overall I enjoyed it, but it won’t be reaching my pantheon of favorite horror movies.

Released in 1985 and directed by Tobe Hooper, of Poltergeist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame, this film feels like a throwback to the sci fi horror films of the 1950’s. It follows a collection of characters usually working in the government trying to respond to a massive crisis threatening the earth, and less concerned with the individual horror of the people facing the danger.

The film begins with a space shuttle exploring Haley’s Comet up close when they find a massive space craft hiding in the comet’s path. They explore it and find three humanoids encased in protective forcefields and a whole host of alien corpses that appear to be giant bat-like creatures. They bring the humanoid people on board their ship for research purposes.

Cut to weeks later and the shuttle returns to earth with everyone on board dead, the ships records erased and the three humanoids still in take and apparently untouched inside their cases. The government responds trying to uncover the mystery of what happened. One of the humanoids is a beautiful and alluring woman who awakens and seduces one of the guards. She sucks the life out of him with a special effects enhanced kiss and leaves him a desiccated corpse.

The government scientists soon realize that the corpse comes back to life and must suck the life-force out of others to sustain itself. These space vampires as they call them are like a plague sweeping across Great Britain, and must be stopped.

The production design is great. I love the designs for the alien space craft and the bat creatures. The movie looks very cool and very surreal. It has this wonderful 80’s aesthetic that feels wholly original in today’s copy of a copy environment. I love stepping back in time and seeing real artists creating unique spaces.

The puppetry and animatronic work is also excellent. The desiccated corpses are so fun. The way they get up and hobble around trying to suck the life out of the living is a lot of fun. They aren’t wholly convincing as real corpses come back to life. You can almost see the puppet strings, but they are real. I believe that they exist in the real space with the real actors. I miss seeing real things in movies. No matter how good the cgi, you can always tell that the cgi zombie is not really in the room with the gun toting hero. I’ll take a thousand puppets over another computer generated fabrication.

The story totally feels like an old 50’s drive in feature. We don’t really have. amain character. We have a team of scientists and government agents trying to understand what is going on, but none of them really stand out as the hero we’re meant to be following. After a while, they find one of the crewmen from the spaceship that uncovered the space vampires, and his story is the closes thing we have to a main character arc, but even he feels like a secondary character. This lack of a single hero to follow left me feeling a bit a drift. Especially when we launch into the third act and it’s time for someone to step up and defeat these space vampires.

Some of the story telling also feels incomplete. The explanations for certain sci fi phenomena feel half baked and are proposed and accepted too easily by the characters. Also, there is an hilarious moment that launches us into the third act in which while our team of characters were pursuing a lead, the entire city of London was consumed by the vampire plague. It seems everyone is in London became a space vampire overnight. I laughed out loud wondering when this happened and why we didn’t get to see it.

Overall, this was a very fun throwback. I enjoyed spend time in this world with these designs and effects. It was a great time even if it left me a little dissatisfied in the character and story department.

It was my cup of tea. B