In this recurring column, we revisit (and reconsider) eagerly anticipated films that didn’t seem to fulfill their pre-release promise.

Though dogged by rumors that executive producer Steven Spielberg spearheaded its production, 1982’s Poltergeist was nonetheless The Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s first mainstream, major-studio success. His 1985 follow-up Lifeforce, however, demolished most of the professional momentum generated by his prior effort, and a simple recap of its plot suggests why. Investigating Haley’s Comet, a joint American-British space shuttle crew discovers an extraterrestrial ship full of desiccated bat-man creatures and three nude humanoids trapped in giant crystals, whom the astronauts bring aboard their own craft. Some time later, another space expedition recovers these three unclothed figures, including a gorgeous female (Mathilda May), and transports them to Earth, where they turn out to be space vampires who can possess bodies and are intent on draining – and then beaming to the umbrella-shaped ship they’ve positioned just above London – as many human souls as they can harvest. As May’s sexy E.T. sucks people dry and telepathically communicates with the astronaut (Steve Railsback) who first discovered her, Londoners sapped of their lifeforces become zombies, terrorizing the city and putting mankind’s continued survival in peril.

The term “batshit insane,” it seems, was created with this specific film in mind. And yet I’d argue that’s a positive, since how many unironic psychosexual space vampire-zombie apocalypse films do you get in one lifetime – and helmed by Tobe Hooper in his (relative) prime, no less? Adapted from Colin Wilson’s novel Space Vampires by Don Jakoby and Alien scribe Dan O’Bannon, Lifeforce has an off-the-deep-end mentality that was bound to alienate, its plot going from silly to ludicrous to mental ward-bonkers without even an accompanying hint of wink-wink self-consciousness. Hooper plays his bizarro material straight, which in this case involves repeatedly employing a dreamy, hallucinatory aesthetic marked by twisting, gliding, seemingly weightless camerawork, extreme soft-focus lighting, and heightened shot-reverse shot angles for his protagonists’ telepathic conversations. Juxtaposed rotating close-ups of May and Railsback during their maiden encounter not only beautifully evoke how Railsback’s world is about to be turned figuratively upside-down, but elegantly establishes the two characters’ forthcoming mental-physical union, one of many instances where Hooper’s evocative direction elevates his often loony-tunes sci-fi saga.

Hooper’s potent widescreen cinematography and Henry Mancini’s robust score help foster a surrealistic atmosphere for a story simultaneously intoxicated and frightened by femininity. The embodiment of male sexual fantasies and anxieties, May’s Playboy-ready, perpetually nude succubus gives the action a perversely electric energy, while the performances of Railsback, Peter Firth (as a military colonel) and Frank Finlay (as a government scientist who studies “death”) afford just enough campiness to keep the proceedings light. Originally trimmed of 15 minutes by TriStar Pictures, Lifeforce’s restored 116-minute DVD cut boasts few glaring plot holes but a number of memorable horror images – blue lightening flashing around the gaping mouths of a reanimated, dried-out corpse and his victim; May’s alien materializing from the blood spewing out of a deceased Patrick Stewart’s mouth; an ominously carnal dream sequence; and a final, naked make-out session between May and Railsback in a column of blue light comprised of human souls. Frequently outlandish and far from profound, it’s nonetheless a box-office bomb that, like its horror-maestro director, deserved quite a bit better.