Blu-ray: Lifeforce

Tobe Hooper changed cinema with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) for pennies in rancid Southern heat, but came closest to a mainstream Hollywood career a decade later, following the hit Spielberg collaboration Poltergeist (1982), with his biggest budget from hack mavericks Cannon Films. He characteristically determined to “make it as wild as I can”.

Based on British Beat writer Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires, Lifeforce (1985) is indeed one of its decade’s most unhinged, far out films. Infamous and too easily dismissed for 18-year-old French ballerina Mathilda May’s mostly nude queen vampire role, May’s unabashed commitment overcomes such old-school exploitation to embody the ferociousness of what one drained victim calls “overwhelming” feminine sexuality. As storm-fronts of crackling blue energy swirl around her succubus assaults, Hammer’s Seventies lesbian vampires looks limp by comparison. Switching bodies and stalking the Yorkshire Moors for male victims, she’s a pulpy precursor to Scarlett Johansson’s beautiful predator in Under the Skin.

Henry Mancini’s rousing, martial score drives Lifeforce forward. Straying far from “Moon River”, he was lured by the chance to compose a suite for a projected lengthy opening sequence as the UK-US space shuttle Churchill discovers a 150-mile long, HR Giger-influenced phallic spaceship secreted within Halley’s Comet, harbouring a dead race of desiccated, bat-like creatures and three suspended bodies in alluring human form. Only the humanoids and Carlsen (Steve Railsback) make it to Earth alive to be interrogated by UK scientist Dr Fallada (Frank Finlay) and SAS man Caine (Peter Firth), as May and her male cohorts revive and escape the authorities.

Hooper’s originally intended space section was substantially cut by Cannon, leaving eerily atmospheric dissolves which could have anchored his film if sustained, and further resembled Alien’s early scenes (returning the favour of Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s major influence on Ridley Scott’s fright machine). The cuts also lose much of the impressive organic alien production design and Star Wars special effects master John Dykstra’s work. This prologue could usefully have included the whole outer space narrative of a spreading vampire plague on an antiseptic astronaut version of Dracula’s Whitby-bound ship Demeter. Instead Lifeforce jolts between urgently pitched UK scenarios, incorporating psychic visions and space flashbacks, perhaps skipping the holes in Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby’s incomplete script. O’Bannon co-wrote John Carpenter’s loose hippie space yarn Dark Star (1974) as well as Alien, and must like Hooper have been aware of the camp and outre edge to Lifeforce’s hysterically straight face.Hooper envisaged a big-budget throwback to Hammer films of his youth, and his English cast’s thunderously plummy registers recall Matt Berry’s Toast, while the American Railsback goes full Method. During a Gothic asylum scene, he joins Patrick Stewart in long agonised howls as if physically forcing horror, as the latter flits between male and female voices amid madly flickering chandeliers and poltergeist carnage. Lifeforce is by now heading towards its ultimate mode of frenzied excess. Hooper’s Hammer model is plainly Quatermass and the Pit (1967), and screenwriter Nigel Kneale’s buried, ancient aliens’ apocalyptic assault on London. The Prime Minister excuses himself behind a screen to suck his secretary’s essence and Carlsen and Cain wordlessly turn on their heel to race on into a capital of crumbling martial law, zombified hordes and flaming red buses. May’s queen reclines in St Paul’s with a corpse congregation of the damned, funnelling the city’s souls towards her orbiting vampire craft. Eros remains the true lifeforce, in a film which also absorbs the essence of cheeky, witless Seventies sex comedies into its passionate, bonkers ethos.

Extras on this 4K UHD release include the longer international edit and the making-of doc Cannon Fodder. A gossipy UK crew who’d arrived fresh from Mike Hodges’ similarly misunderstood Flash Gordon recall Hooper “mostly on drugs” and “a bit spaced out… jumpy with caffeine”, filming unusably “pornographic” shots of May. Lustrous effects work was lost when Cannon denied him final cut. Boy, he went too far.

• More film reviews on theartsdesk