Here’s what Virus has going for it: an all-too-rare lead performance by the undervalued Jamie Lee Curtis as the Sigourney Weaver of a crew of hard-nosed sailors trapped on an extraterrestrial-infested Rusian ship; a nifty-neato geek monster with some fairly cool animatronics and gore; a lesser (but at least not the least) Baldwin brother; and Donald Sutherland in bug-eyed, ham-sandwich mode.

Here’s what Virus doesn’t have: genuine scares, anything approaching originality, and a director who can do more than aim the camera at the right spot. But when I’m presented with a monster comprised of electrical impulses that replicates itself by combining spare human body parts with mutated versions of the spiderbots that menaced Tom Selleck in Runaway, resulting in awesomely goofy Borg/Cenobite hybrids, I’m willing to forgive a lot.

A generic Alien on a boat, there’s little to actually recommend, and nothing aside from the efforts of some talented effects technicians stands out. But for me, Virus is comfort food — an unchallenging, unchanging, unhealthy snack — one of those films that somehow fills a particular hole in my soul. A greasy Hawaiian pizza of a movie.

Bonus marks for allowing Sutherland to perform his last scenes as a manic, organs-exposed Terminator. Even in a career as varied and wide-ranging as his, that must be a first. BTW: I hereby claim the term “sigourney,” meaning any female lead in a genre flick comprised otherwise almost entirely by male character actors wherein all men will almost certainly be deceased by film’s end, as in, “Jamie Lee Curtis pulls sigourney duty.” —Corey Redekop

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Ah, the 1980s. It was a simpler time: a time of magic, miracles, demons and gods. A time when a cult horror director could commandeer a $25 million budget to construct an amalgamation of thoughtful British science-fiction and American horror. A time when Steve Railsback was considered a viable leading man. I speak of the infamous flop Lifeforce.

Loosely based on Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires — fairly on-the-nose for a title — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper and Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon cobbled together one of the cinema’s most bizarre achievements. Ostensibly a tale of intergalactic vampires discovered in Halley’s Comet (embodied by Mathilda May, wandering nude through her scenes and helping a few teenagers achieve maturity much faster), Lifeforce switches tones at will, transforming from space opera to vampire flick to chase film, then going absolutely bugfuck to become a zombie apocalypse. At one point, May replicates herself through blood streaming from the faces of nearby victims, and somehow, it just makes sense.

Cannon Films clearly didn’t know what it had signed on for. Lifeforce flopped, with reviews generally negative or worse (although Gene Siskel liked it). But aided through hindsight and extended editions, Lifeforce is a geek classic. Certainly no one involved phoned it in; Hooper’s direction (never better) captures the style and dry wit of the classic Hammer Quatermass films (well worth checking out), the score by Henry Mancini (!) is appropriately quirky and bombastic, and John Dykstra’s (Star Wars) special effects are superb — the desiccated zombie design is wonderful, and the alien spacecraft is a thing of beauty. No CGI here, just craft and skill.

And the cast! Railsback is fittingly hammy as the token American hero, and the rest of the talent is a who’s who of classic British faces, including Patrick Stewart, who may well be a Highlander considering he hasn’t aged a day in almost three decades. Lifeforce ain’t particularly scary, although it has a share of “Boo!” moments. But when you add up its elements — vampires, zombies, mad scientists, astronauts, sex, spaceships, psychics, aliens, Lovecraftian undertones — you have one utterly sui generis film. —Corey Redekop

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