Did I watch a movie based on a book called "Space Vampires"? Yes. Did I watch a movie based on a screenshot of a Tumblr post saying that a woman walks around topless and Jean Luc Picard kisses another man? Yes. Am I disappointed? Yes, but also no.
This movie waffles between absolutely boring and extremely dogshit looking science fiction where an alien spaceship is discovered inside of a weirdly green tinted Halley's Comet and a thriller about hunting down a body stealing alien vampire, with a third act that drastically swerves into a zombie apocalypse. Just when I think I'm bored, the movie pulls out some creepy fucking animatronic zombie or blood monster that gets me excited.
The plot is utter nonsense. A spaceship that has gravity because it goes fast (a needless explanation that gets ignored when they slow down and the computer screen literally says the gravity is off but they still clearly have it) brings back three human looking alien vampires, and they start terrorizing Earth. There's a fairly large cast of characters, almost none of whom are actually important. It takes a pretty good while for the actual protagonists to show up. Colonel Carlsen is a member of the Churchill spacecraft and finds the vampires, but is out of the movie for a good ten or twenty minutes. Colonel Caine comes in around half an hour. It takes about twenty minutes for the damned movie to even get started.
Caine is played by Peter Firth, and his primary personality trait is that he's stoic. He has no meaningful backstory or motivation other than that it's his job. He's also limited by the fact that he's acting alongside Steven Railsback, who acts his fucking heart out. If Bohemian Rhapsody could get an award for editing simply for having the most editing, Steven Railsback deserved some kind of award for doing the most acting. This man acts the same way that I sing: Terribly, but that isn't going to stop him. Every single moment he's on screen he somehow looks both terrified and angry. At one point he grabs a woman and psychically dominates her and tells Caine and whatever the third guy's name is that it's okay, she's a masochist and she wants him to hurt her. He slaps her, uses his psychic powers to pry into her mind, and rips the back of her dress open to reveal scars from when she had sex with a random man. There IS a scene where he kisses Patrick Stewart, who keeps flickering between himself and the space vampire (who is credited as Space Girl). It is an unfulfilling kiss that doesn't actually get shown on screen despite what the random screenshot told me. But the entire time leading up to it is absolute madness. Railsback acts his ass off, terrified and screaming as he's practically forced to lean in to peck the lips of a comatose Patrick Stewart while the voice of a vampire draws him in. It is absolutely fucking ridiculous and I couldn't help but laugh.
So much of this movie is like that. It's overblown and the characters are treating it serious, but the acting and the script are complete dogshit. I only enjoyed myself for about half the runtime of this movie in total, and I don't think that I was enjoying it the way the movie wanted me to. It weaves its way from one genre to the other—science fiction, military, thriller, fucking zombie apocalypse—with all the grace of a cow playing checkers. There are full two sex scenes and a woman with really gorgeous breasts and an amazing full eighties bush walks around topless in multiple scenes and it is somehow a flaccid and unsexy movie. Is this what people jerked off to before outlandish hentai and niche streaming internet porn? Except for the one scene of vampire sex in a gothic dreamscape, this movie is about as erotic as a Sears catalogue. I do appreciate that they gave the desiccated husk perfect tits and a bush, though.
For vampire movies, one of the big draws is the rules of the vampire and how they work. This does not really care about that. The male vampires harvest souls, somehow, by just sort of standing around, and then they transfer it to the female vampire, somehow, despite the fact that she doesn't seem to need their help, and she transmits it back to the spaceship of dead space vampires. They were maybe making new baby vampires? There's an entire section that just exists to get the main characters out of the city so that while they're away the zombie apocalypse can happen. Oh, also, at the end the vampire woman just tells Carlsen that he's always been a vampire alien and that's just not explore and goes nowhere and doesn't even make sense???
This is a terrible movie. Do I regret watching it? no. It's the best movie where Patrick Stewart dies as all the blood goes rushing out of his body and turns into the figure of a naked woman that I've ever seen.