“She’s destroyed worlds!”

Whether you think Lifeforce is great depends a lot on your criteria for enjoying movies. It has to be said that Lifeforce is a big, stupid film - full of pointless, spectacular deaths, pointless, spectacular nudity and yes, pointless, spectacular explosions. It was never going to win the Best Picture Oscar, but who cares?

The space shuttle Churchill is approaching a massive alien spaceship hidden in the tail of Halley’s Comet. The astronauts decamp using rocket packs and fly through the alien ship, finding thousands of dead giant bats floating around inside... but that's not all...

Three "perfectly preserved" naked humans (one girl, two blokes) are in the centre of the craft, housed inside giant crystals. As the astronauts make plans to bring them back with them, the alien ship starts to change, and one of the crew members starts mumbling to himself, "something's happening to me.... what's wrong?"

Before you can say "loads, probably", the stricken Churchill has drifted back into Earth's gravitational pull, and space shuttle Columbia is sent up to find out why they're not answering transmissions. The ship has been burned out, with no-one alive - but the naked aliens are still there, untouched by the flames...

Back on Earth in a top secret military establishment, the girl wastes no time in waking up, sucking the life out of a passing chap, and leaving the building in spectacular window-busting style. The is despite the best efforts of the security team, who use every sandwich at their disposal to change her mind ("Come to daddy," leers one ill-fated security guard).

Call for Colonel Kane of the SAS, a bubble permed tough guy in a turtleneck sweater and raincoat ("That's not for publication" he barks at a pressman of his arrival). He meets up with Frank Finlay's doctor (who happens to be an expert on life after death) and they start piecing together the mystery of the killer naked woman, on the way discovering that her dessicated victims have the rather unfortunate habit of waking up after two hours and sucking the life out of the nearest living person ("I had an idea it could be passed on," says Finlay. "I wouldn't be surprised if we were dealing with a pattern here..."). The other two aliens have also woken up, and shown themselves to be impervious to bullets and grenades... oh-oh...

Over in Texas, the Churchill's escape pod has landed, containing one survivor, Colonel Tom Carlson, who immediately starts babbling on about how he "couldn't expose the world to what we brought back with us... I was determined to destroy them all!"

"Part of me didn't want to leave... she killed all my friends and I still didn't want to leave. Leaving her was the hardest thing I ever did."

Col Carlson has got a mental link with the female vampire for some reason, so they decide to use him to track her down and eventually find that she's now swapped bodies and is sharing a lift with a farmer with his own Volvo. Cue entertaining rant by a sweaty Carlson: "She's... pulling... up... her skirt..." etc.

Then, without any kind of warning at all, we suddenly find that there are zombies - zombies, I tell you - in the shadows of Big Ben (symbolising the fact that the undead have taken over the capital). Meanwhile, the girl has made her way to Thurlstone, an asylum for the criminally insane in Yorkshire, which is run by Dr Armstong (Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart). They find her, and Carlson slaps her about a bit, then kisses her, but the alien has long since vacated her body.

They realise that the girl was last close to Jeffrey Sykes, a child murderer, and focus of their space vampire hunt switches to him.

Keeping up? It doesn't matter really. The vampire is not actually in Sykes' body, and everyone jumps to the conclusion that she's actually in Armstong's. The poor bloke gets beaten up, drugged by his own staff and piled into the back of the helicopter, Carlson realising that she's been luring him away from the capital, where all hell is breaking loose...

Anyone who's seen Hammer's Quatermass And The Pit can guess what's coming next, as a welter of London landmarks are destroyed by cannibalistic zombies in an orgy of 80s practical light effects. The film ends with more nudity, some spectacular chases and much head exploding pyrotechnics.

If you want huge soul-collecting alien spaceships, zombie prime ministers and London under NATO martial law, track down Lifeforce, switch off your brain and enjoy.

"She's not a woman, she'll destroy you!"

"She's destroyed worlds..."