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In a work of many allusions, the most valuable is surely the most abstruse: Antonioni's notion in Identificazione di una Donna of womanly mystery as an image out of sci-fi hokum. Tobe Hooper picks it up with a weightlessly mobile, rapidly dissolving camera, gliding into the tail of Halley's Comet to find the alluring alien (Mathilda May) bare amid petrified gargoyles in the belly of a spaceship. She awakens on the institute's autopsy table, her smile beckons a nearby medic and her kiss leaves a smoldering carcass, thus "the most overwhelmingly feminine presence I've ever encountered." Immemorial succubi, destroyers of worlds whose victims become ghouls sucking their own share of humanity's lifeforce. The jumpy American astronaut (Steve Railsback) drops by to save the world and reconnect with the demon of his dreams. "She was calling me. Her power was... spiritual." Delectable pandemonium to honor Breton's fiat: "La beauté convulsive sera érotique-voilée, explosante-fixe, magique-circonstancielle ou ne sera pas." Bava's Terrore nello Spazio (flashes of red and blue in steel corridors) and Haskin's War of the Worlds (Big Ben against a nocturnal sky lit by the green slash of the comet), mainly however the homage is to British genre reaching back to MacDonald's Devil Girl from Mars. Much of the drollness is in the casting—wispy Peter Firth representing military might, Frank Finlay as the relativist scientist ("I mean, in a sense we're all vampires"), plus Patrick Stewart and Michael Gothard adding to Hooper's surrealism. "London on the brink of the worst devastation since the blitz" (cf. Baker's Quatermass and the Pit), a priapic intergalactic umbrella vacuuming up souls while Railsback and May enact their Liebestod in St. Paul's Cathedral. "Rather a nice touch, don't you think?" Glazer has a more analytical view in Under the Skin. With Nicholas Ball, Aubrey Morris, and Nancy Paul.
--- Fernando F. Croce |