n Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce (1985), the government captures a beautiful alien woman and stores her, dramatically if unnecessarily naked, in a glass case for experimental and possibly aesthetic purposes. Unfortunately for humanity, she wakes up and begins sucking the blood out of everyone in sight, leaving a trail of dusty corpses. Along the way she mesmerizes a hapless male and sets about trying to remake Earth as an alien paradise via a little creative crossbreeding. Later, Patrick "Jean-Luc Picard" Stewart shows up and disintegrates into goo, but that's beside the point.
Kimera doesn't boast the presence of a blood-spouting Patrick Stewart, but otherwise it's a dizzying dollop of deja vu, with a few distinguishing touches. For instance, in this case, the naked alien beauty isn't really female, despite the drooling response it gets from men. It's actually an androgynous breeder, capable of producing eggs or sperm--whichever best furthers the continuance of its nearly-sterile species.
More importantly, Kimera skips over Lifeforce's standard monster-movie tone and makes a few random stabs at psychological and political horror. Where the Lifeforce alien was a straightforward, generic rampaging space vampire, Kimera has a secret past with a hint of real pathos. And while the Lifeforce alien's male companions got scragged early on, Kimera's the center of a rabid war between her vampiric kin, who engage in virtuoso martial arts battles over whether she should be allowed to breed the human race out of existence.
It's great, but where's the rest?
Ludicrous premise and generally sterile animation aside, Kimera really isn't bad. It's mostly frustrating, because the most unique and stylish elements of the story are the ones given the least room to breathe. Kimera's lost personality, her species' highly unusual biology, her strange family relationship, and intimations of a millennia-long effort at diplomatic relations between vampires and humans are all given lip service but no resolution. Fragments of fascinating mini-stories are flung at the audience by the shovelful, then immediately pushed aside in a welter of eye-popping, limb-severing gore, all set to familiar classical music.
Meanwhile, the bulk of the screen time goes to Kimera's callow cereal-salesman paramour, who squanders it in gaping, screaming or bleeding. Kimera's brother, a black-haired, caped Goth-vamp, is more captivating, mostly since he's always in motion. His fight choreography is one of the few elements in this too-short film that never becomes disappointing--he and his slimy antagonists pirouette through three-dimensional worldscapes in a wildly kinetic blur that almost makes up for the otherwise staid images.
Kimera is a study in dissonant combinations: pleasant tunes underscoring grotesque images, captivating creativity fleshing out flaccid cliches, thrill-ride animation drizzled over dullness. It's a shaky execution of what seems like a series of really inspired ideas, capable of forming the backbone of a truly inspired movie.
Kimera isn't quite it. But then again, Lifeforce definitely wasn't quite it either.
