I watch a lot of review videos on YouTube devoted to, shall we say, less mainstream cinema. More than one of them have looked into Lifeforce, produced by the 80s era schlock cinema pair of Golan and Globus. They had been hoping to get more into A-list moviemaking and hired Tobe Hooper, director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist, to a three picture deal. Giving Hooper a big budget and a source novel about a space vampire the result was, well, something of a huge expensive flop when it came out but has since gone on to have a considerable cult following.
A movie like Lifeforce was probably never going to be better than a cult favorite, but I was curious enough to check it out anyway.
A joint team of American and British astronauts are flying a space shuttle into Haley’s Comet’s tail to do some scientific research and discover a large craft of some kind. After a group of the astronauts, led by Col. Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback), fly inside to look around, they discover hordes of dead, bat-like humanoids and a trio of very human-looking beings in what looks like suspended animation tubes. The three, two men and a woman, are naked and appear to be alive. The astronauts take those three back to the shuttle and that’s when the crazy stuff starts to happen. Not long after, a second shuttle is launched to rescue the first, and Carlsen is the only astronaut on the original shuttle left alive. The others have been reduced to dried-out husks.
And from there, it gets weirder. The lone female alien (French actress Mathilda May) wakes up, drains the life from a guard in the lab she was being held in, overpowers a few more, and walks off into the night. Soon enough, the two male aliens likewise wake up and disappear, the dried-out husks aren’t as dead as they appear unless they can’t feed off other people’s lifeforces, and the aliens can possess bodies, with only Col. Carlsen able to find the “space girl” as she’s listed in the closing credits due to a psychic link of some kind. And if Carlsen and his friend, British officer Col. Colin Caine (Peter Firth), can’t find the space girl soon, all of London might be transformed into these undead monsters because, apparently, the vampire legend may have been based on these aliens.
Summarizing this movie in brief is difficult because, well, a lot crazy happens. This is a movie where a character played by Patrick Stewart is not only possessed by May’s space vampire, but at some point all the blood drains out of him to assume her appearance before splashing away from Carlsen and Craine to escape. It’s not that the plot doesn’t make sense. It does. It’s just that so much of what happens is so bonkers, enough so that Colin Wilson, author of the novel the movie was based on was, well, let’s just say less than pleased with the end result. May spends most of the movie if not wearing nothing than soon after she appears getting undressed. The Prime Minister of Great Britain got changed into one of the alien’s minor minions at one point and drains his secretary. The aforementioned Stewart got his first movie kiss, only it was from Railsback. It’s that kind of crazy.
Still, it’s clear that Golan and Globus swung for the fences with this one. The cast may be made up of mostly lesser known actors (May was a newcomer who got the part, despite speaking no English at the time, because too many other actresses refused to do the movie due to, shall we say, the character’s wardrobe), but behind the scenes was a different story. Besides Hooper, there was Henry Mancini writing the score, the screenplay was co-written by Alien writer Dan O’ Bannon, and the special effects–which are still pretty cool for the time–came from John Dykstra, one of the men responsible for Star Wars‘s groundbreaking effects shots. That’s actually a rather impressive bunch.
True, the movie maybe doesn’t hold together as well as it could, but there’s a reason movies like this become cult hits. They’re too weird and sometimes wonderful to be a mainstream success while still bringing in the right number of loyal fans who love it because it’s so weird. I wouldn’t say I am a huge fan of this one, but I did enjoy it and I could easily see why others do too.
Grade: B-
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