LIFEFORCE (1985) - By the mid '80s, Cannon Films was looking to move away from low-budget, disposable fare like HOSPITAL MASSACRE (1981) and BREAKIN' 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO (1984). Owners Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus had loftier ambitions: They wanted a blockbuster; a big-budget smash that they could call their own. To this end, they signed director Tobe Hooper to a three-picture deal and turned him loose with $25,000,000 and free reign to create the movie he wanted. Working with a stellar, mostly British cast (save token American star Steve Railsback, who apparently misplaced his charisma at Heathrow; and startlingly uninhibited French goddess Mathilda May); legendary composer Henry Mancini; and a screenplay co-written by the man who wrote ALIEN (1979), Hooper unleashed a wonderfully unwieldy miasma of genres. What starts out as a science fiction mystery gradually morphs into full blown, zombie apocalypse horror - played with square-jawed seriousness by all involved. Unfortunately, this film got lost among that years' heavy-hitters like BACK TO THE FUTURE and the second RAMBO film, and earned back less than half its budget. Cannon Films ceased operations in 1994, but their ambitious attempt to stand amongst the major studios keeps giving back to its growing cult audience via home video. Sometimes success takes a few decades.
Lifeforce is the best Dracula from Space movie I’ve ever seen. I haven’t seen that many, mind you, and Vampirella and Dracula 3000 sure as shit didn’t set that particular bar especially high; on the other hand, Lifeforce is better-looking than many sci-fi/fantasy films released as recently as this the year of Our Lord 2022, vis-a-vis practical, mechanical special effects versus CGI and motion capture visual effects (it doesn’t hurt Lifeforce either that there’s generous full-frontal female nudity courtesy of French uber-babe Mathilda May).
The script is not without its share of silliness (consider this piece of dialogue: "Sir, we've found a naked girl in Hyde park. The body is in an indescribable condition" — but you just kind of described it, didn’t you? I mean, "a naked girl" is a reasonably specific description), but the movie’s weak spot lies in a deliberate choice: comparing the plot’s events to the "vampires of legend," which the film’s quasi-Van Helsing eventually concludes "came from creatures such as these. Perhaps even from these very creatures."
Somehow it never occurs to Dr. Fallada (Frank Finlay) to wonder, if "these very creatures" needed an astronaut to bring them to Earth in his space shuttle, how the "vampires of legend" arrived in our planet the first time around. How the good doctor correctly guessed that a "leaded metal shaft, penetrating not through the heart, but through the energy center two inches below the heart [how he knows so much about the creatures’ anatomy is anybody’s guess, considering the things human form is but a disguise]. Not steel, but leaded iron" (he calls this the "old way," but wouldn’t that be a wooden stake through the heart?) would prove fatal to the aliens is another secret I’m afraid he takes to his grave. There is also some mumbo-jumbo about how "The process of conversion
releases a life energy" that "can be collected ... The male vampire's collecting life energy. But he has to send it through her to get it up to the collector" and some other such nonsense.
The filmmakers should have treated the word "vampire" as anathema, and avoid any and all direct references to it. Take for instance the aforementioned space shuttle, which anyone familiar with Bram Stoker will identify as an allusion to the Demeter; this is a clever little touch, but it won’t impede any viewer’s enjoyment of the film if the parallelism escapes them.
My point is that you don’t have to be the boy who cried vampire when the thought is already in pretty much everybody’s mind. There are shades of other works here (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead, Solaris, and even Ghostbusters), but the movie doesn’t feel the need to overtly draw attention to them — so why the hard-on for vampires? Other than that, Lifeforce is a satisfying minor diversion for fans of old-school horror.
