Lifeforce (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1985)
Colin Wilson had one of the odder careers of any postwar British writer. A working class autodidact, he came to prominence at the age of 24 with a popular work of nonfiction, The Outsider, a critical study of alienation in literature. He would soon become obsessed with the occult and the esoteric, writing literally dozens of books on the subject in addition to true crime, horror, and science fiction, including the 1976 novel The Space Vampires, which served as the basis for Lifeforce a decade later.
A joint British-American mission to study Halley’s Comet encounters an extraterrestrial craft hidden in its coma [1]. The astronauts investigate, finding strange aliens corpses and more unusual still two seemingly human men and one women in suspended animation. They take them aboard their ship. One month later, the ship is derelict in orbit around Earth. Its escape pod and mission commander Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback) are missing, its crew dead. The mysterious beings are taken to London for study.
At the lab where they are taken, the woman awakens, drains the life out of a security guard, and escapes the facility. The two men similarly wake, revealing that not only can they drain energy out of human beings, they can move from body to body and their dessicated victims become zombies who must feed hourly or collapse into dust. Commander Carlsen is discovered and is psychically linked to the female alien. Together with Colonel Colin Caine of the SAS (Peter Firth), they must find her before they overtake the planet.
Lifeforce was a Golan-Globus production released by the Cannon Group. Normally this would mean a film would be low budget schlock, but Lifeforce was quite an anomaly for them. They secured director Tobe Hooper for a three picture deal off the success of Poltergeist. The script was co-written by Dan O’Bannon, best known for Alien. The budget was a ludicrous 25 million dollars. The cast that they initially tried to get was overqualified. For instance, Sir John Gielgud was to psychiatrist Dr. Armstrong before realizing that he’s Sir John fucking Gielgud and had other options in life. They instead settled on a lesser known Shakespearean actor named Patrick Stewart for the role [2]. The film ran out of money, was delivered weeks late to the studio, was mercilessly edited by the distributors, and didn’t even make back half its production costs.
Oh, and there’s of course the issue I’ve been avoiding discussing: the aliens are nude. The female alien, known in the script creatively as Space Girl, is likely the only reason this film has had any lingering presence in pop culture. The creatures drain the life force out of their victims using their mouths. There’s an aggressive sexuality to the film that’s oddly coupled with a level of gravitas entirely unwarranted for something that was originally titled The Space Vampires.
Still, it’s kind of a decent film, perhaps the third or fourth best in Tobe Hooper’s career. It’s overserious for something so ridiculous, its characters don’t have personalities, and it’s possibly a two hour long film built around ten minutes of nudity, but you know what? It’s also the best space vampire movie ever made.
Sorry, Mario Bava.
[1] Get ready for some pedantry. We are told two facts. One: the HMS Churchill is traveling at a fast enough speed that it simulates Earth gravity. Two: Halley’s Comet is near enough to Earth to be visible. This suggests a couple of possibilities. The first is that there was some rapid technological development that made it possible to reach the comet in 1986. The second is that it’s 2061 when the comet would next be in the solar system, and Earth has been culturally stagnant for decades. Either way, not terribly realistic, space vampire movie!
[2] Who would have his first on-screen kiss with Steve Railsback while possessed by the female alien. It’s a shame that the makeout session between his Karla and Alec Guinness’s George Smiley was cut for the 1979 BBC adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
October 16, 2018
oliveresque 