31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 17: Lifeforce

Day 17: Lifeforce (1985), dir. by Tobe Hooper

Streaming Availability: Rental

The only thing anybody remembers about Lifeforce is Mathilda May as a Space Vampire Girl walking buck and indeed butt naked around London. She nudely struts in the full monty in her birthday suit bare, completely exposed, stripped, starkers, disrobed, undressed, and in the altogether. Let your monocles pop, your bowties spin, your socks get knocked off, and your wigs fly into the air as you double-take to the camera with eyes bigger than dinner plates and anime blood pouring out of your nose.

With a premise that utterly ridiculous, it is amazing how dry Lifeforce is. Lifeforce almost never winks at the audiences, and it looks awkward the few times it tries. It’s full of serious men in serious suits, very seriously discussing the matter of national security for Her Majesty’s government.  This movie is an adaptation of a book called The Space Vampires, it should be tongue-in-cheek. Lifeforce, instead, is this retro Fifties SciFi pastiche. Not since Night of the Lepus, a movie about giant adorable bunny rabbits attacking a town, has a horror movie’s grave tone been more a mismatch for its bonkers material. 

Sure, the serious men will stammer something like “She was the most overwhelmingly feminine presence I have ever encountered”. Sometimes security guards will nearly fall over in their chairs. But wow is this movie nowhere near bawdy enough for the material. Lifeforce was considerably dryer than I remembered this watch, and that is because I chose the nearly director's cut version. The theatrical version is fifteen minutes shorter and fifteen minutes better.

It is worth noting that Mathilda May’s nudist jaunt is only a few minutes of Lifeforce. It might be all you remember, but most of the film is about her disappeared, becoming a psychic body snatcher traveling from mind to mind, just in case Naked Space Vampires are not weird enough for you. This becomes occasionally amazing, such as the scene where the Space Girl possesses Dr. Armstrong (Patrick Stewart). Through Stewart’s body, she has a psycho-sexual confrontation with our protagonist, ending with our lead locking lips with Picard. (Dr. Armstrong later will have all his flesh sucked out his face, forming a kind of blood golem in the Space Girl’s shape in a truly amazing scene..)

Again though, Lifeforce is weirdly nonplussed about all this. How is it that Lifeforce’s most stiff organ is its upper lip?

Luckily for me, I do like Fifties SciFi movies, so Lifeforce is not boring. If you loved say, Quatermass and the Pit, this movie does have a similar vibe. Lifeforce spend far too much time in boardrooms until it ends on a fiery apocalypse of psychic alien chaos in London just like in Quatermass. The Prime Minister eats his secretary and we're off to the races to truly weird stuff. When Lifeforce opens a huge orchestra playing over a deep space mission to Haley’s Comet, complete with cornball narration, I am here for it.

The plot is surreal in a way that really only Silver Age SciFi ever could achieve. The Space Girl is a member of a bat-like vampire race living in the comet, who occasionally come to Earth to suck out our energy. The leader of the mission, Colonel Carlson (Steve Railsback) is trapped in a psychic hold together with the Space Girl, who is not actually a woman at all, bur rather an energy being sculpting herself to be his perfect pin-up fantasy. Carlson takes the Space Girl and two naked male vampires back to Earth, only for his space shuttle to turn into a celestial Demeter from the novel Dracula, with every crewmember dying mysteriously on the way home.

Also, those male vampires? Never hang dong on camera. (Crowd boos.)

Finding nothing but a ghost spaceship, the British government brings the naked bodies back to London. This leads the Girl to come to life, sucking bodies down to emaciated corpses (which come back to life in astonishing puppetry effects). She very nakedly escapes, spreading a fangless energy-sucking vampiric plague across England. Our heroes, including British secret service member Colonel Caine (Peter Firth), and the local Van Helsing, Dr. Hans Fallada (Frank Finlay) try to stop the plague before it overtakes us all. This all leads to a MCU-ass giant blue light in the sky pouring out of St. Paul’s Cathedral, as the aliens try to take home a rich harvest of every soul in London.

The problem for me is that again, none of these heroes are characters. A lot of Eighties SciFi was retro, and indeed, the decade was obsessed with the an imagined Fifties, considered Reagan and how they let the Beach Boys have a number one hit in 1988. But usually when the Eighties cinema was remaking the Fifties, it was not just to apply new special effects technology onto old corny stories but also to update the drama. One of the classic examples is The Thing from Another World. That starts as a goofy 1951 movie about professional men dealing with a big clumsy spaceman, and it becomes John Carpenter’s The Thing, where a gang of blue collar misfits struggles to survive the most horrible alien nightmares you could ever imagine and also their own paranoia. Lifeforce adds nudity (so much nudity) and great gore effects to a Fifties script, but misses the part where audiences want to see, you know, relatable drama. 

It’s interesting how flawed, yet wonderfully wacky Lifeforce is, considering it should have been an easy hit. It is directed by Tobe Hooper, who we last saw kicking ass in Salem’s Lot. It was written by Dan O’Bannon, whose previous credits include Alien. So you have somebody who made a great vampire movie and a guy who wrote a great space SciFi movie, and somehow their space vampire movie is sterile and strange in often unpleasant ways. I don’t think of either of these guys as dreadfully serious. O’Bannon would continue his nudism fetish with the extremely silly Return of the Living Dead. Hooper would go on to make The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, which has a chainsaw fight in a theme park volcano. Maybe these two Americans were trying to be more British than the British. 

Still, between the screaming mummies and thoroughly bonkers decisions, Lifeforce is not a failure. Nobody has made a better naked space vampire psychic virus apocalypse movie yet. I’ve been fascinated by Lifeforce for decades. Certainly not an easy movie to forget.

Next Time! Sadly, people wear clothes this time. But can a retro-flavored vampire movie be done with a little more personality? Welcome to Fright Night.