RETRO REVIEW: LIFEFORCE ☆☆☆
By Albert Lanier
A big budget sci-fi horror film from a low budget studio known for making forgettable features with shoestring funding, Lifeforce was a risky film both creatively and financially at the time of its release but is an overlooked and underappreciated small gem of 1980s horror.
Cannon Films, a small film company known for producing low grade B movies like The Delta Force with Chuck Norris and also trying its hand at releasing more acclaimed films like 52 Pick Up and Runaway Train signed director Tobe Hooper to a deal to make a couple of films for the firm.
Hooper- known for his pioneering work on the now legendary Texas Chainsaw Massacre- directed Lifeforce as part of this deal with Cannon.
The film's story begins with the joint American/British mission on the Space Shuttle Churchill under the command of an American astronaut, Colonel Tom Carlson ( Steve Railsback).
The Churchill comes across an enormous, bizarrely shaped craft stretching for a number of miles.
The crew opt to don their space suits and head into space and then inside of this craft to examine what lies within its interior.
Inside the immense ship, they find transparent, glass coffins containing what appear to be the nude bodies of two human men and one humanoid woman.
The action will shift to Earth where the Churchill has crash landed with the coffins of the three individuals still in good shape.
The individuals are brought to the European Space Centre in the UK. The female ( Mathilda May) is placed on a table in a examining room.
A guard however allows his curiosity to get the better of him and enters the room. Admittedly this is a beautiful woman lying horizontally covered on a table and obviously the guard couldn't resist.
Barely touching her, the guard wakes up the lady who has ditched the sheet covering her and now- fully naked -faces this startled man. She removes this guard’s glass face mask and then kisses him.
This is no romantic kiss, no indication of love or just. What this supposed woman is doing is transferring this individual's energy, his essence, his lifeforce if you will.
What remains is a horrifying skeletal husk of a man, basically a person soon to be a corpse. It is clear this is no mere woman but an alien in human form that can literally suck the life of anyone it comes across.
As if that isn't bad enough, this alien woman is now roaming the facility naked and with her superior power dispatches guards easily, destroys a row of windows and calmly walks out of the Space Centre.
Col Carlson has been found in an escape pod recovered by authorities in the UK. He winds up being interviewed by Dr Hans Fallada (Frank Finlay) at the Space Centre as well as special forces Intelligence agent Colin Caine ( Peter Firth) now tasked on this case.
Carlson tells the men that they brought the coffins on board the Churchill but that the alien individuals ended up killing the crew and opted to spare him. Carlson tried to set the Shuttle on fire before jettisoning off in the escape pod but this last ditch act ended up not working as he planned.
With this energy sucking, life obliterating creature on the loose, Carlson joins forces with Caine to hunt down and try to slay this alien before she can wreak total havoc on Great Britain and possibly in other parts of the globe.
It is best to stop here for a film like Lifeforce needs not to have too many plot points stated else lots of foreknowledge would ruin the enjoyment of the movie.
Lifeforce was made on a budget of over $20 million and the money was well spent. The film is nicely photographed and has solid special effects.
Mathilda May gives the film's best performance as the Alien Creature ( she is credited in the film's titles as “Space Girl” terrible credit that makes her sound like an extra instead of an actress in an integral part in the film).
Though May, a French ballerina and dancer who had no interest in acting but was encouraged by an agent to audition for the part in Lifeforce, spends the majority of her time nude in this film and has her few lines dubbed by another actress, she nonetheless does a fine job taking what could easily be an exploitative and one dimensional part and imbuing it with both curiosity and malevolence.
In fact, what I think many film reviewers and critics missed about Lifeforce is that the movie is fundamentally not simply a vampire film with an interstellar female vampire but a movie that shifts the power imbalance from male to female .
What the filmmakers achieve is a look at the power of women, of the feminine mystique which is a theme that often pops up in female vampire films and demonstrate it physically in its naked state.
Thus a literally nude woman doesn't make men weak and helpless with her gorgeous figure, her body, her beauty but with her life draining powers. It's an intriguing package displayed here thematically and optically in Lifeforce: The duality of fatal beauty.
Steve Railsback is actually well cast as Colonel Carlson. His rugged looks work to his advantage as does his sweaty, terrified, fear laced persona. Railsback is convincing as a man seduced by a powerful alien creature.
Peter Firth is effective as the straightforward, by the numbers agent Colin Caine. He brings an unalloyed toughness and simple heroism to the part which plays quite well.
Frank Finlay does solid veteran work as Dr Fellada and future Star Trek icon Patrick Stewart has an intriguing role here as a Dr Armstrong.
Written by Dan O Bannon who wrote the classic Alien in 1979 and Dan Jakoby who previously Co- wrote the helicopter drama Blue Thunder in 1983, Lifeforce is adaptation of author Colin Wilson's novel “Space Vampires”.
Lifeforce ended up being financially unsuccessful as it was unable to recoup its budget and break even at the time of its release in 1985.
Though it's become a bit of a cult film in later years, Lifeforce was simply too off kilter, too different a horror movie to fit neatly in the cookie cutter expectations of movie marketing and film reviewers.
As it stands, it's a slightly daring film that merges aspects of vampiric horror with a sci- fi apocalyptic nightmare creating a hybrid feature well worth viewing.
Albert Lanier is a former film reviewer.