‘Lifeforce’ or — An Unhinged, Coke-Fueled Masterpiece?
I remember when Tobe Hooper’s ‘Lifeforce’ (1985) was released back in 1985, coming and going at the cinemas like a sub-atomic particle briefly flashing into existence. Yet before it disappeared forever my friend Paul caught it at the Bearsden Rio just outside Glasgow.
“It’s pretty cool,” he told me. “It’s about space vampires and it’s got a naked woman walking around in it.”
And that’s all I knew about ‘Lifeforce’ — it had a naked woman walking around in it. It didn’t sound terribly cool, in fact it sounded awful (space vampires?!), even taking into account the naked woman walking around in it. So when I watched it on video a couple of years later my expectations were somewhat low.
“What the fuck is this?!” were certainly words that passed through my mind but two things were absolutely undeniable — firstly, technically it was extremely well made; secondly, it was as far from boring as you could possibly get.
‘Lifeforce’ starts conventionally enough as a straight ahead sci-fi adventure; a space shuttle approaches a mysterious craft hiding in the tail of Halley’s Comet where three naked humanoids are discovered lying in crystal coffins. Yet, from there on, the film gleefully and violently lurches into everything from horror then sexploitation, alien invasion, infection outbreak, Gothic vampire, then mind possession, identity swap, body horror, zombie holocaust, Ghostbusters-esque spirits-on-the-loose and all this by way of Quatermass before climaxing as a love story. It’s like a Hammer Horror film on steroids, or possibly even harder stimulants. As I said, this film isn’t boring… and I haven’t even mentioned the exploding, desiccated un-dead bodies of which there are, thankfully, many.
To pull all this off Canon Films gave director Tobe Hooper a tonne of creative freedom and even more money (this movie was not cheap and it’s all up there on the screen) and you can palpably feel Hooper grabbing this opportunity by the throat and going for broke; after all, you’ve just been given over $20,000,000, a world-class crew and total creative freedom to make a movie about space vampires so you’re not going to waste that chance in the slightest, are you? Hooper goes all in and, or me, it pays off big time.
Not that ‘Lifeforce’ is perfect (or is it?) with Steve Railsback delivering a few too many exposition dumps which can stop the film dead for a minute or two, combined with the fact that none of the characters here are in any way particularly likeable with Peter Firth’s SAS Colonel coming across as an arrogant asshole and explicit sexual deviant. Fortunately the overall pacing of the movie is strong and consistent, and culminating in a final forty minutes which have to be seen to be believed with Hooper ramping up the insanity and spectacle to giddying levels to an extent I’m struggling to of another example that matches it.
‘Lifeforce’ has to be accepted as a movie with an inherently stupid and derivative central premise but it is also these factors which make it work and, amazingly, give it it’s own unique feel — I can’t think of another movie like ‘Lifeforce’ even though I can think of fifteen just like it, but nothing quite the same. It’s made by a dream-team of filmmakers — directed by Tobe Hooper, co-written by Dan O’Bannon, effects by John Dykstra, music by Henry Mancini and one of the best technical crews of the day. If this movie didn’t exist but we knew that it could’ve then we would be lamenting its loss.
I adore ‘Lifeforce’. I love its invention, its energy. its imagination, its refusal to even acknowledge what it means to show restraint because who the hell wants restraint in a space vampire movie anyway? I love how idiosyncratic it is and that that feeling I had watching it thirty years ago thinking there was nothing else quite like it hasn’t change since. All these years later and there is still nothing quite like ‘Lifeforce’ and, for that, it should be cherished, its little, shrieking, desiccated, exploding body held close to our hearts.
