Space Vampires--er, I mean Lifeforce--shoots its sci-fi wad early with a long, lavishly-rendered opening sequence in which the crew of the English space shuttle Churchill investigates a 150-mile-long, needle-shaped spaceship concealed in the halo around Halley's Comet. The VFX-heavy space exploration scenes channel similar material from Alien, except with a much more colourful production design that's strongly suggestive of reproductive organs--one shot sees the Churchill's astronauts floating through a long, positively vaginal antechamber as one of them deadpans, "I almost have a feeling I've been here before." Once they reach the heart of the spaceship, the astronauts encounter hundreds of desiccated, bat-like corpses suspended in zero gravity. Pressing further inward (and forward through an alien sphincter), the crew finds a handful of human-size glass chambers holding three nude figures in apparent repose: two men, genitals obscured, and one woman, body fully visible. And if you remember only one thing about Lifeforce, odds are you remember this.
Hooper was good at haunted-house yarns--horror stories built around insular, claustrophobic spaces where the rules of the outside world didn't apply. Think of the nightmarish homestead in Texas Chain Saw, with its banal dining room doubling as torture chamber, or the titular house of horrors in the wry, self-reflexive The Funhouse, itself a kind of family home. The alien spaceship here is an obvious haunted-house surrogate, as is the lab back on Earth where the space vampires first escape captivity. Hooper does a decent job establishing those locations, and I wish that Lifeforce had good reasons to spend more time there. Once the canvas expands to include all of London, succumbing to unremarkable end-times mayhem, the film's initially spooky erotic focus is diffused.
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Even if you give it credit for being a loose fable of desire and sexual role-playing, Lifeforce is never especially sexy, although a gothic-tinged dream tryst set, maybe, in a cemetery and lit with flashes of red and purple light gets part of the way there, and I'm thankful for it. In another scene, Carlsen tracks down a woman whom he believes is inhabited by the Space Girl. He comes on strong, like an aggressive private dick from a 1940s film noir, slapping her around and growling, "Despite appearances, this woman is a masochist--an extreme masochist." Caine settles in to watch and declares himself "a natural voyeur." The moment comes apropos of nothing--if there's an intended subtext, it's undeveloped and wasn't going to make sense to a mainstream genre audience anyway. And some of the most daring moments, including a same-sex smooch between Railsback and Stewart, were elided for the film's U.S. release. Speaking of elisions, we see plenty of Mathilda May, but what of the two buff male humanoids who accompanied her, their genitalia carefully obscured in most every shot where they might appear? (Playing one of them is Mick Jagger's brother, Chris.) Were the rest of their scenes excised from the shooting script? In a movie about space vampires who essentially seduce their human prey, you'd expect their presence to pay off at some point, perhaps through the introduction of actual female and/or gay characters who might find them alluring. Instead, the boy vampires vanish until the very ending, the resulting narrative dominance of their female counterpart reinforcing every long-standing sexist genre trope about the sexually predatory female you can think of.
Well, Lifeforce endures, not as a quality picture on the order of Hammer horror, but as a cheeseball classic. Golan and Globus might not have gotten the blockbuster SF epic they were banking on, but they did get a modest cult film with surprising staying power. (On my most recent viewing, I was completely surprised to note, for the first time, the appearance of a bunch of pudgy little space vampire babies at the climax, suggesting that if this Blu-ray does really well, it may not be too late for Damon Lindelof to start working up Space Vampires 2: The New Batch.) Hooper himself wasn't so lucky. The next two movies he made for Cannon were the much lower-budget Invaders from Mars and a project he had avoided directing, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. The latter at least earned a profit, but the damage was done and Hooper's career never recovered. The worst thing about Lifeforce is how bland it turned out--it's utterly crazy and yet surprisingly restrained, freaky in concept but generic in execution and badly wanting for any hint of an expressive artistic sensibility. Hooper's unhappy distinction was that he made a big-budget picture that was simultaneously more loony and more anonymous than anyone would have expected.
THE BLU-RAY DISC Lifeforce is being treated well in the afterlife, as Shout! Factory presents the "director-approved cut" and the abbreviated U.S. theatrical release on the same disc, making comparisons easy for armchair historians. I watched the longer cut in full, followed by a sample of the domestic edit, and I found no reason to spend any more time with the shorter version. The lengthy opening sequence involving the exploration of the alien spacecraft gets truncated so severely that it plays out like a "Previously on..." segment in front of a TV show, leaving no opportunity for mood and atmosphere to build. Elsewhere, quite a bit of expository dialogue is excised--usually a smart move, except in this case the effect is to decimate the movie's mythology and downplay the "space vampires" conceit. And crucial moments like Steve Railsback's reluctant on-the-lips smacker with Patrick Stewart and his show-stopping "she wants me to hurt her" monologue have been removed, robbing the cheese of its flavour.
Running 116-minutes, the longer cut is delivered, as per usual, as an MPEG-4 AVC HD file encoded in 1080p at 24fps. Unusually, the 101-minute alternative is an MPEG-2 file encoded in 1080i at 30fps. I'm tempted to bitch and moan about this, but even this version of Lifeforce doesn't look too bad--although MPEG-2 doesn't handle the grain so well, and the fact is that one dual-layered Blu-ray couldn't have held a second copy of the film encoded at similar quality to the first, so compromise was going to be unavoidable. (Also, you have to access the U.S. theatrical cut from the Bonus Features menu, which I guess technically relegates it to the status of an "extra." Nobody is going to be watching it by mistake.) The extended cut looks quite good--not excellent--for a movie of its vintage, displaying a healthy amount of grain in the 2.35:1 image that gets thick in some of the darker scenes. (For example, scenes showing Dr. Bukovsky alone in his office around 19 minutes in have an almost soupy layer of noise.) Shots with optical effects look softer, noisier, and a bit darker--all par for the course. Though black levels are adequate, there is some visible instability and flickering in the shadows, plus a noticeable amount of gate weave throughout. Colours look good, with excellent saturation levels and what appear to be accurate skin tones; Hooper reportedly took a revisionist pass at the HD masters to cool down some of the shots--and, moreover, to ramp up the colours in Carlsen's gothic sex-dream sequence. There is no evidence of digital sharpening or overly aggressive noise reduction.
The so-so "Space Vampires in London: with Tobe Hooper" (10 mins., 1080p) is a new interview with Hooper that dwells again on the title of the source material, as if its change were among the most intriguing aspects of the film. (While I do think there's a revisionist-historic argument that the picture's reception would have improved if it had been marketed more appropriately as a big-budget schlock-horror piece, it was never coherent enough to be a mainstream hit.) He discusses other aspects of the production, and scenes from the film and excerpts from B-roll are inserted where appropriate. It plays as a short recapitulation of the audio commentary. And "Carlsen's Curse: with Steve Railsback" (7 mins., 1080p) collects some of the native Texan's "incredible memories" of making the film. He met Hooper on the set of his TV movie Helter Skelter, through actress Marilyn Burns. He talks about hitting his marks when suspended in mid-air on wire rigs for the zero-gravity scenes and tells a funny story about being the punchline when Patrick Stewart was asked, on Leno, about his first screen kiss.
Lifeforce is ludicrously campy horror film let down by a confusing story, a wooden lead actor but it has great special effects.The disreputable Cannon Group were hoping that Lifeforce would be the Citizen Kane of horror movies. Golan and Globus must have found out that it was indeed Steven Spielberg who directed most of the good bits of Poltergeist.The joint NASA/ESA space shuttle project, Churchill reaches Halley's Comet under the command of Colonel Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback.) Inside the comet they find an alien spaceship.When the astronauts go for a closer look they discover giant bats and three naked humanoid bodies in a crystal chamber. They decided to bring the humanoids to their spaceship.The story jumps 30 days later when the space shuttle returns to earth's orbit. The crew are dead apart from the humanoids who turn out to be space vampires. They suck the lifeforce out of humans who then go on a zombie rampage in London.Colonel Carlsen is left alive and together with SAS soldier Colonel Colin Caine they want to track down and kill the remaining space vampires.French actress Mathilda May is gratuitously wholly naked throughout the movie as the sole alien humanoid. She mesmerises men and sucks their lifeforce out. When the aliens are in a laboratory, there are no soldiers on guard to prevent any harm coming to the scientists.The plot is confusing, I am still unsure why London ended up with zombies running amok. That bit of the story was straight out of Quatermass and the Pit. Railsback is awful, even the zombies out act him. 2ff7e9595c
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