Imaginative, overwrought, and freakishly bizarre, Lifeforce, as cinema history’s only would-be blockbuster apocalyptic alien vampire nudie flick, can hardly be accused of being mere mundane product. Lifeforce, produced by the Israeli financing team Golan-Globus who were aiming much higher than their usual cheesy action fare, proved a colossal flop, one which badly hurt director Tobe Hooper’s career. Hooper had experienced a stellar rise from being the auteur of the much-banned trash masterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), through to making the strong Stephen King adaptation Salem’s Lot (1979), and then directing Poltergeist (1982), which, in spite of his off-screen clashes with that film’s writer-producer Steven Spielberg, was internationally successful. Hooper’s gift for narratives that slowly gather in intensity and dynamism is still on display in this adaptation of Colin Wilson’s more literally titled novel “The Space Vampires”, and the film sports some of the most inspired imagery of sci-fi and horror movie history, even if the many interwoven strands of generic influence and striking originality slip out of his grasp for a lack of rigorous grip on tone and exposition. Lifeforce in many respects sticks close to the general template of the British sci-fi tradition, as exemplified by John Wyndham and Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass stories, and indeed the whole story comes to bear a close resemblance to a more fanciful version of Quatermass and the Pit in particular. Lifeforce nonetheless commences squarely in Alien territory, partly explained by the fact the script was co-written by Dan O’Bannon, as a super-sophisticated space shuttle, the Churchill, a joint UK-NASA mission, travels to intercept and study Halley’s Comet.
The crew of the Churchill, led by Col. Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback), discover a colossal space craft they find hidden within the comb of the comet, a ship which resembles a haunted castle in space. Exploring the inside, they find the dessicated remains of thousands of bat-like humanoid creatures, and then three seemingly perfect, naked humans in suspended animation in crystalline cells, two males (Christopher Jagger and Bill Malin) and a female (Mathilda May) who proves immediately, hauntingly fascinating to Carlsen. He and his crewmates haul these specimens to their own ship and set off homeward. Several weeks later, the Churchill reaches Earth, but doesn’t answer signals, so NASA launches the shuttle Columbia London London
Meanwhile the Churchill’s ejected escape pod lands in Texas, proving to contain Carlsen, exhausted but otherwise in good condition, and he’s swiftly flown to London to narrate his story to Bukovsky, Fallada, and SAS investigator Col. Caine (Peter Firth), telling them how the crew was killed off one by one, found drained of life essence. Carlsen has a dream in which he’s visited by the vampire girl, and realises through this that he has a psychic link with the alien. Using this link, he, Caine, and overseeing Minister Sir Percy (Aubrey Morris) track the girl, who seems to have left her body in hiding but is transmitting her spirit from body to body, north to an asylum for the criminally insane, where she proves to have leapt from a nurse (Nancy Paul) working there, into the body of its chief psychiatrist Dr. Armstrong (Patrick Stewart). Having doped Armstrong up, Carlsen manages to interrogate the trapped spirit within, but the whole escapade proves to have been a distraction to give the girl’s male brethren, who have swapped their old bodies for those of the soldiers who were guarding them, time to set in motion an exponential chain of infection and energy harvesting. Soon zombified hordes stalking London’s streets and the city is being reduced to a flaming, chaotic site for armageddon.
The bracing quality of Lifeforce is the unique way it tries to meld the pumped-up ambitions of ‘80s big-budget cinema with straight horror movie pizzazz, and lushly psychosexual provocation. Hooper had already pulled off a forceful blend of blockbuster and horror to a certain extent with Poltergeist, but where that film revolved around the travails of its nuclear family without any erotic dimensions, May’s strutting through the early scenes of this film completely nude signal something far naughtier and venturesome at play. Much of Lifeforce plays as a succession of dirty jokes played deadly serious, from the initial adolescent fantasy of stumbling across the ripely formed vampire trio, to the Benny Hill-esque interlude of the possessed nurse ensnaring a befuddled older gent. When Carlsen interrogates the possessed Armstrong, who speaks simultaneously in May’s voice and in another that sounds like a drag queen, it’s clear that Hooper is teasing the outer edges of polysexual anarchism. Coming out of nowhere and serving no apparent purpose other than adding to this mesh of perversity is the detail that, when Carlsen tracks her down, the nurse proves to have been a masochist, who has the scars from whips imprinted on her back. May’s pair of male aides look like androgynous refugees from an ‘80s boy band. It is perhaps even admirable that the film delves much more deeply into the erotic suggestiveness of the material than O’Bannon’s Alien script did, which left the sexuality encoded in the look of the facehugger and the architecture of the lost spaceship. Here it’s front and centre.
Images of the dreadfully emaciated victims of the vampires writhing in famished agony before disintegrating, and a brilliantly done set-piece in which a lifeforce-draining is depicted in precise detail, drag the film close to the body-horror territory of Cronenberg and Carpenter of The Thing (1981). The blockbuster ambitions, harboured by Golan and Globus who hoped it would see their Canon Films outfit hit the big time, are clearly signalled with the genuinely awesome, eventful tone achieved by Alan Hume’s photography, John Dykstra’s spectacular effects, and the thunderous score by Henry Mancini, of all people. These apposite tensions fail to balance satisfyingly, but also contribute to the film’s careening yet relentless drive and perversity. The plotting pays overt tribute to Dracula, with the narrative of the Churchill’s doomed voyage home clearly echoing that of the Vesta in Bram Stoker’s novel, and the psychic link between Carlsen and the girl, thanks to their having swapped energy in the same fashion Dracula and Mina swapped blood, evokes that parasitic romance, except with genders reversed. By its final half hours the film veers wildly between the sight of its anti-heroine, sprawled in white in the vaults of a cathedral, looking exactly like a vampire bride of an early ‘60s Hammer film, and the chaotic action as London
The film’s problems are not, however, minor. Heavy editing before release, first to the European cut of just under two hours (the version I am commenting on) and then to an even less coherent American length of about 100 minutes, saw much of the film’s space for development of mood and character junked. I suspect there were nonetheless quite enough flaws in O’Bannon and Don Jakoby’s script, which is structured episodically and delays crucial revelations about Carlsen’s experiences for no particularly good effect. Bukovsky’s off-screen end and Fallada’s revelation as a vampire before being killed seems less like shocking twists than really clumsy, arbitrary storytelling. The opening sequences especially are overly fast, and the film sometimes jumps from scene to scene with little warning. The middle third, whilst offering the kinkiness I’ve mentioned above, feels nonetheless off the point and very awkward. Perhaps the biggest overt problem with the film is the badly miscast Railsback, who lacks the necessary sense of erotic obsession (or worthiness of obsession) that would give a charge to the otherwise desultory fumbling he does with May. Much of the acting around him is uncertain, particularly in the smaller roles, suggesting that Hooper’s ear was failing him in the British setting. Finlay comes off best, highly effective in the Quatermass role, and Firth has fun as Caine, whose sense of nuts and bolts militarist pragmatism doesn’t even let mass carnage faze him in rushing to the rescue. For all its faults, Lifeforce is a fairly brave, undoubtedly vigorous film. It’s the sort of work where one has the feeling that the slightest tweak in either direction could have made it totally disastrous – which, admittedly, some already find it – or uniquely brilliant. One can see how it could easily have been made more palatable to mainstream tastes and so avoid being such a colossal flop, simply be excising most of the sexuality. How it could have been made better and still retained its rarer edge is a much more challenging proposition. I sense its influence, however, on Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later… and Neil Marshall’s Doomsday, and it’s interesting to consider Stewart’s later casting in the X-Men films in relation to this very differently styled yet conceptually linked movie.
