Hot nude space vampire action! (Lifeforce (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Lifeforce (DVD)
Date:	01/06/09 (223 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: There's a naked lady

Disadvantages: The plot is awful, the lead actor bad

A review of the MGM DVD, currently selling for around £3 on amazon.

Ah, Lifeforce. So beloved of teenage boys in the late 80s, myself included. A science-fiction horror movie from 1985, this will forever be known as 'the one with the naked space chick'. It served an important part of shaping the psyches of many a young chap - not quite as good as Duran Duran's Girls on Film video, but with a lively dose of horror to make up for the bits when the naked space vampire wasn't present.

Revisiting it as an adult, it's dull and overblown. But that space chick is still awfully cute.

A space shuttle investigating Halley's Comet finds a large alien spaceship hiding in the comet's tail. Along with hundreds of dead bat-like creatures, the astronauts also find three naked humans in what seems to be suspended animation. When the shuttle makes it back to Earth, everyone is dead, except for the captain, who got out via an escape pod. The three naked people are still there, though, apparently still asleep.

The naked space girl soon comes to life and starts sucking the 'lifeforce' out of people. The mummified victims soon rise, in search of more lifeforce. The harassed authorities have to try to prevent an epidemic of space vampirism while trying to catch the alluring chief vamp.

This is a big-budget horror movie that takes itself seriously which, given the parade of low-budget, jokey slasher movies that were being churned out in the mid-80s, at least shows some ambition. Unfortunately, ambition is about all this has going for it. The story, which seems like a certain winner, is let down by a lack of focus and a great deal of pretention. The vampire starts transferring her consciousness to other bodies, a threat which is never milked for the kind of tension it could be (Lifeforce never has the paranoid feel of The Thing or Invasion of the Body Snatchers). The peculiar mental bond the hero, astronaut Tom Carlsen, has formed with the naked space girl results in some unbearably slow scenes and pompous, shouty acting. And the whole film transforms, seemingly at random, into a disaster movie with explosions and zombie hoards about 20 minutes from the end.

I suspect part of the blame must lie with the buffoonish Colin Wilson, who wrote the novel this is based on. If ever there was a man who should never have been taught to read, that man is Colin Wilson. The direction isn't much better. Tobe Hooper directs in a lumpen, unimaginative fashion. The space scenes are generic Alien rip-off, and the Earth scenes have none of the tension or sense of the grotesque of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hooper's one and only masterpiece. (Also, in the space scenes the astronauts all wear fingerless gloves when they're space-walking. I know little of the practicalities of space exploration, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this would be an incredibly bad idea.)

This was made in Britain, which turns out to have a deeply unlikely space programme (although the chief astronaut is an American). This has the advantage of the film at least being able to fill the screen with British character actors, many of them exploitation perennials. Frank Finlay, a young Peter Firth and a pre-Trek Patrick Stewart all know just how much overacting they can get away with. Able support is provided by the likes of Aubrey Morris (from A Clockwork Orange), John Hallam (from Flash Gordon, among many other things) and Michael Gothard (from The Devils).

Which is just as well, as the lead, American Steve Railsback, really isn't good. He acts way too many of his scenes at full tilt, roaring lines slowly and melodramatically (like the way people shout 'NOOO!' in slow motion in the Simpsons). He doesn't have the charisma to be an action hero, and seems to lack the versatility to pull off the mental-powers stuff properly. He later played Ed Gein and Charles Manson.

The other notable cast member is Mathilde May, a French dancer cast as the space girl. She doesn't have many lines, and is probably dubbed anyway, but she remains a curvaceous, full-breasted favourite of mine. Next to Princess Aura out of Flash Gordon, she's probably the sexiest science fiction lady of the 80s (and I frequently imagine her next to Princess Aura, in a hot tub. I am also in the hot tub.)

The music, by Henry Mancini, is overdone orchestral stuff, like Star Wars without any of the charm. The film is much too long, coming in at almost two hours. This is the pulpiest of pulp fiction, but it has ideas waaaay above its station (that'll be Colin Wilson's fault). If it had been 80 minutes and made by Roger Corman it would be much more fondly remembered than it is now.

But at least it has the necessary budget to pull off all the special effects. The space scenes are weak, with some terrible model spaceships. But the horror effects are very good for their time. There's a lot of Ghostbusters-style pyrotechnics and some impressive London-being-smashed up scenes (although the zombie make up is pretty bad). The desiccated corpses of the vampires' victims are pretty good, and the animatronic ones are, for their time, wonderful.

But overall this isn't really worth seeing. The DVD has great picture and sound quality, but the only extra is a trailer which is exactly as you'd expect. Still, at least it's cheap.

Maybe watch the first 40 minutes next time it's on telly, as that's when the bulk of the hot naked action occurs. The rest of it can just stand as one more nail in the coffin of Tobe Hooper's reputation.

Summary: A rather silly but impressively expensive sci-fi horror