LIFEFORCE (1985) Nudity! Yes! Psychic link! No, fuck! My brother-in-law and I were just talking about movies like this - movies which seem all right for a while, until they reach a certain point, after which there's no recovering from a spiral dive into an ocean of shit. Lifeforce is schlocky fun...for a while. Then that most dreaded of horror-movie clichés - the hated psychic link - thrusts its way into the story like the unwanted, unlubricated advances of a prison cellmate, and after that it's just not fun anymore. I should've known Tobe Hooper would have given us a psychic-link movie eventually. Based on a (unread by me) book called The Space Vampires (yuuuck, what a title) by Colin Wilson, Lifeforce has a joint US/UK mission heading out to study Halley's Comet close up, because hey, it's not like it's coming back soon. Halley's Comet flew by in 1986, one year after this movie's release, and yet this movie's already predicting artificial gravity (no, not centrifugal inertia, artificial gravity) within the year. They notice a spaceship hiding in the coma of the comet, so they go aboard and find three people encased in crystal, who they promptly pack off in a "specimen bag" (read: net) back to the shuttle, hustling all the way especially once the ship starts turning on. Bad idea. So soon enough, the three "humans" (including Mathilda May) are in London, causing trouble by sucking the lifeforce out of people, turning them rapidly into withered carcasses that themselves need a quick fix of the ol' lifeforce from somebody or they'll explode into dust. (they all look like the zombie chick who was strapped to the table in Return Of The Living Dead...particularly in one scene where one of them is strapped to a table) These life-suckings are accompanied by nearby electrical appliances exploding like in Highlander. The only survivor of the space mission (Steve Railsback) is flown across the pond to discuss just what happened up there and maybe help out with the problem of containing this pseudo-vampire contagion. As a thanatologist (Frank Finlay) helpfully tells us that she'd drained the lifeforce "totally, from the guard. That girl is no girl...she's totally alien to this planet...and totally dangerous." Like, this dialogue is totally 1985. I make fun, but not without affection. Up til this point, Lifeforce moves pretty quickly, has Peter Firth as an icepick-cool British science/intelligence guy, and shows Mathilda May naked a LOT. It's like a big-budget (yet low-rent), R-rated Quatermass movie. What's not to like? That's about the time when Railsback reveals that he has a psychic link with the space-vampire chick because they had a bonding moment up there in space. It's most of the standard psychic-link shit - he suddenly knows (and explains) everything that needs explaining. He doesn't see through her eyes or anything, but a psychic link is still a psychic link. And like most psychic links, this one leads the plot around like a dog on a choke chain. If it weren't for his regular psychic revelations, these poor Brits would've spent the second half of the movie sitting on their asses waiting for London to get quaranterminated, and Patrick Stewart would never have gotten his first screen kiss (with Railsback). These vampires can also body-jump, can be killed with an iron stake in the heart, and if skewered at the right time, will revert to their natural "giant bat" form (so why didn't the first one turn into a giant bat?). Not that it even matters anymore since by this time the movie's become an unusually frenzied but still very bad zombie flick, zombie Londoners everywhere trying to give life-sucking kisses to the diminishing supply of humans in town. No, no cannibalism. Life-sucking kisses. I've come to think of Tobe Hooper as "that really lucky guy" because since you can't suck this bad for this long by accident, what successes there have been can probably most easily be explained by luck. Everybody hated this when it came out, but it seems to have picked up a bit of a minor cult following. But then, just about anything with a few zombies in it can be assured of eventually getting a minor cult following. Catch it if it's on late-night TV if you're curious about what Hooper could do with Spielberg's money but without Spielberg. BACK TO THE L's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE