Lifeforce (1985)
Lifeforce (1985), directed by Tobe Hooper.
Space explorers discover a vast spacecraft at Halley's Comet. Inside are dead, bat-like aliens and three perfect human beings in suspended animation. They shouldn't have brought them back to Earth, especially the female: buck-naked, seductive and destructive, hungry-looking, sucking the life energy from everyone she meets and zombiefying them. End of the world?
I saw this in the theater, on DVD, and now on Blu-ray. It is one thing to suspend disbelief; you could not enjoy a whole range of movies without doing that. But it is a another to abandon your notions of entertainment, to pretend you are enjoying a movie as clunky as this. The film is still just plain bad:
The plot is poorly developed. We're just getting to know the folks on the spaceship, then they're all dead. We meet a series of characters on Earth but never get to know any of them. Who are we supposed to follow through the story? It slows down in the middle when these characters sit around and talk to each other.
It's expensive but looks cheap.
Does Steve Railsback look like an astronaut colonel and commander of a deep space expedition to you? Or is he more like an unstable fruitcake about to morph into Charlie Manson?
That bit slapping around the supposedly masochistic woman: huh?
To be fair, it has some redeeming features:
Beautiful, bodacious Mathilda May's full-frontal naked performance throughout. This is what people remember.
Bright adventure score by Henry Mancini.
Alien menace + British scientists + military = a Quatermass story. If you are a fan of the genre -- as I am -- then you have to have it for the collection.
We have a large-scale "zombie apocalypse" segment toward the end.
Ambitious pre-CGI effects. Many complex life-size dummies; the makeup effects manager had a crew of 70 operators.
It's true: what if you could have the ultimate sexual experience with your dream woman that went on for a good long time, but then you had to die? Men seriously stop and ponder...
Misc notes:
The early scenes owe a lot to Alien (1979), although there is no comparison in quality. Dan O'Bannon wrote both.
The space vampires win in the end. They get what they want and sail away. Carlsen goes with them, locked in orgasmic hell forever.
I read Colin Wilson's book before the movie came out, but all I remember is a comment from a gypsy woman: "Don't worry about the vampires: they're unlucky".
Canon Group & Golan-Globus: that brings back memories. Many painful.
A discourse on nudity by beautiful women in movies:
The director complained that he had a hard time finding an actress who would do the movie naked.
Mathilda May was 20 and spoke no English. She did not realize the role required nudity and was intensely embarrassed, although that doesn't show in her performance. She had been a ballet dancer, although she had a fleshier (in a good way!) physique than seems usual for that craft. It takes all kinds.
She has those lovely Dimples of Venus between her lower back and backside.
For the scene where she walks on broken glass, they cast the bottom of her feet and glued on rubber soles.
Beautiful women appearing naked on film: it is a small thing in the great scheme of everything, but the joy it brings to a significant part of the audience should not be discounted. It is encouraging that this relatively innocent pleasure survives in an age of abundant pornography.
Available on Blu-ray from Scream Factory. Said to be the director's longer "British cut", but I'm not remembering the differences. Several extras and two commentary tracks.
