MOVIE REVIEW – Lifeforce (1985) – 3/5 Another revisit to the past. This one has everything. Vampires, zombies, a naked lady walking around for the first half of the film, and even Jean Luc Picard. The only thing it really lacked was some sort of coherency in the plot. > The space shuttle Churchill, on a long range mission to examine Haley’s Comet, encounters an alien space craft hidden in the head of the comet. They investigate and find numerous dead bat things and three perfectly preserved human specimens. They take them back to the shuttle. Contact is lost and another shuttle sent up to find the Churchill. It has been gutted by fire, the escape pod ejected, but the three humanoids perfectly intact. Returned to Earth, the Space Girl awakes, attacks a guard and escapes into London. Two hours later the dead guard wakes, grabs another and steals his lifeforce. Two hours after that he explodes into dust. The scene is set. The soul survivor of the shuttle, Col Carlsen, lands in the escape pod. He is quickly flown to London to help out with the investigation. Meanwhile, the two other aliens awake and attack. They are blown up. We think. Another decimated corpse is found and transferred to the main operations base. It wakes after two hours and disintegrates when it cannot feed. Carlsen and Col Caine, track down Space Girl’s victim. Only to discover that the alien is body hopping. The boys have also done the same before being blown up. London is besieged by zombies produced by the body hopping vampires. Carlsen, through some psychic link, tracks down the location of Space Girl and heads there. Caine is given the only weapon that can defeat the vampires, a leaded steel sword. It seems the vampires of legend were real and are back. The two fight their way through large throngs of zombies. Carlsen finds Space Girl and initiates re-entry, well that’s what it looks like. Caine tracks him down and throws him the sword. Carlsen stabs Space Girl and himself. Instead of dying they transport to the orbiting ship and fly off towards the comet. > Yeah, I didn’t get the ending either. This was directed by Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and written by Dan O’Bannon (Alien, Total Recall, Return of the Living Dead). It’s not what I’d call one of their best efforts. The concept was great. Space Vampires that suck the lifeforce from their prey, and take on the image of their prey’s deepest desire (hence the extremely beautiful Matilda May walking around starkers for the best part of the movie). It just got a bit weird towards the middle, and really didn’t recover. The whole second act where they track down the Space Girl’s victim to an asylum and virtually torture Dr Armstrong (Patrick Stewart) into revealing the alien’s location was really drawn out and boring. It was only a vehicle to get them out of London so that all hell could break loose. And that in itself made very little sense. Up until that point anyone infected by the alien was turned into a desiccated corpse came back two hours later, if they couldn’t feed they exploded. Suddenly, all the victims turn into zombies with an insatiable appetite for human flesh and are all rotting and falling apart. The performances were pretty good. I remember Steve Railsback (Carlsen) from a movie called the Stuntman, which stayed in my mind for one particular scene that panned across the aftermath of a World War I battlefield strewn with dismembered corpses, then “cut” is called and all the body parts twitch and the owners rise up out of the sand. The effects were pretty damn good. A lot of money was spent on constructing sets and then destroying them. There were buildings and cars on fire. The space shuttle was cool, as was the alien ship. The makeup effects were very good too, all practical and a lot were done with hand animated puppets. One particular effect using blood pouring upwards out of two corpses was effective, it’s easily done by suspending the dummy on the roof and pumping blood into it so if falls to the floor, but angling the camera back to normal makes for a cool effect. This movie is worth watching, if only for the naked vampire. It does have some good ideas and some cool effects, but just loses it in the middle and doesn’t really regain it. If You Really Lovd Me Youd Let Me Eat Your Brains-horror movie page. Fright Meter Horror Movie Reviews & Awards youtu.be/qej5nlRb9VM
Posted on: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 11:05:02 +0000
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