Lifeforce (1985)

Tobe Hooper directs this ambitious and downright strange effort for The Cannon Group called Lifeforce, based off of a deliberately Lovecraftian 1976 novel from Colin Wilson called, “The Space Vampires”, which has a reputation of being just as weird. Controlling shareholders in Cannon, Golan-Globus, had been wanting to make Space Vampires made for several years but didn’t quite have the right elements in place to do it.

Here we find a space shuttle mission co-funded by American and British space agencies traveling to explore Halley’s Comet up close. They soon make a discovery of an alien ship hiding in the comet’s coma (the part that seems to create the comet’s tail), so they go on board to investigate, only to find desiccated bat-like creatures and three naked humanoid beings, a woman and two men, seemingly in a perpetual state of sleep in their glass sarcophagus-like pods. They bring the pods aboard to bring to study, but things go awry in ways that we don’t quite learn about until the pods are brought down to the European Space Research Centre in London. The shuttle mission’s sole human survivor, Colonel Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback) also makes his way to Earth to spin a crazy tale, and to help with the mission to track down the space vampires trying to make their escape and wreak havoc on an unsuspecting planet.

Lifeforce was adapted to the screen by Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby. O’Bannon is certainly no stranger to the genre of a space mission gone awry, having written the screenplay for the more playful Dark Star as well as the hit space chiller that would become a classic, 1979’s Alien. O’Bannon had worked with Jakoby on three films during the mid-1980s, with the others being 1983’s Blue Thunder and the follow-up film from Tobe Hooper, 1986’s remake of Invaders from Mars, which was the second of a three-picture deal between Hooper and Cannon Films due to the success of Poltergeist (one which would have included a film version of Spider-Man that never quite manifested), ending with the director’s long-awaited sequel to the film that put him on everyone’s radar in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Despite his success in the horror genre, Hooper wasn’t Cannon’s first choice for Lifeforce, with the original intent to give the reins over to Michael Winner, mostly known for his lucrative Charles Bronson films with Cannon, including the Death Wish series (screenwriter Don Jakoby had just written the screenplay for Death Wish 3 for Winner, but had his name changed to Michael Edmonds because he objected to the extensive rewrites.) Winner had been trying to option the film from Golan-Globus to make with the De Laurentiis Group, but the asking price was too high. They decided to partner up instead, but then Winner grew disinterested as time went on, as did De Laurentiis.

Some have compared what happens in Lifeforce to an old Hammer horror film called Quatermass and the Pit (released in the U.S. as Five Million Years to Earth). Indeed, it was Hooper’s intention all along, as he was a huge fan of the Quatermass stories told on television and in films from the 1950s and 60s. Having basically been given the green light to make the film the way he saw fit, to use the film to pay homage to these Hammer horror films of yesteryear, inspired by the British production team and actors, shooting in England for the first time at famed Elstree Studios, where it took up several massive soundstages (they had to compete for space with the likes of Ridley Scott’s Legend and Return to Oz). Hooper ordered additional screenwriters be brought in to make a few changes to the adaptation including changing the asteroid belt from the novel to Halley’s Comet, which was more topical to the news as the world was eagerly anticipating its arrival in 1986 for the first time in 75 years. He also wanted it to be set in 1986 (rather than the original’s mid-21st Century setting) because he felt that too much emphasis on the hows and whys of life in the far future would distance the audience from the nature of the more immediately personal and horrific relationships at the heart of the story.

The novel’s author, Colin Wilson, detested the changes, stating, “John Fowles had once told me that the film of The Magus was the worst movie ever made. After seeing Lifeforce I sent him a postcard telling him that I had gone one better.” Wilson, in particular, hated the chopping out of the build-up of the film, thinking that once you jump to the middle of the matter, there’s nowhere more interesting you can go.

Because he was over schedule and Cannon was running out of money, Hooper, who had become notorious for his odd on-set behavior spurred on by an intense coke habit, never got to shoot all of the scenes he wanted, resulting in several compromises to the story that were intended but never shot.  He did manage to put together something he felt was workable, enough to produce a 128-minute cut.  Despite Hooper having the green light for the shoot, it did not carry over into the post-production decisions, especially when the distributor, TriStar, saw the final product. TriStar felt that Hooper’s cut was too long, especially in getting going to the “good parts”, ordering several big cuts to the mostly dialogue-free scenes aboard the space shuttle to give the film a pace that they felt would avoid early lulls. Nevertheless, due to these decisions, some of the scenes would have to be redubbed and rescored, with some actors having their voices dubbed by obvious voice actors, giving Lifeforce the b-movie feel that Cannon had been intending to avoid this time out. The international cut would end up running about 116 minutes and the U.S. cut would get chopped down an additional 15 minutes, with a run time of 101 minutes. Though unavailable on video from a long time, the international cut is the choice now for the Blu-ray and streaming releases, and it restores the full Henry Mancini score.

“Lifeforce” wasn’t the original title of the film, written under the same title of the book, “The Space Vampires”, but Cannon Films, who already had the reputation of producing low budget b-movies, thought people would assume it was low-budget trash. They were betting big on the film becoming the tentpole release they had been hoping for and had put in $25 million into the shooting budget, making it one of the most expensive films they ever produced. They decided that “Lifeforce” had a better and more prestigious ring to it (Hooper thought it sounded pretentious and overly serious), and they wanted a more epic feel to the score for the American release, injecting a last-minute song cues by Michael Kamen to replace some of the tonal sounds and rhythms that had already been done by Henry Mancini (Mancini was asked but was unavailable to re-score the scenes).

John Dykstra, whose claims to fame were providing effects work for Star Wars and the “Battlestar Galactica” TV series, would deliver some impressive visuals, especially in the neon smoke effects, the umbrella-like alien craft, and some truly intense body transformations between the human actors and their desiccated counterparts, which was done through the use of a variety of face and body cast work. Over 400 artists total worked on the film, with a tenth of that working just on the prosthetic pieces alone.

Despite having only seven total minutes of screen time, if you remember anything about Lifeforce at all, it will likely be the mostly nude performance from then 19-year-old French ballerina Mathilda May (who didn’t know English at the time and had to speak her lines phonetically) as the siren-like “Space Girl” (as she’s billed in the credits; she’s called G’room in the novel). She’s not naturally human but took on the shape and adopted the language by taking it from the imagination of Colonel Carlsen and his notions of the “perfect woman”. To this end, it has led some to study the male attraction to the female form, but also the fear of it, as the men in the story find Space Girl to be irresistible, controlling their minds, even though they know that she is using their lustful urges to draw them to her, and drain them of their energy, essence, and body fluids in an obvious metaphor of sexual intercourse and both the attraction and worrisome qualities of unrestrained female expression of sexuality.

This is especially relevant to the London location, with London society especially in upheaval at losing their traditionally reserved nature to feed off of others for restoration of their lifeforce, including expression of those urges toward those of the same sex. Nevertheless, given the AIDS epidemic that ran rampant in the media of the mid-1980s, the story of how the succumbing to one’s lustful nature to have rampant sexual relations with anyone and anything around you even if it infects others with a fast-moving and debilitating disease perhaps hit too close to home for some to see the entertainment in the material.

The film would be met with mostly negative reviews upon its release in June of 1985, though it would debut at the number four spot in its initial week of release, where it would be easily bested by the #1 debut competing for box office dollars in the more positive-minded sci-fi effort known as Cocoon.  All totaled, it would garner $11.6 million in the United States, not even half of the production budget. Some of this can be chalked up to the bad reviews, but to some extent it could also be seen as a shift in attitudes in the mid-1980s following the success of Steven Spielberg (who Hooper had great success with for Poltergeist) at focusing on aliens, not as destroyer of worlds, but our friends, in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extraterrestrial, plus all of the cute knockoffs that filled theaters in the two or three years leading up to Lifeforce‘s release (not even a film like John Carpenter’s The Thing, which is considered an all-out genre classic now, could get $20 million at the box office in the wake of the more family-friendly space adventures, and that film didn’t have the additional issue of the semi-erotic tone of Tobe Hooper’s story.

Despite its failures at the time, Lifeforce would eventually find an audience that appreciated it for its weird and sometimes inspired choices and has garnered a considerable cult following over the years among critics and fans alike. More modern critics enjoy the risk-taking in the story as well as its commitment to the material, especially in how it tries to mesh the tone of the science fiction of yesteryear into the more contemporary notions of morbid sex and shocking violence that took hold in horror of the 1980s. Despite Hooper’s emphasis on trying to find immediacy in his film, Lifeforce ironically seems much better the more it is distanced by the time and place in cinema in which it was released into the world.

Qwipster’s rating: B

MPAA Rated: Rated R for nudity, sexual content, gore, violence, and language
Running Time: 161 min.

Cast: Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May, Patrick Stewart, Michael Gothard, Nicholas Ball, Aubrey Morris
Director: Tobe Hooper
Screenplay: Dan O’Bannon, Don Jakoby (based on the novel, “The Space Vampires”, by Colin Wilson)