GORILLANAUT

FINAL GIRL FILM CLUB REVIEW: LIFEFORCE

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Sometime after doing whatever the hell he did on POLTERGEIST, Tobe Hooper got the job of directing the adaptation of Colin Wilson's novel "The Space Vampires" for producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. This was to be the first of a three picture deal that later included INVADERS FROM MARS and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2.

As with Hooper's good movie, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, narrator John Larroquette gives us the set up info, this time about Halley's Comet and the fancy spaceship Churchill going to investigate. The crew spots a 150 mile long object in the comet and led by crazy dead- eyes Steve Railsback, decides to investigate. Man oh man, that's some miscasting. I've got no serious beef with Railsback but he doesn't look like a guy you would send into space to do anything. He barely looks like a guy you would send into your basement to kill silverfish. I would've gone with Gil Gerard as he had some space vampire experience and from the looks of it, Railsback stole his hair for LIFEFORCE anyway.

So crazy Steve and a few others jetpack into the 150 mile long ship as if it's just around the corner. Once inside everyone looks around in awe as they fly deeper into the ship. Steve says " I feel like I've been here before" which is a pretty odd thing to say considering it's a 150 mile long alien ship hidden in Halley's Comet. Maybe he meant he'd seen this set before like maybe when saw ALIEN. Now, you would think that investigating a ship that is 150 miles long and 2 miles deep might take like twenty years or so but you would be wrong. They then quickly find thousands of dead bat shaped aliens floating around but at no time does anyone say "Holy Shit! Batmen!" As if that wasn't enough they then quickly discover the three naked humanoids in the floating glass cases and Steve starts to feel a little weird so they decide to take the humanoids back to the ship.

Thirty days pass and Earth has lost contact with the Churchill which is apparently drifting towards Earth so they send up another ship to investigate. It turns out everyone on the Churchill is dead but the glass cases with the naked people are intact. They return to Earth with the aliens and promptly put the most important discovery in the history of modern man in a room with one incompetent guard. He gets too close and instantly the girl vamp awakes to suck his lifeforce which for some reason is a blue lightning type thing. I wouldn't be me if I didn't point out that the vampire girl's tits are just splendid and belong to actress Mathilda May. Let's face it, they got her the job. As she's sucking the guy's lifeforce, another guy sees this on the video monitor and rushes through seven or eight glass doors to help. So he gets hypnotized and yet another guy sees this happen again on the monitor and runs through the same glass doors to help. There's a lot of glass door opening going on. She uses her naked vampire girl electro powers to shatter all those doors and breeze past some guards.

Meanwhile and just in time, Steve lands in Texas in an impossibly tiny escape pod. It's a good thing only one guy had to escape because anybody else would be shit out of luck. So Steve tells the story of what happened, mainly everybody went bat shit and died. He set a fire, pulled a bunch of levers and escaped into the tiny pod. He gets hypnotized and for some reason has a psychic link to vampire girl which leads everybody to a mental asylum run by Patrick Stewart. Now things get very goofy. There's an inexplicable scene with a nurse who was a host for Vampy's mind and for some reason she's a masochist. Steve slaps her around while his British cohort watches because he's a "natural voyeur". They should've strapped her into one of those Paul Snider sex benches. This leads to a over the top Patrick Stewart-Steve Railsback mating/wrestling scene complete with blue lightning and flying furniture. None of this leads to much so they leave.

In the meantime, the two guy vamps have come to life, one is killed but the other escapes and quickly starts to de-lifeforce London so that it looks like Billy Idol's "Dancin' With Myself" video. It all seems very abrupt but suddenly London is on the brink of destruction as the vampire/zombies are running around lifeforce sucking the hell outta everybody. They don't look like the sucked out meth puppet guys we saw earlier but more like zombies. At some point Steve tells another version of what happened on the Churchill but I'm not sure why. We learn that the girl vamp changed her form to appeal to Steve as they approached the alien ship. I suppose the two naked males changed their forms for the women on the ship or possibly the gay members of the crew. The older Quatermass type scientist has figured out that they can be killed by an iron spike in their lifeforce hole, which he refers to as the "old way". The vampires have to direct the blue lifeforces through the male vampire and then through the girl vampire back to the ship to conquer Earth or something. The male turns into a pretty cool bat-man monster but just for a moment. In a scene nobody wanted to see, Steve and Mathilda get naked and make out in the lifeforce before Steve decides to sacrifice himself. He manages a highly unlikely sword catch and then equally improbable spearing to save the day. I think. It turns out he is one of them, I think. I don't know, it's kinda muddled. I have no idea why that had to do the naked hippie love embrace thing or why they were in Haley's Comet to begin with. Were they here 76 years ago too? Who the fuck knows? Did their comet have anything to do with the comet The Brainiac was in from the Mexican movie classic BRAINIAC? And what of Frehley's Comet and whatever was hiding in its tail? Was it Peter Criss? I imagine some of these questions are answered in the novel which I've owned for 25 years but still have not read.

Boy, this thing is a mess but I still like it. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just the rampant goofiness and just the idea of space vampires. This version on dvd is longer the one I saw in 85 but I'm not sure what's different. It still doesn't make sense. The British members of the cast definitely add to the humor just by being British. Railsback is awful but it's not entirely his fault. I like the effects work, not so much the blue lightning but the alien ship. As far as I know, this was Hooper's biggest budget after POLTERGEIST. I don't remember Haley's Comet looking anything like the one from the movie, especially the shot of it above London. That seems really close and a lot bigger than I remember. I gotta stick with BRAINIAC as my favorite "comet bringing a monster" movie.

Shortly after the release of LIFEFORCE, the Anne Rice Gay Vampire Act was passed. Scenes like this are are now deemed "not gay enough" and banned from vampire films.