31 Days of Gore: Lifeforce (1985)

A mission to Haley’s Comet discovers a gigantic derelict spaceship hidden in the corona. Once inside, the astronauts are shocked to discover two men and a woman preserved in see-through capsules. After transferring the bodies to their own ship, the human aliens are brought back to Earth for experimentation. Just as they begin to dissect the female specimen, she wakes up and sucks a scientist’s life force right out of his body, leaving him a decayed shell of his former self. The woman escapes the facility in the nude and manages to evade the police as if that’s not an APB every cop in the country would respond to.

While the main characters are trying to track the woman down, the corpse of the man she drained unexpectedly comes back to life and steals the life force of another victim. The scientists later discover that people who’ve been drained in such a manner always come back—via awesome animatronic effects—and if they don’t get life force they explode. London is the center of this pandemic. The military quarantines the city and prepares to quarantine it with nuclear weapons. The aliens, however, have other plans.

What’s strange about Lifeforce is I enjoyed the movie tremendously, but have little desire to talk about it this month. Maybe it doesn’t belong in 31 Days of Gore despite the fact it has plenty of gore, bitchin’ animatronics, and more nudity than a porno. None of that stuff is presented in an exploitative way. It’s probably the most tasteful movie I’ve featured all month.

I’m slipping. I’ll do better, I promise.

Sexuality aside, Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce has more in common with a modern blockbuster than it does with the horror film the marketers wanted to promote. Which is probably why it bombed: the people the ad campaign targeted expected something more terrifying from the guy who brought us Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Both movies are great. I wish this one was better known.

The acting is solid. The special effects are bombastic. The Blu-Ray edition was well worth the wait—and I did wait because the DVD edition I obtained last year was presented in 4:3; meanwhile the Scream Factory edition goes for over fifty bucks on eBay. If the plot made a little bit more sense (or any at all) it likely would have found more love from critics. It’s just not very compelling when all the aliens want from us is humans’ life force, represented as mystical blue stuff that might as well be fairy dust.

This is a very serious film. Tobe Hooper has made something unique, which makes it hurt all the more that he’s making cheap movies like Djinn today (I confess I have not seen that one yet, but it looks awful). Considering movies are rarely made for adults anymore (I guess that’s what TV’s for these days even though it’s often a poor substitution for production value), it’s hard to imagine a time when movies with such overt sexuality would be marketed to summer crowds. If you ever wanted to see Patrick Stewart get possessed by a feminine creature and make out with another man, here’s the movie for you.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.