We've all had that person in our lives at one time or another, the one whose presence just drains the energy from your body, who saps your happiness, your enthusiasm and your very will to live.
They are called emotional or psychic vampires. I don't know if those are clinical or colloquial terms, but they're accurate. People exist who suck out your life force and leave you an empty rotten husk. Which brings us to our latest entry on Fright Film Spectacular.
Psychic vampires are the villains in the 1985 film Lifeforce, which is an adaptation of a novel called The Space Vampires. Lifeforce is quite a movie. I'll stop short of calling it a classic. But it's different. And the horror genre can always use different.
The story is fairly simple: A joint British-American space mission discovers humanoids in stasis on a giant spaceship hidden in the coma of Halley's Comet. The crew returns the humanoids to their own ship, which is later discovered with said crew all burned up on it. The humanoids are, of course, mysteriously alive and intact, despite everyone else on the ship being horribly burned. The discoverers then bring the creatures to Earth. This, of course, turns out to be a huge mistake. By the time we reach the end, we've been treated to spaceships, spacewalks, giant bat aliens, vampires being turned to dust, fires, explosions, a zombie-vampire horde of Londoners, a Ghostbusters-esque funnel cloud of human souls being sucked up into the alien mothership and whole lot of nudity (more on that in a minute). How can all that not be entertaining?
As far as a scifi-horror film, it's pretty good. It's written by Dan O'Bannon, who wrote Alien and Return of the Living Dead and worked on Star Wars, so he knows his way around both genres. Director Tobe Hooper had, among other films, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist under his belt by the time he made Lifeforce, so he was a heavy hitter by then, too. (I know about the controversy, that a lot of people believe it was actually Steven Spielberg who did the bulk of the directing on Poltergeist, and I personally believe it was probably a joint effort, but either way, Hooper worked on it.) It's gory, and the effects are pretty good and hold up fairly well -- most of them anyway. And while the film makers were aiming for epic in scope, Henry Mancini's score makes it feel like a bigger movie than it is.
The acting is a little bombastic at times. The hero, Steve Railsback as Carlsen, reminded me of a 1950s B movie leading man. Still two years from becoming Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: Next Generation, Patrick Stewart puts in a decent performance as Dr. Armstrong.
But it's the overall theme I really enjoyed. And I'll be honest: I'm not one to look for a lot of metaphors and subtleties in film. For one thing, a lot of horror movies don't go for subtle. And some might have underlying themes, but I don't tend to care. What I wanted to do was create a commentary on the human condition, blah, blah, blah ...
No. You made a scary, gory movie that kept me entertained for an hour and a half. I'm not normally looking for anything any deeper. But in the case of Lifeforce I made an exception, mainly because I couldn't help it.
I don't know which of the film makers was involved with a real-life psychic vampire of a woman, but someone was. And she was the kind of girl this someone loved to hate, hated to love and had as much fun fighting with as he did making sweet love to.
You know how I know? The aforementioned nudity.
The super-hot Mathilda May, who is credited only as Space Girl, plays the main vampire and spends probably 95 percent of her on-screen time totally nude. And she's on the screen a lot. Now I've got nothing against super-hot women walking around buck naked, but it can't help but be a distraction, and after awhile you begin to wonder, "What does this alien have against pants and shirts?" I mean, I get it from a Hollywood point of view -- sex sells and all that. But from a storytelling point of view, you start to ask, how does this chick being nude in every scene move the narrative along or develop the theme?
The answer didn't dawn on me until after the film was over. It was to show the temptation. Our hero, Carlsen, knows her evil intent, and yet he is drawn to her, not just sexually and romantically, but in an emotional, molecular way. He has an addiction that is primal, animalistic. He knows he must destroy her to save the Earth, but it's nearly impossible. He even asks her aloud: why can't I break away from you? She tells him: Because you're just like me.
Translation: Yeah, I know she's a soul-sucking psychopath who makes me crazy and makes me do stupid things, and I think I'm happy with her when I'm really miserable, but I don't care because holy shit, just look at her!
And of course, a relationship like that can only end in destruction, but to find out just how, you'll have to watch the movie, which I highly recommend. It's available on DVD from Netflix, and has recently been released on Blu-ray from Scream Factory. If you follow the link, it will take you to a trailer.
4 stars
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