Lifeforce: reviews
This film has more than 70 reviews linked on IMDB, which shows how much interest and controversy it has generated over the years, despite being unpopular with critics at the time.
Absolute Horror
Everything but the kitchen sink. It’s a phrase tossed around lightly. But it’s no exaggeration to say that LIFEFORCE tosses everything in but the kitchen in an attempt to entertain you. Actually, scratch that, it tosses everything including the kitchen sink. By the time the movie is complete, you may have to watch it again just to verify that you actually saw what you just saw. The movie is a mess of enormous proportions which I absolutely loved. Any movie that tries this hard to entertain you deserves credit - and it’s not just A for effort, the movie actually succeeds at its mission.
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Basement Rejects
Lifeforce, actually scared me the first time I saw it so many years ago. For a somewhat cheesy, B-movie flick from Cannon Films, it actually gives a nice twist on the vampire mythology. … As a vampire movie, it pushes the oldest boundaries of what constitutes a vampire and offers a somewhat reasonable explanation why we have these stories of vampires and why we haven’t seen them since the inception of the myth.
Full review
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Fernando F Croce on Cinepassion
… Hooper pays rich homage to his hosts, drawing on the British tradition of sci-fi and drollness (the perfect female shape is sculpted out of blood, tea is served as the country burns down). Much of its wryness is in the casting - wispy Peter Firth representing military authority, Frank Finlay as the relativist scientist ("Well... in a sense, we are all vampires"), plus Patrick Stewart and Michael Gothard, all of them pitching in the surrealism as Railsback and May enact their blue-tinged Liebestod. Far from the nonsensical, failed-blockbuster of its reputation, the movie is a ravishing renewal of the genre hollowed out by Star Wars …
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R.B. Armstrong on Classic Film and TV Café
Most of the cast in Lifeforce consists of solid British thespians like Finlay, Michael Gothard, and Patrick Stewart. The standout is Peter Firth (Equus), who plays Colonel Colin Caine of the Special Air Services, a no-nonsense investigator determined to track down his quarry …
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Perfesser Deviant on Cult Reviews
ESA Director Dr. Bukovsky (Michael Gothard) decides that someone should really investigate the naked space girl, which is why she has the chance to drain him a bit as well as feast upon the guard before wandering off. He claims that she’s the most feminine being he has ever encountered and is hypnotized by her naked chick-powers …
In case it’s not obvious, this film is patently ridiculous, but still a lot of fun. The idea of the end of the world showing up in the form of nekkid space vampires from Halley’s comet is so ludicrous that there’s no way that a person can’t enjoy this film unless they suffer from terminal feminism or otherwise lack a sense of humor.
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Horror Talk
The acting is strong, with Steve Railsback (The Stunt Man) and Peter Firth (Chill Factor) effective as the tormented Col. Carlsen and the enigmatic SAS Col. Caine, respectively. Railsback is somewhat over the top, but that style plays well against Firth's understated performance. The two colonels are aided on their quest by a pair of eccentric scientists, the death aficionado Fallada (Frank Finlay, Cthulhu Mansion) and the weary Bukovsky (Michael Gothard, The Devils of Loudon) - who spends most of film suffering after a too-close encounter with one of the vampires - as well as Britain's Home Secretary (Aubrey Morris, A Clockwork Orange) and a few others.
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Horrorview
The token American (almost everyone else bar May seems to be British) is played by Steve Railsback, who stars with Mathilda May and Peter Firth (together with various appearances by the occasional respected actor such as Patrick Stewart) in a very silly but very entertaining horror flick ...
It has to be said that Lifeforce does get VERY funny at times … but Steve Railsback really doesn't help matters much with his terrible performance … As for Peter Firth, hahaha! There is so much pleasure to be obtained from this guy's performance as the SAS Colonel. BTW That isn't a compliment.
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Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot
While Carlsen and SAS colonel Caine (EQUUS’ Peter Firth) are following a trail of desiccated corpses in pursuit of May (it’s easier for a sexy nude woman to hide in Hyde Park than you think), the screenplay by Dan O’Bannon (ALIEN) and Don Jakoby (BLUE THUNDER) leaps from science fiction to medical thriller, AIDS allegory, and finally full-tilt zombie movie with London in a state of martial law and a gun-wielding Firth careening through crowds of life-sucking undead haunting the streets.
O’Bannon and Jakoby’s dialogue is hilariously arch at times, but performed at a perfect pitch by pros like Frank Finlay (an Oscar nominee for OTHELLO), Michael Gothard (FOR YOUR EYES ONLY), and a pre-Picard Patrick Stewart, whose makeout scene with Railsback draws screams. Props to director Tobe Hooper (THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE) for keeping LIFEFORCE from going off the rails-a difficult feat for a film as over the top as this one.
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Movie House Commentary
This is arguably the single best movie in history to watch stoned, maybe even better than 2001: A Space Odyssey, because the Kubrick movie provides only the rich visuals, but no laughs. This one also has the look and the sound, and its bizarre, often self-contradictory plot is a laugh a minute.
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Marco Lanzagorta on PopMatters
Lifeforce presents a rather unusual apocalyptic tale of epic proportions. As the film begins, a crew of intrepid astronauts discovers two naked men and one naked girl inside a weird alien ship hidden in the tail of Halley’s comet. These three humanoids are terrifying vampires that feed on the “lifeforce" that resides inside every living creature. When these creatures are brought to Earth, all hell breaks loose.
Lifeforce has several other worthy attributes: a rousing score by the legendary Henry Mancini, solid direction by Hooper, bizarre production designs, gory special effects, exciting action sequences, and decent acting … Therefore, even though Halloween III, The Keep and Lifeforce have moments that drive them into the realm of absurdity, they have many quality assets that raise them above most horror films of the period.
Most significantly, they attempted to present original ideas within an artistically stagnant period of the genre. The early ‘80s was an era in which horror had been reduced to formulaic slasher flicks. Thus, instead of bashing Halloween III, The Keep, and Lifeforce for their silliness, one should admire them for trying to be radically different, venturing into new uncharted lands of cinematic terror. As such, they represent the limits, and the liabilities, of the horror film.
Full review
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The Aisle Seat
Tobe Hooper's sci-fi extravaganza, LIFEFORCE, … has become something of a cult classic over the years and remains a guilty pleasure shared by many fans around the world.
No other movie in the annals of cinema can boast a naked space vampiress, London burning up in flames, countless outrageously bad performances from noted British thesps, AND a great score by Henry Mancini to round it off. Throw in direction that treats the epic story as if it's a comedy, and you should have an indication why the film's popularity is higher now than it ever was back in 1985 …
If you haven't seen LIFEFORCE, I think I've made it clear by now why this film holds so much entertainment value for those of us who treasure this sort of thing. Co-writer Don Jakoby later blasted Tobe Hooper, claiming he mis-directed the entire film and that he edited sequences as if they were comedic -- a charge that nearly every frame of the movie could be used as evidence to support.
It's a '50s "B" sci-fi movie blown up to epic proportions, and as Jakoby stated, it's played so TOTALLY straight it threatens to veer into self-parody throughout.
In fact, not only does the film boast excellent special FX, but it also contains atmospheric photography from Alan Hume (a vet of many fine British films, including several James Bond pictures), expensive sets by John Graysmark, and a gorgeously bombastic, melodic music score by Henry Mancini that's rightfully regarded as one of the finest of the 1980s …
You can't say that LIFEFORCE is a good movie, but it's impossible not to get caught up in the fun of it. I've shown the movie to a bunch of friends over the years, and all of them got a major kick out of it -- it's simply too unusual, too incredible not to.
With the biggest effects to be seen this side of "Star Wars," some of the most unintentionally funny dialogue of the '80s, and the worst acting by competent actors you may ever see (although Mathilda scores a 10 for her "performance"), LIFEFORCE throws in everything but the kitchen sink in an effort to make the picture enormously entertaining.
And entertaining it is -- right down to the last shots of Firth watching as the ship of extraterrestrial vamps flies away from Earth at the very last minute. We're all saved, and a veritable B-movie classic comes to a fitting, perfect end.
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Slant Magazine
… Col. Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback) is actively interrogated by a host of military men, including Col. Colin Caine (Peter Firth), a gung-ho angry young man who eventually loses his nerve once he sees first-hand the naked sex vampires from space that have come to Earth for the sole purpose of creating an incoherent metaphor for the fear of sex rampant throughout the AIDS crisis of the '80s. Terror is, after all, the only appropriate response.
Full review
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Matt Wedge on The Parallax Review
Lifeforce is one of the first films that the Cannon Group rolled the dice on with a big budget. As with most of their grasping attempts to hit it big, their roll came up snake eyes. With a budget reported in excess of twenty-five million dollars, Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires is a sprawling, messy epic with moments of startling horror interspersed with silly plot twists, and characters acting in bizarre ways that somehow make sense when filtered through Hooper’s oddball view of the world.
There’s enough plot in Lifeforce to fill a series of films …
The humanoids are brought to London, where Dr.’s Fallada (Frank Finlay) and Bukovsky (Michael Gothard) of the “Space Research Centre” puzzle over them. After finally agreeing that the humanoids are dead, they decide to begin dissection of the bodies. But at that moment, the woman (Mathilda May, who spends roughly ninety percent of her screen time in the buff) awakens and sucks the “lifeforce” from the body of a soldier, leaving a dried-out husk of a man behind. The woman makes her escape, and her victim eventually rises from the “dead” and attacks a doctor, taking his “lifeforce,” returning him to his natural state. Finally getting a clue, the authorities lock up the soldier and the husk that was the doctor ...
It may sound like I’m mocking Lifeforce, but I watched the film with a big, goofy smile on my face. Right from the opening credits that play out to a pounding Henry Mancini score (that feels like it was composed for an entirely different movie - one that features castles and swordplay, not spaceships and insane asylums) before leading into an unconvincing model of the space shuttle wobbly approaching a matte painting of Halley’s comet, I knew I was in for a treat ...
Even the cast that was assembled bears the mark of a loosening of Cannon’s notoriously tight purse strings. While Steve Railsback and Peter Firth aren’t marquee names, they bring a level of craft and commitment to the silly material that many bigger names would have lacked.
The supporting cast (Finlay, Gothard, Patrick Stewart, Aubrey Morris, Nicholas Ball) share the same ability to elevate the material beyond what is on the page. Perhaps it’s stereotypical to say so, but Lifeforce feels like the ultimate proof that stage-trained British actors have the world’s best ability to hit their marks and deliver the cheesiest dialogue in the goofiest films without a trace of self-awareness or embarrassment.
Hooper takes great advantage of the idea of the British “stiff upper lip” by mining it for incidental comedy. One of my favorite scenes in the film occurs in the third act: As London is burning to the ground (by way of some terrific model work), Carlson and Caine visit the Prime Minister in an underground bunker. While the world collapses around them, the Prime Minister’s secretary pleasantly offers them a seat and asks if they would like a cup of tea. It’s a throwaway scene that adds nothing to the story, but it’s a hilarious bit of straight-faced comedy that fits into the overall goofy tone of the film.
While Hooper lands some impressive scares early on, the film is less horror and more a sci-fi/action flick. As such, it succeeds admirably, in spite of the story problems. The third act destruction of London is quite stunning. Besides the great model work, hundreds of extras roam the streets as zombie-like creatures, cars flip and explode with aplomb, and amidst it all, Dykstra’s swirling visual effects act as the cherry on top of the sundae. It may sound like overkill, but that’s a term that Tobe Hooper has never understood. He uses all the ingredients to create a convincing tone of apocalyptic doom that adds a little weight to a movie that started out silly and only became more so as it went along.
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Moria Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy film review
Lifeforce is a film that squarely divides opinion. It was a box-office flop at the time it came out and was roundly trashed by critics. A 1985 end of year reviewers’ poll in Sight and Sound magazine saw Lifeforce placed in both one critic’s Top 10 and listed as another critic’s worst film of the year. Audiences since divide between either tossing Lifeforce into Golden Turkey status and those who see a flawed brilliance in it …
If nothing else, it is a conceptually extraordinarily ambitious film that bites off far more than it is ever capable of coherently presenting. The sheer profusion of ideas that it wields bewildered most audiences but these actually prove to be its pleasure. It comes across as a dazzling conceptual blend of metaphysical whodunnit - sort of a supernatural variation on John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) - an ingenious highbrow science-fiction reworking of classical vampire mythology and a big-budget apocalyptic effects horror show. Lifeforce can even sort of be construed as a science-fictional reworking of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) - note parallels between Carlsen’s journey into the comet and Jonathan Harker’s opening journey to Castle Dracula in Stoker, and the later scenes using hypnosis of a victim to track the vampire …
Hooper does impress as the conflict takes on more and more massively scaled proportions - this is one of the few vampire films to take into account the fact that the spread of vampirism must be exponential. The images of London under attack are impressively mounted. Lifeforce is certainly not a film that lets its pretensions get away with it - it has that O’Bannon-esque sense of fatalistic black humour - not even the British Prime Minister is allowed to get above his station and is shown furtively vampirising his secretary behind a filing cabinet. John Dykstra’s visual effects and Nick Maley’s makeup effects are excellent.
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The Terror Trap
Outrageous sci-fi/horror outing with alien vampires disguised as humans that travel to earth via Haley's Comet to claim victims, causing an apocalyptic outbreak of zombification in the UK.
Just as ridiculous as it sounds - and surely not Hooper's finest hour - yet it's shamelessly fun.
Full review
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Roderick Heath on This Island Rod
Imaginative, overwrought, and freakishly bizarre, Lifeforce, as cinema history’s only would-be blockbuster apocalyptic alien vampire nudie flick, can hardly be accused of being mere mundane product …
Hooper’s gift for narratives that slowly gather in intensity and dynamism is still on display in this adaptation of Colin Wilson’s more literally titled novel “The Space Vampires”, and the film sports some of the most inspired imagery of sci-fi and horror movie history, even if the many interwoven strands of generic influence and striking originality slip out of his grasp for a lack of rigorous grip on tone and exposition. Lifeforce in many respects sticks close to the general template of the British sci-fi tradition, as exemplified by John Wyndham and Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass stories, and indeed the whole story comes to bear a close resemblance to a more fanciful version of Quatermass and the Pit in particular. Lifeforce nonetheless commences squarely in Alien territory, partly explained by the fact the script was co-written by Dan O’Bannon, as a super-sophisticated space shuttle, the Churchill, a joint UK-NASA mission, travels to intercept and study Halley’s Comet.
The crew of the Churchill, led by Col. Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback), discover a colossal space craft they find hidden within the comb of the comet, a ship which resembles a haunted castle in space. Exploring the inside, they find the dessicated remains a thousands of bat-like humanoid creatures, and then three seemingly perfect, naked humans in suspended animation in crystalline cells, two males (Christopher Jagger and Bill Malin) and a female (Mathilda May) who proves immediately, hauntingly fascinating to Carlsen. He and his crewmates haul these specimens to their own ship and set off homeward. Several weeks later, the Churchill reaches Earth, but doesn’t answer signals, so NASA launches the shuttle Columbia to intercept it.
The Americans find the crew dead, their bodies incinerated in fire, but the three aliens are untouched. Salvaged and returned to the headquarters of a European space agency in London, the specimens are watched over by the Churchill mission’s masterminds, Bukovsky (Michael Gothard) and Fallada (Frank Finlay). The female alien comes to life and seems to suck the life out of a guard, and escapes into the London night. The guard proves however to be the victim of a form vampirism that drains not blood but living energy. The drained come to life, seek out their own victims, but disintegrate messily if they spend too long without feeding.
Meanwhile the Churchill’s ejected escape pod lands in Texas, proving to contain Carlsen, exhausted but otherwise in good condition, and he’s swiftly flown to London to narrate his story to Bukovsky, Fallada, and SAS investigator Col. Caine (Peter Firth), telling them how the crew was killed off one by one, found drained of life essence …
The bracing quality of Lifeforce is the unique way it tries to meld the pumped-up ambitions of ‘80s big-budget cinema with straight horror movie pizzazz, and lushly psychosexual provocation ...
The film’s problems are not, minor. Heavy editing before release, first to the European cut of just under two hours (the version I am commenting on) and then to an even less coherent American length of about 100 minutes, saw much of the film’s space for development of mood and character junked. I suspect there were nonetheless quite enough flaws in O’Bannon and Don Jakoby’s script, which is structured episodically and delays crucial revelations about Carlsen’s experiences for no particularly good effect. Bukovsky’s off-screen end and Fallada’s arbitrary revelation as a vampire before being killed seems less like a shocking twist than really clumsy, casual storytelling. The opening sequences especially are overly fast, and the film sometimes jumps from scene to scene with little warning …
Perhaps the biggest overt problem with the film is the badly miscast Railsback, who lacks the necessary sense of erotic obsession (or worthiness of obsession) that would give a charge to the otherwise desultory fumbling he does with May …
For all its faults, Lifeforce is a fairly brave, undoubtedly vigorous film. It’s the sort of work where one has the feeling that the slightest tweak in either direction could have made it totally disastrous - which, admittedly, some already find it - or uniquely brilliant. Where one can see how it could easily have been made more palatable to mainstream tastes so that it wouldn’t have been such a colossal flop, how it could have been made better and still retained its rarer edge is much more challenging …
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Tobe Hooper Appreciation Society
… even when not being parodic, the film is one of mimicry and representation -- for one, of public behavior and professional designation. The capacity with which we get to know any of our characters is in a purely public and professional mode (varying across fields of military, government, and scientific), which of course acts ironically against the film's main subject of sex and all the shame and energy that fluctuates on its unpredictable terms -- and that now the characters are made to discuss simply as a matter of total necessity. (In a film full of artifice, the expository discussion of calamitous sex is the film's most underlying artifice!) …
The only audience stand-ins we have in the film are … the government men, and with that decision of O'Bannon (and in Hooper's cinematic realization), Lifeforce forgoes being that conventional sentimental narrative and embraces its rhetorical distanciation, its presentational tone, its thoroughly British manner. If I call Hooper a rhetorical filmmaker, Lifeforce is his most blatant rhetorical exercise: removed of conventional drama, he's made instead a tonal cocktail containing "blockbuster action film," mystical-theological parable, British film, and British sci-fi-actioner, Quatermass-style.
… Lifeforce is an uneven film that never brings its thematic points to a head, nor provides explanations, rules, and logic enough to make it satisfying on a conventional level, but it is still something of a remarkable film.
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Wider Screenings
Although riddled with sexual paranoia (as opposed to misogyny), the film nonetheless stresses the psychic bond between Railsback and May. Indeed May has taken her appearance from Railsback’s own mental image of the ideal woman. This raises the possibility for a Jungian reading of the film in which May is the projected personification of Railsback’s anima.
The conflict for dominance between May and Railsback thus becomes an allegorical clash of the anima and animus and the film in turn becomes a weirdly Jungian sexual psychodrama in a field where Freudian analysis still prevails - it is no longer a loosed male id which is monstrous, but a wild anima. This is a rare conceit and done with ferocious aplomb by Hooper. Males react at the prospect of this out-of-control anima with total fear for it represents the potential collapse of their patriarchal order and thus their sexual dominance …
The film holds that the inability to reconcile the anima and animus will result in the collapse of any social order into violent anarchy and the loss of one’s life essence in a regression to another state of existence that is perhaps even stored in some part of the collective unconscious. The absurdly inventive pseudo-religiosity of this astonishing film is staggering.
Full review
Absolute Horror
Everything but the kitchen sink. It’s a phrase tossed around lightly. But it’s no exaggeration to say that LIFEFORCE tosses everything in but the kitchen in an attempt to entertain you. Actually, scratch that, it tosses everything including the kitchen sink. By the time the movie is complete, you may have to watch it again just to verify that you actually saw what you just saw. The movie is a mess of enormous proportions which I absolutely loved. Any movie that tries this hard to entertain you deserves credit - and it’s not just A for effort, the movie actually succeeds at its mission.
Full review
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Basement Rejects
Lifeforce, actually scared me the first time I saw it so many years ago. For a somewhat cheesy, B-movie flick from Cannon Films, it actually gives a nice twist on the vampire mythology. … As a vampire movie, it pushes the oldest boundaries of what constitutes a vampire and offers a somewhat reasonable explanation why we have these stories of vampires and why we haven’t seen them since the inception of the myth.
Full review
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Fernando F Croce on Cinepassion
… Hooper pays rich homage to his hosts, drawing on the British tradition of sci-fi and drollness (the perfect female shape is sculpted out of blood, tea is served as the country burns down). Much of its wryness is in the casting - wispy Peter Firth representing military authority, Frank Finlay as the relativist scientist ("Well... in a sense, we are all vampires"), plus Patrick Stewart and Michael Gothard, all of them pitching in the surrealism as Railsback and May enact their blue-tinged Liebestod. Far from the nonsensical, failed-blockbuster of its reputation, the movie is a ravishing renewal of the genre hollowed out by Star Wars …
Full review
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R.B. Armstrong on Classic Film and TV Café
Most of the cast in Lifeforce consists of solid British thespians like Finlay, Michael Gothard, and Patrick Stewart. The standout is Peter Firth (Equus), who plays Colonel Colin Caine of the Special Air Services, a no-nonsense investigator determined to track down his quarry …
Full review
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Perfesser Deviant on Cult Reviews
ESA Director Dr. Bukovsky (Michael Gothard) decides that someone should really investigate the naked space girl, which is why she has the chance to drain him a bit as well as feast upon the guard before wandering off. He claims that she’s the most feminine being he has ever encountered and is hypnotized by her naked chick-powers …
In case it’s not obvious, this film is patently ridiculous, but still a lot of fun. The idea of the end of the world showing up in the form of nekkid space vampires from Halley’s comet is so ludicrous that there’s no way that a person can’t enjoy this film unless they suffer from terminal feminism or otherwise lack a sense of humor.
Full review
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Horror Talk
The acting is strong, with Steve Railsback (The Stunt Man) and Peter Firth (Chill Factor) effective as the tormented Col. Carlsen and the enigmatic SAS Col. Caine, respectively. Railsback is somewhat over the top, but that style plays well against Firth's understated performance. The two colonels are aided on their quest by a pair of eccentric scientists, the death aficionado Fallada (Frank Finlay, Cthulhu Mansion) and the weary Bukovsky (Michael Gothard, The Devils of Loudon) - who spends most of film suffering after a too-close encounter with one of the vampires - as well as Britain's Home Secretary (Aubrey Morris, A Clockwork Orange) and a few others.
Full review
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Horrorview
The token American (almost everyone else bar May seems to be British) is played by Steve Railsback, who stars with Mathilda May and Peter Firth (together with various appearances by the occasional respected actor such as Patrick Stewart) in a very silly but very entertaining horror flick ...
It has to be said that Lifeforce does get VERY funny at times … but Steve Railsback really doesn't help matters much with his terrible performance … As for Peter Firth, hahaha! There is so much pleasure to be obtained from this guy's performance as the SAS Colonel. BTW That isn't a compliment.
Full review
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Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot
While Carlsen and SAS colonel Caine (EQUUS’ Peter Firth) are following a trail of desiccated corpses in pursuit of May (it’s easier for a sexy nude woman to hide in Hyde Park than you think), the screenplay by Dan O’Bannon (ALIEN) and Don Jakoby (BLUE THUNDER) leaps from science fiction to medical thriller, AIDS allegory, and finally full-tilt zombie movie with London in a state of martial law and a gun-wielding Firth careening through crowds of life-sucking undead haunting the streets.
O’Bannon and Jakoby’s dialogue is hilariously arch at times, but performed at a perfect pitch by pros like Frank Finlay (an Oscar nominee for OTHELLO), Michael Gothard (FOR YOUR EYES ONLY), and a pre-Picard Patrick Stewart, whose makeout scene with Railsback draws screams. Props to director Tobe Hooper (THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE) for keeping LIFEFORCE from going off the rails-a difficult feat for a film as over the top as this one.
Full review
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Movie House Commentary
This is arguably the single best movie in history to watch stoned, maybe even better than 2001: A Space Odyssey, because the Kubrick movie provides only the rich visuals, but no laughs. This one also has the look and the sound, and its bizarre, often self-contradictory plot is a laugh a minute.
Full review
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Marco Lanzagorta on PopMatters
Lifeforce presents a rather unusual apocalyptic tale of epic proportions. As the film begins, a crew of intrepid astronauts discovers two naked men and one naked girl inside a weird alien ship hidden in the tail of Halley’s comet. These three humanoids are terrifying vampires that feed on the “lifeforce" that resides inside every living creature. When these creatures are brought to Earth, all hell breaks loose.
Lifeforce has several other worthy attributes: a rousing score by the legendary Henry Mancini, solid direction by Hooper, bizarre production designs, gory special effects, exciting action sequences, and decent acting … Therefore, even though Halloween III, The Keep and Lifeforce have moments that drive them into the realm of absurdity, they have many quality assets that raise them above most horror films of the period.
Most significantly, they attempted to present original ideas within an artistically stagnant period of the genre. The early ‘80s was an era in which horror had been reduced to formulaic slasher flicks. Thus, instead of bashing Halloween III, The Keep, and Lifeforce for their silliness, one should admire them for trying to be radically different, venturing into new uncharted lands of cinematic terror. As such, they represent the limits, and the liabilities, of the horror film.
Full review
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The Aisle Seat
Tobe Hooper's sci-fi extravaganza, LIFEFORCE, … has become something of a cult classic over the years and remains a guilty pleasure shared by many fans around the world.
No other movie in the annals of cinema can boast a naked space vampiress, London burning up in flames, countless outrageously bad performances from noted British thesps, AND a great score by Henry Mancini to round it off. Throw in direction that treats the epic story as if it's a comedy, and you should have an indication why the film's popularity is higher now than it ever was back in 1985 …
If you haven't seen LIFEFORCE, I think I've made it clear by now why this film holds so much entertainment value for those of us who treasure this sort of thing. Co-writer Don Jakoby later blasted Tobe Hooper, claiming he mis-directed the entire film and that he edited sequences as if they were comedic -- a charge that nearly every frame of the movie could be used as evidence to support.
It's a '50s "B" sci-fi movie blown up to epic proportions, and as Jakoby stated, it's played so TOTALLY straight it threatens to veer into self-parody throughout.
In fact, not only does the film boast excellent special FX, but it also contains atmospheric photography from Alan Hume (a vet of many fine British films, including several James Bond pictures), expensive sets by John Graysmark, and a gorgeously bombastic, melodic music score by Henry Mancini that's rightfully regarded as one of the finest of the 1980s …
You can't say that LIFEFORCE is a good movie, but it's impossible not to get caught up in the fun of it. I've shown the movie to a bunch of friends over the years, and all of them got a major kick out of it -- it's simply too unusual, too incredible not to.
With the biggest effects to be seen this side of "Star Wars," some of the most unintentionally funny dialogue of the '80s, and the worst acting by competent actors you may ever see (although Mathilda scores a 10 for her "performance"), LIFEFORCE throws in everything but the kitchen sink in an effort to make the picture enormously entertaining.
And entertaining it is -- right down to the last shots of Firth watching as the ship of extraterrestrial vamps flies away from Earth at the very last minute. We're all saved, and a veritable B-movie classic comes to a fitting, perfect end.
Full review
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Slant Magazine
… Col. Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback) is actively interrogated by a host of military men, including Col. Colin Caine (Peter Firth), a gung-ho angry young man who eventually loses his nerve once he sees first-hand the naked sex vampires from space that have come to Earth for the sole purpose of creating an incoherent metaphor for the fear of sex rampant throughout the AIDS crisis of the '80s. Terror is, after all, the only appropriate response.
Full review
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Matt Wedge on The Parallax Review
Lifeforce is one of the first films that the Cannon Group rolled the dice on with a big budget. As with most of their grasping attempts to hit it big, their roll came up snake eyes. With a budget reported in excess of twenty-five million dollars, Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires is a sprawling, messy epic with moments of startling horror interspersed with silly plot twists, and characters acting in bizarre ways that somehow make sense when filtered through Hooper’s oddball view of the world.
There’s enough plot in Lifeforce to fill a series of films …
The humanoids are brought to London, where Dr.’s Fallada (Frank Finlay) and Bukovsky (Michael Gothard) of the “Space Research Centre” puzzle over them. After finally agreeing that the humanoids are dead, they decide to begin dissection of the bodies. But at that moment, the woman (Mathilda May, who spends roughly ninety percent of her screen time in the buff) awakens and sucks the “lifeforce” from the body of a soldier, leaving a dried-out husk of a man behind. The woman makes her escape, and her victim eventually rises from the “dead” and attacks a doctor, taking his “lifeforce,” returning him to his natural state. Finally getting a clue, the authorities lock up the soldier and the husk that was the doctor ...
It may sound like I’m mocking Lifeforce, but I watched the film with a big, goofy smile on my face. Right from the opening credits that play out to a pounding Henry Mancini score (that feels like it was composed for an entirely different movie - one that features castles and swordplay, not spaceships and insane asylums) before leading into an unconvincing model of the space shuttle wobbly approaching a matte painting of Halley’s comet, I knew I was in for a treat ...
Even the cast that was assembled bears the mark of a loosening of Cannon’s notoriously tight purse strings. While Steve Railsback and Peter Firth aren’t marquee names, they bring a level of craft and commitment to the silly material that many bigger names would have lacked.
The supporting cast (Finlay, Gothard, Patrick Stewart, Aubrey Morris, Nicholas Ball) share the same ability to elevate the material beyond what is on the page. Perhaps it’s stereotypical to say so, but Lifeforce feels like the ultimate proof that stage-trained British actors have the world’s best ability to hit their marks and deliver the cheesiest dialogue in the goofiest films without a trace of self-awareness or embarrassment.
Hooper takes great advantage of the idea of the British “stiff upper lip” by mining it for incidental comedy. One of my favorite scenes in the film occurs in the third act: As London is burning to the ground (by way of some terrific model work), Carlson and Caine visit the Prime Minister in an underground bunker. While the world collapses around them, the Prime Minister’s secretary pleasantly offers them a seat and asks if they would like a cup of tea. It’s a throwaway scene that adds nothing to the story, but it’s a hilarious bit of straight-faced comedy that fits into the overall goofy tone of the film.
While Hooper lands some impressive scares early on, the film is less horror and more a sci-fi/action flick. As such, it succeeds admirably, in spite of the story problems. The third act destruction of London is quite stunning. Besides the great model work, hundreds of extras roam the streets as zombie-like creatures, cars flip and explode with aplomb, and amidst it all, Dykstra’s swirling visual effects act as the cherry on top of the sundae. It may sound like overkill, but that’s a term that Tobe Hooper has never understood. He uses all the ingredients to create a convincing tone of apocalyptic doom that adds a little weight to a movie that started out silly and only became more so as it went along.
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Moria Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy film review
Lifeforce is a film that squarely divides opinion. It was a box-office flop at the time it came out and was roundly trashed by critics. A 1985 end of year reviewers’ poll in Sight and Sound magazine saw Lifeforce placed in both one critic’s Top 10 and listed as another critic’s worst film of the year. Audiences since divide between either tossing Lifeforce into Golden Turkey status and those who see a flawed brilliance in it …
If nothing else, it is a conceptually extraordinarily ambitious film that bites off far more than it is ever capable of coherently presenting. The sheer profusion of ideas that it wields bewildered most audiences but these actually prove to be its pleasure. It comes across as a dazzling conceptual blend of metaphysical whodunnit - sort of a supernatural variation on John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) - an ingenious highbrow science-fiction reworking of classical vampire mythology and a big-budget apocalyptic effects horror show. Lifeforce can even sort of be construed as a science-fictional reworking of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) - note parallels between Carlsen’s journey into the comet and Jonathan Harker’s opening journey to Castle Dracula in Stoker, and the later scenes using hypnosis of a victim to track the vampire …
Hooper does impress as the conflict takes on more and more massively scaled proportions - this is one of the few vampire films to take into account the fact that the spread of vampirism must be exponential. The images of London under attack are impressively mounted. Lifeforce is certainly not a film that lets its pretensions get away with it - it has that O’Bannon-esque sense of fatalistic black humour - not even the British Prime Minister is allowed to get above his station and is shown furtively vampirising his secretary behind a filing cabinet. John Dykstra’s visual effects and Nick Maley’s makeup effects are excellent.
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The Terror Trap
Outrageous sci-fi/horror outing with alien vampires disguised as humans that travel to earth via Haley's Comet to claim victims, causing an apocalyptic outbreak of zombification in the UK.
Just as ridiculous as it sounds - and surely not Hooper's finest hour - yet it's shamelessly fun.
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Roderick Heath on This Island Rod
Imaginative, overwrought, and freakishly bizarre, Lifeforce, as cinema history’s only would-be blockbuster apocalyptic alien vampire nudie flick, can hardly be accused of being mere mundane product …
Hooper’s gift for narratives that slowly gather in intensity and dynamism is still on display in this adaptation of Colin Wilson’s more literally titled novel “The Space Vampires”, and the film sports some of the most inspired imagery of sci-fi and horror movie history, even if the many interwoven strands of generic influence and striking originality slip out of his grasp for a lack of rigorous grip on tone and exposition. Lifeforce in many respects sticks close to the general template of the British sci-fi tradition, as exemplified by John Wyndham and Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass stories, and indeed the whole story comes to bear a close resemblance to a more fanciful version of Quatermass and the Pit in particular. Lifeforce nonetheless commences squarely in Alien territory, partly explained by the fact the script was co-written by Dan O’Bannon, as a super-sophisticated space shuttle, the Churchill, a joint UK-NASA mission, travels to intercept and study Halley’s Comet.
The crew of the Churchill, led by Col. Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback), discover a colossal space craft they find hidden within the comb of the comet, a ship which resembles a haunted castle in space. Exploring the inside, they find the dessicated remains a thousands of bat-like humanoid creatures, and then three seemingly perfect, naked humans in suspended animation in crystalline cells, two males (Christopher Jagger and Bill Malin) and a female (Mathilda May) who proves immediately, hauntingly fascinating to Carlsen. He and his crewmates haul these specimens to their own ship and set off homeward. Several weeks later, the Churchill reaches Earth, but doesn’t answer signals, so NASA launches the shuttle Columbia to intercept it.
The Americans find the crew dead, their bodies incinerated in fire, but the three aliens are untouched. Salvaged and returned to the headquarters of a European space agency in London, the specimens are watched over by the Churchill mission’s masterminds, Bukovsky (Michael Gothard) and Fallada (Frank Finlay). The female alien comes to life and seems to suck the life out of a guard, and escapes into the London night. The guard proves however to be the victim of a form vampirism that drains not blood but living energy. The drained come to life, seek out their own victims, but disintegrate messily if they spend too long without feeding.
Meanwhile the Churchill’s ejected escape pod lands in Texas, proving to contain Carlsen, exhausted but otherwise in good condition, and he’s swiftly flown to London to narrate his story to Bukovsky, Fallada, and SAS investigator Col. Caine (Peter Firth), telling them how the crew was killed off one by one, found drained of life essence …
The bracing quality of Lifeforce is the unique way it tries to meld the pumped-up ambitions of ‘80s big-budget cinema with straight horror movie pizzazz, and lushly psychosexual provocation ...
The film’s problems are not, minor. Heavy editing before release, first to the European cut of just under two hours (the version I am commenting on) and then to an even less coherent American length of about 100 minutes, saw much of the film’s space for development of mood and character junked. I suspect there were nonetheless quite enough flaws in O’Bannon and Don Jakoby’s script, which is structured episodically and delays crucial revelations about Carlsen’s experiences for no particularly good effect. Bukovsky’s off-screen end and Fallada’s arbitrary revelation as a vampire before being killed seems less like a shocking twist than really clumsy, casual storytelling. The opening sequences especially are overly fast, and the film sometimes jumps from scene to scene with little warning …
Perhaps the biggest overt problem with the film is the badly miscast Railsback, who lacks the necessary sense of erotic obsession (or worthiness of obsession) that would give a charge to the otherwise desultory fumbling he does with May …
For all its faults, Lifeforce is a fairly brave, undoubtedly vigorous film. It’s the sort of work where one has the feeling that the slightest tweak in either direction could have made it totally disastrous - which, admittedly, some already find it - or uniquely brilliant. Where one can see how it could easily have been made more palatable to mainstream tastes so that it wouldn’t have been such a colossal flop, how it could have been made better and still retained its rarer edge is much more challenging …
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Tobe Hooper Appreciation Society
… even when not being parodic, the film is one of mimicry and representation -- for one, of public behavior and professional designation. The capacity with which we get to know any of our characters is in a purely public and professional mode (varying across fields of military, government, and scientific), which of course acts ironically against the film's main subject of sex and all the shame and energy that fluctuates on its unpredictable terms -- and that now the characters are made to discuss simply as a matter of total necessity. (In a film full of artifice, the expository discussion of calamitous sex is the film's most underlying artifice!) …
The only audience stand-ins we have in the film are … the government men, and with that decision of O'Bannon (and in Hooper's cinematic realization), Lifeforce forgoes being that conventional sentimental narrative and embraces its rhetorical distanciation, its presentational tone, its thoroughly British manner. If I call Hooper a rhetorical filmmaker, Lifeforce is his most blatant rhetorical exercise: removed of conventional drama, he's made instead a tonal cocktail containing "blockbuster action film," mystical-theological parable, British film, and British sci-fi-actioner, Quatermass-style.
… Lifeforce is an uneven film that never brings its thematic points to a head, nor provides explanations, rules, and logic enough to make it satisfying on a conventional level, but it is still something of a remarkable film.
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Wider Screenings
Although riddled with sexual paranoia (as opposed to misogyny), the film nonetheless stresses the psychic bond between Railsback and May. Indeed May has taken her appearance from Railsback’s own mental image of the ideal woman. This raises the possibility for a Jungian reading of the film in which May is the projected personification of Railsback’s anima.
The conflict for dominance between May and Railsback thus becomes an allegorical clash of the anima and animus and the film in turn becomes a weirdly Jungian sexual psychodrama in a field where Freudian analysis still prevails - it is no longer a loosed male id which is monstrous, but a wild anima. This is a rare conceit and done with ferocious aplomb by Hooper. Males react at the prospect of this out-of-control anima with total fear for it represents the potential collapse of their patriarchal order and thus their sexual dominance …
The film holds that the inability to reconcile the anima and animus will result in the collapse of any social order into violent anarchy and the loss of one’s life essence in a regression to another state of existence that is perhaps even stored in some part of the collective unconscious. The absurdly inventive pseudo-religiosity of this astonishing film is staggering.
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