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Lifeforce (1985)Whether you think Lifeforce is great depends a lot on your criteria for enjoying movies. It has to be said that Lifeforce is a big, stupid film - full of pointless, spectacular deaths, pointless, spectacular nudity and yes, pointless, spectacular explosions. It was never going to win the Best Picture Oscar, but who cares? If they were giving out Oscars for "best use of a pair of enormous gazongas", I'm sure it would have made runner-up, at least. What makes Lifeforce even better is that it has a load of bad sci-fi thrown in, and even better (for me, anyway) it gives us Brits a chance to be part of the space race, firing off in space shuttle Churchill for a rendevous with Halley's Comet before cocking it up spectacularly in typically British sweaty style, and having to be saved by the Yanks in Columbia. Three "perfectly preserved" naked humans (one girl, two blokes) are in the centre of the craft, housed inside giant crystals. As the astronauts make plans to bring them back with them, the alien ship starts to change, and one of the crew members starts mumbling to himself, "something's happening to me.... what's wrong?" Before you can say "loads, probably", the stricken Churchill has drifted back into Earth's gravitational pull, and the Columbia is sent up to find out why they're not answering transmissions. The ship has been burned out, with no-one alive - but the naked aliens are still there... Back on Earth in a top secret military establishment, the girl wastes no time in waking up, sucking the life out of a passing pervert, and buggering off in spectacular style. ("Come to daddy," leers one ill-fated security guard, waving a sandwich at her). Over in Texas, the Churchill's escape pod has landed, containing one survivor, Col Tom Carlson, who immediately starts babbling on about how he "couldn't expose the world to what we brought back with us... I was determined to destroy them all!" "Part of me didn't want to leave... she killed all my friends and I still didn't want to leave. Leaving her was the hardest thing I ever did." Even in the world of lame Brit horror heroes, Col Carlson is a drip. He's got a mental link with the female vampire for some reason, so they decide to use him to track her down (the scene where she attacks him in bed and rubs her knockers in his face is pure Hammer Horror) and eventually find that she's swapped bodies and pulled a flat-capped farmer with his own Volvo. Cue entertaining rant by a sweaty Carlson: "She's... pulling... up... her skirt..." etc. Then, without any kind of warning at all, we suddenly find that there are zombies - zombies, I tell you - in the shadows of Big Ben (symbolising the fact that the undead have taken over the capital, I suppose, but it's anyone's guess, really). Meanwhile, the girl has made her way to Thurlstone, an asylum for the criminally insane in Yorkshire, which is run by Dr Armstong (Star Trek slap-head Patrick Stewart). Carlson slaps her about a bit, then snogs her, but the alien has long since vacated her body, and entered that of Jeffrey Sykes, a child murderer. Keeping up? It doesn't matter really. She's not actually in Sykes' head, and everyone jumps to the conclusion that she's actually in Armstong's. The poor bloke gets beaten up, drugged by his own staff and piled into the back of the helicopter, Carlson realising that she's been luring him away from the capital, where all hell is breaking loose... Anyone who's seen Hammer's Quatermass And The Pit can guess what's coming next, as a welter of London landmarks are destroyed by cannibalistic zombies in an orgy of sub-Michael Jackson's Thriller violence. The film ends with more nudity, some spectacular chases and much head exploding pyrotechnics. Lifeforce is a brilliant film, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It makes no sense, but who needs sense? If you want clever-clever, go and watch Vanilla Sky. If you want huge soul-collecting alien spaceships, zombie prime ministers and London under NATO martial law, track down Lifeforce, switch off your brain and enjoy. "She's not a woman, she'll destroy you!" "She's destroyed worlds..."
Last updated: February 24, 2010
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The
SFX are pretty good too (which puts it apart from pretty much every other
Brit horror apart from American Werewolf), the first scenes being the
Churchill in space, approaching a massive alien spaceship hidden in the
tail of the comet. The astronauts fly through the alien ship with their
rocket packs and find thousands of dead giant bats floating around inside...
but that's not all...
Call
for Colonel Kane of the SAS, a bubble permed mummy's boy in a turtleneck
sweater and raincoat ("That's not for publication" he barks
at a pressman of his arrival). He meets up with Frank Finlay's doctor
(who happens to be an expert on life after death) and they start piecing
together the mystery of the killer naked woman, on the way discovering
that her dessicated victims have the rather unfortunate habit of waking
up after two hours and sucking the life out of the nearest living person
("I had an idea it could be passed on," says Finlay. "I
wouldn't be surprised if we were dealing with a pattern here...").
The other two aliens have also woken up, and shown themselves to be impervious
to bullets and grenades... oh-oh...
