RE:View: Life Force
At the age of 31 Tobe Hooper delivered one of the greatest horror movies of all time for under $140K. Texas Chainsaw Massacre rewrote the rules of American horror as a genre. There was something intimate to the horror of Chainsaw. It spoke to Baby Boomers and told them the old rural world must be cast aside. That it was degenerate, corrupt, and their parents were right to abandon it.
A lot of Chainsaw’s success derived from its anti-rural bigotry that Baby Boomers lapped up like mother’s milk at a Sawyer family reunion.
Tobe Hooper had tapped into the zeitgeist of the early 1970s and was now the hot young director that studios wanted to work with. And Hooper delivered; Salem’s Lot was something unique in that it was a horror mini-series
This vampire mini-series, with the classic Nosferatu in it, made for the kind of killer ratings that let Tobe have a shot at the big time.
Poltergeist was the first production that Stephen Spielberg wrote but opted not to direct himself. And again Hooper had a massive hit on his hands.
It was said at the time that if Tobe Hooper had sold his soul for his early successes, the devil came for his due when Life Force hit the theaters.
Yes, this is the big titty naked space vampire girl movie.
But it actually deserves a little more respect than it usually gets. Not a lot more you understand but a little more.
Hooper signed a multi-picture deal with Canon Films (Damn, what was he think’n) granted at first Golan and Globus treated Hooper like a prince of the picture palaces. The Space Vampires (the original title) was a Colin Wilson novel that was heavily based in Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos. A race of space vampires are found and are inadvertently brought to Earth. It was very much a cosmic horror kind of novel.
This was the film’s first problem. Hooper had only ever directed intimate horror stories, usually, it was about a family, or close friends, and neighbors. World-ending threats of uncaring aliens who viewed the human race as insects to be ignored or squashed depending on what inconvenienced them the least was the kind of story that was way outside Hooper’s comfort zone.
He had also been given what was in its day a fairly hefty budget of $25 million, remember this was a 1985 film, Ghostbusters which was released the same year and had a budget of $30 million. Hooper had the kind of talent that thrives in a pecuniary desert but drowns in deep financial waters.
For various tax reasons and god-only-knows what other fiscal legerdemain Canon was performing, the film would be made in the UK with a primarily British cast. Given that he had to work with the British anyway, Hooper decided he was going to make his own Hammer film. The British cast and crew upon hearing this vision immediately assumed that their Yank director was remaking Quatermass and the Pit (which I will get to before Halloween 23 if it kills me), instead of The Horror of Dracula (which is what Hooper had in mind). Life Force was getting made by three different groups of people who were trying to make three different kinds of film. Not a formula for success.
The film starts with an expedition to Halley’s Comet. The comet was due to make a fly-by in 1986 and there had been quite a bit of interest building over the Earth’s once-every-76-years visitor. It was literally a once-in-a-lifetime event. The catastrophic theory of Dinosaur extinction had become popularly accepted, and there were quite a few arguments being made about it being a comet that wiped out T-Rex and company and not an asteroid. Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer (a story about a comet hitting the Earth) had been a number one New York Times Bestseller. Consequently, Halley’s Comet as a harbinger of destruction was a fairly decent hook in 1985.
John Dykstra did the effects, so they were first-rate, although the time and budget weren’t equal to Star Wars. I’m afraid, the spaceship, Churchill was rather uninspired. It was just a kit-smashed space shuttle model. One thing that did surprise me was a half-hearted explanation of the Churchill’s NERVA engine providing enough thrust to simulate one gee gravity. There is no way a NERVA engine could have done that but it was nice that Hooper made the effort.
So the Churchill gets close to Haley’s Comet and the radar detects a large metal object in the comet’s coma. The European Space Agency mission’s American commander Colonel Carlson decides to investigate. The comet has cut off all communications with Earth. An away team enters what is of course an alien spaceship. Its crew are long dead and resemble larger batlike creatures.
As the team searches they find three apparent homo sapiens, who are in crystal cases and nude. Carlson who finds himself strangely drawn to the girl, opts to take them aboard Churchill.
This alien spaceship scene is honestly pretty impressive. The interior is vast, and cathedral-like with the three aliens and their crystal coffins forming the top of a pyramid. (Sorry, no picture, obvious reasons)
The story then jumps to a few weeks later. Churchill has returned to Earth and gone into orbit but is completely unresponsive. It has been so since leaving Halley’s Comet. Space Shuttle Columbia launches and its astronauts board the Churchill. The interior is completely burned out, and the crew is dead but much to their surprise they find the three crystal sarcophagi and their unexpected nature-loving occupants are fine, if also apparently dead. Churchill’s escape pod is missing. The bad call of taking them down to Earth for study is made.
Given it’s budget the movie had a cast that was pretty well known in it’s day. Most have faded with time, some of you might remember Frank Finlay, and all of you would recognize Patrick Stewart. The Naked Alien Girl was the debut performance by French actress Mathilda May, who went on to have a decent career in her home country. Golan and Globus would never spend big money on the on-camera talent but would turn their wallets upside down for the behind-the-scenes guys (who are always less expensive). The music was immense, enhancing the sense of scale the film was going for, it was performed by the London Symphony and conducted by its composer, Henry Mancini.
After the initial once-over of the humanoid corpses is made, the scientists leave planning to do a first-rate dissection in the morning, (probably shouldn’t have put it off, guys). The girl sits up and she starts to kiss an astonished security guard, then there is an 80s light show where she drains her victim of his life energy through his mouth and eyes leaving him a desiccated husk. Mathilda May doesn’t get enough credit here because the audience is always too distracted by her body to bother with observing her performance which was pretty decent. May had been a ballerina, consequently, she was well experienced in giving a purely physical performance.
An SAS Colonel shows up at the lab and “takes charge of things.” I guess. He spends a lot of his time having an odd conversation with Frank Finlay’s’ character on the subject of death. Which he is a little obsessed with for whatever reason.
It’s interrupted by a frantic phone call. The dead security guard just got up and drained the life out of one of the doctors examining him. This was exactly two hours after he died. Finlay orders both the security guard and the new corpse locked up. Good call, exactly two hours later the corpse rises and the security guard is hungry again. When neither can feed they explode in a cloud of dust.
This is the scene where the Doctor gets drained, it is worth looking at for the quality of the zombie-puppet.
The alien ship has left the tail of Halley’s Comet and is now taking up orbit around Earth.
The Colonel really wants to find the naked alien girl now. But just then the Churchill’s escape capsule is found and the mission commander Carlson is in it, so he’d like a word or two with him as well.
Tobe Hooper had shot extensive scenes chronicling the one-by-one death of Churchill’s crew until only Carlson remained. The problem was that including all of those scenes would have resulted in a 3 ½ hour movie, which Canon Films didn’t want. Hooper also admitted that at the end of the day, it was telling the same story twice. Still, kind of a pity we didn’t get those scenes.
With no other leads available, Carlson volunteers to be hypnotized as he seems to have some kind of psychic link with “The Girl”. And indeed he does, he snoops in on her as she is seducing a middle-aged man, using another woman’s body. Since Carlson could identify the car’s license plate they have a solid lead on “The Girl”. Her current body belongs to a nurse at a mental hospital where Patrick Stewart is the head physician.
The other two male vampires have escaped by now.
With the scenery now confined to the mental hospital’s interior, Life Force changes from a Hammer Film to a Tobe Hooper flick with a lot of screaming and inappropriate sexual tension. Carlson quickly works out that Dr. Stewart is “The Girl’s” new home. And he does a sobbing interrogation of her. He knows she’ll destroy the world but he’s in love with her.
He does however determine that her body is in London and that this whole trip was a ruse to give her companions a chance to set off a vampire-zombie apocalypse in London.
And I just realized that 28 Days Later was NOT the first Rager Zombie movie. That was Quatermass and Pitt, although Life Force was the first movie where the Ragers were actually undead. Oh, and Frank Finlay killed one of the aliens. He used a lead-clad iron sword, two inches below the heart.
It turns out the vampires had come to Earth to feed before and this was the recommended method for killing them. However a lead round would do the job too if it was in the right place.
By the time Carlson and the colonel get back to London, the city is in the midst of the worst disaster since the Blitz.
The London vampire apocalypse is well underway. Carlson is trying to find “The Girl,” while the Colonel looks up Frank Finlay, who has been turned by now. Finlay gives a Quatermass-like speech that fills in the rest of the exposition. The space vampires come to Earth to harvest human life force now and then, which they use as power. The remaining male alien is absorbing the energy and “The Girl” is transmitting it up to the ship.
The Colonel finds the male vampire and kills him with Frank Finlay’s weird sword.
The Colonel eventually finds Carlson and “The Girl.” Yes, they are boning. The Colonel throws Carlson the vampire sword. Carlson impales The Girl and himself. They both teleport up to the ship, and it doesn’t explode like I was expecting it just breaks orbit and heads into deep space having apparently gotten everything it wanted. So the Space Vampires won?
I’m not sure and I don’t think Hooper was sure either.
I had originally planned to make this a Vampire Rules post but the rules were just too inconsistent for that.
But since this is now a RE:View I have to answer the question; Does it hold up?
Oddly enough, yes. Life Force was always a weak film but it has actually gained a bit of charm over the decades. All of the effects were analog and live models. They always hold up better over time than CG animation. The music really was trying to sell the original plot of cosmic horror, it was sweeping, menacing, and grand.
Mathilda May does a lot with a very, very little.
The screenplay by Dan O’Bannon wasn’t his best work but a lot of that could be blamed on Hooper injecting his Hooperisms into it.
But I think it’s biggest problem was perhaps the title. Originally, it was simply called, The Space Vampires, Golan and Globus changed it at the last second.
If the audience had gone into a movie titled, The Space Vampires, their expectations would have been entirely different.
Life Force is currently free to watch on Tubi with commercials.
