Back in 1976 an author called Colin Wilson wrote a book called The Space Vampires. It was moderately well-received, and so in 1985 they decided to adapt it into a movie. The screenplay was written by Dan O'Bannon of Alien fame, it was directed by Tobe Hooper, the musical score was from none other than Henry Mancini, it had a budget of $25 million and the cast list was a who's who of British talent of the time (and the proposed cast list read like a Doctor Who cast reunion). The movie that resulted from this was called Lifeforce, and while it might have something of a cult following now, at the time it was a box office bomb and didn't even make back 50% of its budget at the US box office.
A British and American space mission is investigating Hailey's Comet when they discover a large spacecraft in the comet's corona. The craft is apparently long-derelict, containing several hundred dessicated giant bat creatures and three naked humanoids in some sort of stasis pods. Throwing caution (and the first contact protocols) out of the window, the astronauts decide to take the three humanoids back with them. By the time the craft returns to Earth, however, all but one of the crew are dead, and when one of the naked humanoids is taken out of her pod for study, she promptly revives and starts draining the energy (or "lifeforce", natch) out of anyone she kisses. And of course, anyone killed in this way turns into a shrivelled-up zombie who has to feed of someone else in the same way or explode into dust (except when they don't, but we'll get to that later). It ends up being up to the one surviving astronaut, Colonel Tom Carlsen, and SAS Colonel Colin Caine (who spends the movie running around in an impeccable turtleneck and raincoat, like a Tory John Constantine) to save London (and theoretically the rest of the world) from being sucked dry by the space vampires.
That's a long plot synopsis, and believe me I've made it pretty brief. This, unfortunately, was one of the things that led to Lifeforce's downfall - it has a very long and complicated story. This was made worse by two things - the film's shooting ran over both budget and schedule, so several important scenes ended up not being shot at all; and the film was then further edited for different markets, losing between 12 and 27 minutes of footage in some cases. So quite often the audience was left trying to follow the plot despite it doing a lot of jumping around. Not to mention the fact that the plot tended to forget things it had already established earlier in the movie. People drained by the vampires turned into dessicated husks - except when they didn't and just became generic running zombies instead. The space vampires could jump bodies - except when they couldn't. And the climax of the film took place inside St. Paul's Cathedral and, in outside shots, from the Greenwich Observatory. At the same time.
But hey, most people don't remember that much of the plot. Or anything else, for that matter. Instead, most people will probably describe Lifeforce as "that movie with the hot girl who goes around naked for most of the movie and sucks people dry (nudge nudge wink wink)". I'll agree there - Mathilda May was very hot in this movie. But I think the filmmakers wanted their film to be remembered for more than just her well-formed assets.
And while we're on the subject of naked women in Lifeforce, I do have to say that the sexual politics of this movie were very confusing. While all three of the space vampires are naked and can do the energy-sucking thing, only the "Space Girl" (all the name she gets) is ever shown doing so, and she's nearly always naked or being sexually provocative when she does. So is this film celebrating female power, or being afraid of it? At another point in the film Carlsen is attempting to get information out of a woman that Space Girl had briefly possessed, and he starts slapping her, shaking her and generally beating the shot out of her, with the explanation, "I'm going to have to force her to tell me. Despite appearances, this women is a masochist. An extreme masochist. She wants me to force the name out of her. She wants me to hurt her." Umm. Did someone's therapy notes about their issues with women accidentally end up in the script?
I'm being maybe a little unfair though. Despite it's myriad of production issues, Lifeforce is actually far from bad, and more than a little fun. It also features scenes of London being overrun by zombies a full 17 years before 28 Days Later freaked out the British with its scenes of a completely deserted London. And while some of its effects are dated nowadays, the physical FX of the zombies, being entirely practical, still hold up excellently. There are far worse films to spend a couple of hours watching (feel free to make up your own story for the plot gaps, though).
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