Lifeforce
I saw this picture years ago and filed it under disappointment. Tobe Hooper, who gave us The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, had been handed a budget, a spaceship, and vampires from Halley’s Comet, and what I remember getting was a lot of running around London. It turns out I saw the wrong movie. The American release is fifteen minutes shorter and was cut by somebody who seems to have been embarrassed by the word “vampire,” which is a strange thing to be embarrassed by when your movie is about them. The international version restores the vampires, and a good deal of sense along with them.
The setup: a joint expedition finds a derelict alien ship hiding in the tail of the comet. Inside are dead bat creatures the size of hang gliders and three naked humanoids in glass caskets, one of them a woman. The crew brings the caskets home, as movie crews will. The woman wakes up in a British research facility, drains a guard of his life force, and walks out. Her victims turn into desiccated husks that revive two hours later, needing to drain someone themselves, and the arithmetic of that gets away from London in a hurry. Colonel Carlsen, the American who led the expedition, turns up in an escape pod with a psychic link to her and a reluctance to explain how he got it. He and an SAS colonel named Caine go looking for her while the city burns.
Ridley Scott said he set out to make Alien “the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of science fiction.” Hooper seems content to let him have it. Despite the Giger-esque ribbed corridors and organic gloom of the derelict ship, the lineage here is closer to Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment, where a ship comes back with something aboard wearing a human shape. Peter Firth’s Caine could walk into a Quatermass picture tomorrow and start giving orders.
Mathilda May plays the space girl and spends the first act wearing nothing at all, a decision that I suspect imprinted her on a generation of teenagers. She is beautiful, but what the part wants is the kind of magnetism that makes a room reorganize itself around a performer, and she does not have it, or does not have it yet. Jonathan Glazer solved the same problem decades later in Under the Skin by somehow getting Scarlett Johansson to do it. Hooper, working for Cannon, was never going to get an A-list star to disrobe for two reels, so he cast an unknown and hoped. Fair enough.
Less forgivable is Steve Railsback as Carlsen. Railsback is a good character actor with a specialty in men who are coming apart, and here he starts apart and stays there for two hours. This is the role where the money should have gone. Sam Neill could have played it. Peter Weller could have played it. Or, if Hooper had to have a Texan, Powers Boothe.
Patrick Stewart, years before the Enterprise, turns up as an asylum director possessed by the space girl. Railsback kisses him, and then several gallons of blood exit Stewart’s body and assemble themselves in midair into her shape. Stewart plays it absolutely straight, which is the only way it could work. It is also twice as graphic as anything the first hour led you to expect.
Other moments veer into comedy. There is an autopsy scene where the corpse sits up and helps itself to an orderly while the room politely waits its turn. Later a husk leaps onto a helicopter skid and hangs on until the skin peels off its own hand. Caine drives through the wreckage of the city, something reaches into his car, and he arrives at his destination holding an arm. These are all good bits, and it’s clear Hooper enjoyed them, but they feel like discards from co-writer Dan O’Bannon’s other 1985 picture, The Return of the Living Dead.
It is telling that Hooper shot expecting an atonal score along the lines of Texas Chain Saw, only for Henry Mancini to hand him something full of marching strings and pulsing percussion, exactly right for a Quatermass picture. The composer seems to have understood the material better than the director did.
Despite being a Cannon production, the picture cost real money. Hooper shot in London and his effects crews included veterans of the Star Wars productions. Still, some of the miniatures and process shots feel rushed, which is what happens when a seventeen-week schedule runs five weeks over. The mind link gets used whenever the plot needs a shortcut. Some scenes idle. Hooper includes two or three cheap jump scares that deflate the tension.
Yet the best effect in the movie cost nothing. In the third act, during a confrontation indoors, you look out a window at London burning to the horizon under a sky the color of an infection. Cinematographer Alan Hume built it in about half an hour with cardboard, a box cutter, some lights, and smoke, and it gives the film the apocalyptic scale everything else has been promising.
I can’t call this a good movie. But I can’t say I was bored either, because Hooper never stops throwing things at you. For me it settles an old argument, the one about whether Hooper or Spielberg really directed Poltergeist. Watching this, I’m convinced Hooper directed it and Spielberg kept him pointed at the story. Left alone here, Hooper went over budget, over schedule, and delivered a picture that keeps wandering off to look at something shiny.