Lifeforce (1985Lifeforce (1985) ***  SEAN ASHLIN

AN INSIGHTFUL REVIEW OF ONE OF MY FAVORITE NOVELS BY COLIN WILSON, AND A FAVORITE SPACE VAMPIRES (ORIGINAL TITLE OF THE BOOK) MOVIE 


     Far be it from me to dispute the oft-made assertion that Tobe Hooper has never really lived up to the promise of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Any “outlaw” horror director whose second-best film was produced originally for broadcast television unquestionably has some serious career troubles. One facet of the common assessment of Hooper’s career which I will dispute quite vehemently, however, is the claim that Lifeforce is among the foremost examples of his chronic inability to get it together in the years since his auspicious debut. Though it is a chaotic and somewhat muddled picture, and though it performed quite miserably at the box office (taking in less than half of its reported cost), Lifeforce is also Hooper’s most ambitious movie by a comfortable margin, and it is the closest thing we have to a theatrically released Quatermass film for the 1980’s.

     One point of commonality between this movie and the Quatermass trilogy becomes immediately obvious in the very first scene— Lifeforce, too, apparently takes place in a parallel universe where Great Britain has managed to maintain a cutting-edge space program. The space shuttle HMS Churchill, operating with a combined British-American crew under the command of US Air Force Colonel Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback, from Blue Monkey and Disturbing Behavior), is on a mission to intercept Haley’s Comet when the ship’s radar officer detects a strange object in the gas cloud surrounding the comet’s head. It’s a needle-shaped thing with a bulb at one end and a sort of furled cone structure at the other, and it doesn’t appear to be made of the same substance as the comet. Furthermore, the object’s symmetry strongly suggests that it is of artificial origin— an extraterrestrial spacecraft, perhaps? If so, its builders take their space travel a hell of a lot more seriously than we humans do, for the object is roughly 150 miles long and two miles across at its widest point. Stunned by the potential implications of the discovery, Carlsen orders the Churchill in close enough for him and about half of the shuttle’s crew to go over and have a look; they won’t be able to tell mission control what they’re up to, however, because electromagnetic interference caused by the comet’s interaction with the solar wind has cut off all communications.

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