Friday, March 5, 2010

Lifeforce


First of all, how the fuck did I go through the past decade without seeing this movie? I made it my personal mission to track down every movie with animatronic zombie type guys in it, and somehow this big budget bastard got past my robot person radar? People don't talk about this movie nearly enough. I base that solely on not hearing about it until I saw a trailer at a Screening of The Thing by my homies at Dedfest.
Life force starts off with some space action. Slow floatie space action. A team of scientists aboard the Churchill space explorer are investigating Halleys comet, and find a slim phallic ship with some crazy batwing/umbrella thing on the end that opens, just hanging out at the tip of the huge fireball. They go and explore this crazy hoopajoop.

Inside they find a bunch of floating demon bat guys, who are all made of crumbly chocolate (or they were fossilized). But the real find isn't the hershey monsters, its the nude trio of life force sucking vampires! complete with glass caskets!



I got to admit, I got a little excited when they found people who actually look like people inside that seemingly ancient space craft. I'm a big HP Lovecraft fan, and a big Alien fan. Anything that involves monolithic ancient alien beings, seemingly sentient space ships, or naked chicks encased in glass, count me in.
Flash forward some months, and the ship has returned to earths orbit, the interiors gutted by fire and the crew's juicy corpses litter the hull. The spooky alien/human vampire guys are totally fine though, and ready to start turning some british guards into giant animatronic corpses! YES!
This is where lifeforce really begins for me. The movie wasn't going anywhere until the lady vamp decides to make out with an unlucky researcher. She has this magnetic pull that the men in the film find impossible to resist. I can't imagine why they feel so drawn to her, huh.
Let the lifeforece sucking party commence! Things start getting out of hand at the space research center when the nude alien vampire woman decides to strut her stuff around the facilities, making out with every yutz horny enough to get close to her. This works pretty good actually, and not only because she's not bad to look at. It becomes clear that she doesn't reaaaallly look like that, and that this is just her clever ploy to make men easier to approach. Most of them would probably be apprehensive if they knew they'd end up like grouchy here.

Who ends up switching over to dudes to get his fix of blue electricity.

Then the she-demon busts out of scienceville and embarks on her unholy quest to, well I don't really remember what. This is where lifeforce loses points with me. The plot becomes a little convaluted in the middle, where they start chasing around the vampire's life force, and the survivor of the churchill disaster (who shows up in an espace pod, all gnarly and with beard) establishes some mysterious psychic connection with the soul sucker. It keeps you interested, and I felt entertained, but the vampire's rules and properties feel like they are being made up by the actors as they go. It is all building towards a fairly epic conclusion, but the road there is kind of confused and jumbled in places. Luckily they place lots more open mouthed cadavers on the way to keep you visually stimulated.


In a truly unique twist, Patrick Stewart shows up nearly out of nowhere as the head of a hospital for the criminally insane. Any time I see him in a movie it gives it instant cred. The guy can play any role and instantly elivate the proceedings. That makes his scene with Steve Railsback so entertaining. Through hypnosis Railsback gets Stewart to admit the presence of the vampire lady inside him. He's possesed by her. And to Railsback, he starts looking like her. Which prompts this exchange, Illustrated below.




He fucking plants a big ole wet one right on his full, sophisticated lips. The movie treats this epic moment with the respect and fanfare it deserves. Wind begins to whip around the room, and one poor onlookers neck is snapped from the sheer awesome force of this exchange of saliva. Amazing.
From here the film gets bigger. The scale is amped up as chaos envelopes the streets of London and the alien vampires true power is revealed.
I really enjoyed lifeforce. Even though the running time seems a bit on the long side, and I could see some people getting bored with this. It's hard for me to say I was bored though, since the I find stories like this completely fascinating, and the lead villain walking around naked for most of the movie didn't hurt either. If you've got an evening to kill, and you want to slaughter it with some good sci-fi that you've never seen before give Lifeforce a go. It's a hidden gem of the 80's that's waiting to be rediscovered and given a cult following. Unless im totally clueless and it's got a legion of fans I'm unaware of.
Leave a comment and let me know if you love lifeforce!


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