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Review: Lifeforce (1985)
Tobe Hooper, director of the Spielberg frightfest Poltergeist (1982) offers up a rather tepid shocker. While Lifeforce isn’t completely awful it is quite disappointing. His latest effort is produced by grade z action moguls Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus who have made Chuck Norris a big star.
Steve Railsback, best known for portraying madman Charles Manson in the tv film “Helter Skelter” (1976), is an astronaut. He is on a joint American -British space mission that discovers somen extra-terrestrial beings within Halley’s Comet. Railsback winds up being the only survivor.
The aliens descend upon the United Kingdom, unbeknownst to the authorities. A scientist (Peter Firth of Roman Polanski’s 1980 screen adaptation of Tess), witnesses the efforts that have left some earthlings shriveled up after having had too close for comfort encounters with the malevolent otherworldy beings. The aliens are basically vampires, though they require much more than blood to sustain themselves, and the same goes for anyone who has come into contact with them. Unless they replenish their lifeforce, their bodies will turn to dust.
Hooper’s work has some impressive effects thanks to John Dykstra, the Oscar-winning visual magician of Star Wars. Though Dykstra’s efforts are passable, they do not seem offer more than to avert audiences from the wooden performances from the likes of Railsback and company. Mathilda May, who portrays one of the aliens, is a captivating presence.
One might think Dan O’Bannon, co-writer of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi opus Alien, who penned this adapatation of Colin Wilson’s novel Space Vampires, might have come up with an effort that is at least half as good as that film. Indeed one might be better off renting Alien and for Hooper fans: Poltergeist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), or his truly terrifying 1980 tv adaptation of Steven King’s vampire tale, Salem’s Lot.
Robert Baum is Currently a Bryn Mawr, PA-based film afficanado and pop culture junkie.
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