Lifeforce [1985] [DVD]

"Lifeforce" boasts a rousing, thunderous score by Henry Mancini, it boasts some hilariously straight-faced acting, some very proficient visual effects and a generous helping of most agreeable soft porn. You could do much, much worse than check out this movie. Is it a bad movie? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on your poison. But it is unquestionably an enjoyable movie. One of those pesky, interfering space missions goes and brings a trio of "space vampires" back to Earth, one of them being a uniformly nude Mathilda May, who has a bit of a thing going on with one of the astronauts, Colonel Carlsen (a delightfully earnest Steve Railsbeck), in between feasting on the "lifeforce" (as opposed to the blood) of various extras and minor roles, reducing them to hideous, dessicated, shrieking, mindless husks that in turn seek out the "lifeforce" of other people. That is where the glorious destruction of London comes in, later on in the proceedings and very well handled for a film that endures a reputation for being amongst the worst ever made. There is imagery within those sequences that is up there with the blockbusters. "Lifeforce" has a perfectly creditable cast, including a pre "Spooks" Peter Firth as SAS Colonel Caine, Frank "Bouquet Of Barbed Wire" Finlay as one of the boffins and Patrick Stewart gobbing out a lot of blood from his mouth. The fact that they play this trash so seriously is one of the fun aspects. Oh, come on - it's trash. But it is glorious trash. It is proud trash. Trash is sometimes good, and here you have an example. "Lifeforce", the celluloid Big Mac - of no nutritional value whatsoever, but very, VERY enjoyable. Tuck in.

Danny Boyle was not the first person to realise that zombies can run like the clappers. That honour belongs to Lifeforce, which is, of course, the greatest naked space vampire zombies from Halley's Comet running amok in London end-of-the-world movie ever made. Tobe Hooper may have made a lot of crap, but for this deliriously demented epic sci-fi horror he deserves a place among the immortals. Plus it offers space vampire Mathilda May, the best thing to come out of France since Simone Simon, spending the entire movie naked. Which she does very, very well. Just bear in mind that while she is the most overwhelmingly feminine presence anyone on Earth has ever encountered, she's also "totally alien to this planet and our life form and totally dangerous." It's a pitch meeting I'd have loved to have sat in on: Astronauts from the British space program find three naked humanoid alien life forms inside a giant 150-mile long artichoke/umbrella shaped spaceship hidden in the tail of Halley's Comet filled with giant desiccated bats and bring them back to Earth with near apocalyptic results as they proceed to drain the population of London of their lifeforce amid much nudity, whirlpools of thunder and spit your coffee across the room direlogue ("I've been in space for six months, and she looks perfect to me." "Assume we know nothing, which is understating the matter." "Don't worry, a naked woman is not going to get out of this complex."). Oh, and we'll get the writers of Alien and Blue Thunder to write it with uncredited rewrites by the writer of Mark of the Devil, The Sex Thief and Eskimo Nell and the director of The Jonestown Monster. Sounds like a winner, here's $22m - have fun. And they do, they do.

True, there's enough promise in the raw material to have made something genuinely creepy and thought-provoking (at a time when AIDS hysteria was approaching its height, a sexually transmitted 'plague' offers ample opportunity for allegory), but in the hands of the Go-Go boys at Cannon, what could have been another Quatermass and the Pit quickly turns instead to be more Plan 10 From Outer Space. It's full-to-bursting with delirious inanity, be it Frank Finlay's hilarious death scene ("Here I go!"), Peter Firth's grand entrance ("I'm Colonel Caine." "From the SAS?" discreetly shouts Michael Gothard across a room full of reporters: "Gentlemen, that last remark was not for publication. This is a D-Notice situation" he replies to the surprisingly obliging pressmen), the security guards offering Mathilda May's naked space vampire a nice biscuit to stop her escaping, reanimated bodies exploding into dust all over people, the sweaty Prime Minister sucking the life out of his secretary ("Miss Haversham! Miss Haversham!") and London filling up with zombie nuns, stockbrokers and joggers as the city gets its most comprehensive on screen trashing since Mrs Gorgo lost junior at Battersea Funfair and went on the rampage. And that's not mentioning the "This woman is a masochist! An extreme masochist!" scene or the great stereophonic echo effect on the male vampire's "It'll be a lot less terrifying if you just come to me" line while a lead-stake wielding Peter Firth adopts his best Action Man voice to reply "I'll do just that!" In one scene alone you have a possessed Patrick Stewart embodying the female in our deeply confused astronaut hero's mind, Steve "I-never-got-over-playing-Charlie-Manson" Railsback and his amazing dancing eyebrows in full-on "Helta-Skelta!" mode trying to resist the temptation to kiss him, the inimitable Aubrey Morris (the only man who makes Freddie Jones look restrained) playing the Home Secretary Sir Percy Heseltine as a kind of demented Brian Rix, Peter Firth (one of those actors who always looks like he must have been a Doctor Who around the time no-one was watching it anymore) hamming up the blasé public school macho in the hope that no-one will ever see it and the peerless reaction shots of John Hallam as the male nurse who keeps on opening the door mid-psychic-tornado to bring in more drugs. As if they needed any more in this film. It's just a shame that Frank Finlay's mad-haired scientist who isn't qualified to certify death on alien life forms (a role originally intended for Klaus Kinski) missed out on the action in that one.

No matter how mad you think the film is, it still manages to get madder still, whether it be a zombie pathologist ("He too needs feeding") exploding all over the Home Secretary's suit, Patrick Stewart's blood and entrails forming a naked Mathilda May or the space vampires turning St Paul's Cathedral into the world's biggest laser-show to transport human souls from the London Underground to their geostationary mother ship. I loved every gloriously insane moment. In it's own truly unique way, this might be the greatest film ever made.

The DVD offers the original 116-minute version that opened in the UK rather than the heavily edited 101-minute US version, which not only offers much more hilarity for your dollar, but also fully restores Henry Mancini's score to its original glory (the US version covered a lot of the gaps with additional cues by Michael Kamen and James Guthrie). Although a somewhat surprising choice at first sight, Mancini cut his teeth on many of the classic Universal sci-fi horrors of the 50s and his score is quite superb, with a terrific driving main title that offers a rare reminder of just how interesting he could be away from Blake Edwards. Sadly there's no more than a trailer by way of extras, though it would be nice to hope some day for a special edition with some of the deleted scenes from Hooper's originally intended 128-minute cut: from what's on display here, these might just offer even more comedy gold!

EDIT - A special edition is indeed finally on the way in April 2013, albeit only in the US via Shout Factory's Blu-ray/DVD combo (the Blu-ray will probably be Region A-locked as per their other releases), which offers both the long international version and the shorter US cut, audio commentary by Tobe Hooper, both the original making of featurette and a new documentary featuring Railsback and Hooper, trailer, TV spot and stills gallery.

This is brilliant fun set in some weird Americanised sterotype version of London. The special FX are really great and so are the creature FX particularly the shrivelling up when the vampires drain you. Tobe Hooper films are often hard to pin down, I can never make up my mind if the campiness in this was intentional or just down to plain incompetance. The best line is when a couple of vampires have been blown to bits and someone says "Collect up the pieces and WATCH THEM!!". You've seen shots inside NASA mission control, all those people? Europe mission control in this is like one guy with a radio! Priceless beer and popcorn entertainment.