Lifeforce

I tend to revisit this one every half-dozen or so years, and in the words of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band its always "guaranteed to raise a smile". I think the first time I saw it was on TV when I was very young, and with my parents. Although we only caught the last half hour of it, so the nude walkabouts and the middle section where they are roughing up the woman at the asylum had already passed us by (I don't think my parents would have allowed me to keep watching it if they hadn't), and so my parents were spared any awkward child to parent questions like "whats an extreme masochist" and "what did that man mean when he called himself as a natural voyeur".

Watching it again, I did pick up on there being an overlap in terms of content between it and Return of the Living Dead, what with both films featuring fast moving zombies and sharing a scene where a skeletal female corpse returns to life on an operating table. Obviously the direct link there is Dan O'Bannon having been the screenwriter of both movies, and Hooper having been pencilled in to direct Return of the Living Dead at one point. So I guess a couple of ideas they came up with for Return of the Living Dead also found their way into the Lifeforce script as well, especially in light of the fact that there is no zombie apocalypse in the 'Space Vampires' source novel. Ironically Lifeforce puts you in mind of so many films that came before it (Alien, Night of the Living Dead, Hammer's Quatermass films and variants like X- The Unknown) and yet one of the few significant horror films it isn't reminiscent of is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not for a second does Lifeforce feel like a film from the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, whereas you do get a TCM vibe from Hooper's Death Trap and to a lesser extent Salem's Lot. I find it interesting that the film's trailer and original advertising hypes it as being "from the director of Poltergeist" rather than TCM, and do suspect that had Lifeforce equalled the success of Poltergeist it would have led to a second stage in Tobe Hooper's career as a bankable director of big budget, special effects driven blockbusters, as would later happen with Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson. Whereas the box-office failure of the film and Hooper's retreat back to low-budget horror soon after, means that Lifeforce and especially Poltergeist now feel like career abnormalities, as Hooper is still strongly defined by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in a way that Raimi and Jackson no longer are by The Evil Dead or Bad Taste. I think time is being kind of Hooper's career though, there seems to be allot more people fighting the corner for Lifeforce and TCM2 these days than back when those films first came out. It was once quite fashionable to knock Hooper, I remember there was an especially damning career overview published in 'Deep Red' magazine in the late 1980s that portrayed him as being a talent that had gone astray and sold out to Hollywood. There is a tendency to look more generously on his films these days though, if only because so many of his contemporaries have similarly suffered from career declines and fallen from grace with their fan-bases. Latter day Hooper films like Spontaneous Combustion and Crocodile might never measure up to his earlier work, but then again they're no worse than what Romero and Argento come up with these days.

I was watching it recently mindful of there being growing rumours that a Lifeforce remake is in the works, and whether or not remaking the film is really justified. So I was a little surprised as to how much the special effects in the film hold up. Admittedly, the fake Patrick Stewart head and the burning model village doubling for London do cause you to wince, but the early scenes on-board the spaceship and Halley's Comet –which are the scenes I'd expected to date badly- wouldn't look out of place on the big screen these days. For a Cannon film there is also a real absence of period trappings, which you certainly can't say about the The Exterminator 2 or Ninja 3: The Domination with their aerobics and break dancing scenes. I do know that the original Space Vampires novel is set in the future, and while the film drops that angle, I suspect the fact that it is based on a futuristic source novel lends it a timeless feel. Of course the film does also manage to dodge the fashions of its day by virtue of the fact that the first twenty minutes or so features the majority of the cast in spacesuits and one cast member wearing nothing at all. I don't have a big downer on remakes though, and am curious as to what they'll come up with should this Lifeforce remake come to fruition, but to me there is nothing in the original that really cries out to be remade in order to bring it in line with the tastes of modern audiences. Whereas with say, An American Werewolf In London, you can imagine some Hollywood exec looking at that film nowadays and insisting it is in need of an update on account that there are aspects to it that aren't really relevant to the world of today, no one for instance goes to a cinema to watch porn anymore and the gag about there only being three television channels in Britain is meaningless today. I can't see a great deal in Lifeforce though that overly ties it to the 1980s, although it would have been hilarious if Golan-Globus has insisted that the zombies had to do a bit of break dancing at one point.