The Letdowns: Lifeforce (1985)

Nick Schager — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

In this recurring column, we revisit (and reconsider) eagerly anticipated films that didn’t seem to fulfill their pre-release promise.

Though dogged by rumors that executive producer Steven Spielberg spearheaded its production, 1982’s Poltergeist was nonetheless The Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s first mainstream, major-studio success. His 1985 follow-up Lifeforce, however, demolished most of the professional momentum generated by his prior effort, and a simple recap of its plot suggests why. Investigating Haley’s Comet, a joint American-British space shuttle crew discovers an extraterrestrial ship full of desiccated bat-man creatures and three nude humanoids trapped in giant crystals, whom the astronauts bring aboard their own craft. Some time later, another space expedition recovers these three unclothed figures, including a gorgeous female (Mathilda May), and transports them to Earth, where they turn out to be space vampires who can possess bodies and are intent on draining – and then beaming to the umbrella-shaped ship they’ve positioned just above London – as many human souls as they can harvest. As May’s sexy E.T. sucks people dry and telepathically communicates with the astronaut (Steve Railsback) who first discovered her, Londoners sapped of their lifeforces become zombies, terrorizing the city and putting mankind’s continued survival in peril.

The term “batshit insane,” it seems, was created with this specific film in mind. And yet I’d argue that’s a positive, since how many unironic psychosexual space vampire-zombie apocalypse films do you get in one lifetime – and helmed by Tobe Hooper in his (relative) prime, no less? Adapted from Colin Wilson’s novel Space Vampires by Don Jakoby and Alien scribe Dan O’Bannon, Lifeforce has an off-the-deep-end mentality that was bound to alienate, its plot going from silly to ludicrous to mental ward-bonkers without even an accompanying hint of wink-wink self-consciousness. Hooper plays his bizarro material straight, which in this case involves repeatedly employing a dreamy, hallucinatory aesthetic marked by twisting, gliding, seemingly weightless camerawork, extreme soft-focus lighting, and heightened shot-reverse shot angles for his protagonists’ telepathic conversations. Juxtaposed rotating close-ups of May and Railsback during their maiden encounter not only beautifully evoke how Railsback’s world is about to be turned figuratively upside-down, but elegantly establishes the two characters’ forthcoming mental-physical union, one of many instances where Hooper’s evocative direction elevates his often loony-tunes sci-fi saga.

Hooper’s potent widescreen cinematography and Henry Mancini’s robust score help foster a surrealistic atmosphere for a story simultaneously intoxicated and frightened by femininity. The embodiment of male sexual fantasies and anxieties, May’s Playboy-ready, perpetually nude succubus gives the action a perversely electric energy, while the performances of Railsback, Peter Firth (as a military colonel) and Frank Finlay (as a government scientist who studies “death”) afford just enough campiness to keep the proceedings light. Originally trimmed of 15 minutes by TriStar Pictures, Lifeforce’s restored 116-minute DVD cut boasts few glaring plot holes but a number of memorable horror images – blue lightening flashing around the gaping mouths of a reanimated, dried-out corpse and his victim; May’s alien materializing from the blood spewing out of a deceased Patrick Stewart’s mouth; an ominously carnal dream sequence; and a final, naked make-out session between May and Railsback in a column of blue light comprised of human souls. Frequently outlandish and far from profound, it’s nonetheless a box-office bomb that, like its horror-maestro director, deserved quite a bit better.

Movie Review: "A Girl Cut in Two"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

When the best scene in a movie involves a beautiful young woman looking up worshipfully at her much older lover while crawling towards him on her hands and knees with a peacock's tail attached to her ass, you're either watching a very strange movie or a work of genius. A Girl Cut in Two, the latest from French director Claude Chabrol, isn't a work of genius, but it is the second movie in a week to ride in with the news that hot young babes are putty in the hands of sixtyish grizzled-looking dudes with literary pedigrees. Like Elegy, A Girl Cut in Two has its own literary pedigree: it's an updated take on the Stanford White-Evelyn Nesbit-Harry K. Thaw triangle that blazed across the tabloids in the 1920s and got a second life when E. L. Doctorow used it as the cornerstone of his 1975 novel Ragtime. Here, the stand-in for White is a distinguished, graying novelist, Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand), who is devotedly married but just can't seem to leave those young girls alone. (His agent, who packs a bathing suit when she comes to visit him and his wife in their big house in the country, where she practically camps out on his veranda, is played by the still-stunning Mathilda May, who some of us vulgar Americans will always remember best for her non-speaking, buck naked performance in the 1985 vampires-from-space movie Lifeforce.)

Charles's latest conquest is Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier), a fresh-faced blonde who delivers the weather reports on the TV news, where she's probably the best thing that's ever happened to the phrase "approaching gulf streams." When Charles spots her at his book signing, his eyes seem to pop out on springs, but in a tasteful and refined way, what with him being French and all. He soon secrets her away to his love nest in the city and then, overcome with emotion after she pulls that business with the peacock's tail ("You don't feel humiliated?" "Not even ridiculous."), he takes her to his special club, where classy people with subterranean sex drives get together to do things too shocking for Chabrol to do anything but hint at. He's said that the scenes at the club, where the actors kick back and trade knowing looks and the camera cuts away just when it looks as if we're going to get to see what they're all so smug about, "reflect my desire to explore the theme of perversion without ever showing it." I know that I'm not the one who's been making movies for fifty years, but I can't shake this feeling that giving your characters all kinds of interesting perversions and then not showing them amounts to failing to utilize one of the obvious advantages of making a movie about them in the first place.

I never believed a minute of A Girl Cut in Two, but it does have more of a sustained grip than Chabrol's recent movies, thanks in no small part to Sagnier's surprisingly vulnerable cupcake. Things take a turn for the goofy when the third side of this triangle heaves into sight: the spoiled rich rotter Paul Gaudens (Benoit Magimel), who professes love for Gabrielle while seething with hatred for Charles. (He blames him for having somehow inflicted shame on his family, but the exact details are either never made clear or were spelled out in subtitles that flashed on the screen while I was checking to make sure that my wristwatch still lights up when I press that little button on the side.) With his psychedelic Thurston Howell III wardrobe and his gelled blonde hair with a fistful of forelock strategically draped over one eye, Magimel looks like a French Owen Wilson fronting an '80s "new romantic" cover band, but the actual dialogue he has to speak has nothing on Spandau Ballet. A Girl Cut in Two begins coughing up blood as soon as it begins devoting whole scenes to his aristocratic crumb-bum family, presided over by a vicious snob of a mother (Caroline Silhol, who played Dietrich in last year's Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose) who suggests an albino Morticia Addams. The last half hour or so, which wraps up with an ending that tops Chinatown in going out of it way to give literal meaning to a metaphorical title, dumps the confusion and chaos of adulterous passion in favor of one more demonstration that the cultured mask of the bourgeoisie masks a nest of serpents and is utterly disposable, though I did like the moment when a mercenary lawyer has a polite conversation with Mother Gaudens, exits the mansion, and as he heads for his car, goes, "Brrrrrrr!" The movie can best be appreciated as a one-hour-fifty-minute trailer for whatever Ludivine Sagnier does next. Whatever that is--Bond girl, female lead to Adam Sandler, Celebrity Detox Center: Paris Edition--I'm there.

The Screengrab : mathilda may

The Letdowns: Lifeforce (1985)

Movie Review: "A Girl Cut in Two"