Klaus Kinski, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Terence Stamp either refused to participate in the project or simply fell through the cracks altogether. James Horner was approached for the soundtrack but passed. The roughly $25 million budget recouped only about half of that during its box office run. Over 1,000 actresses (pardon my anachronism?) were screened before the role of “Space Girl” was filled, which is odd considering she only has about four lines of dialogue and spends the great majority of the film in her birthday suit. Oh, and did I mention that the alien ship was modeled after an artichoke?
So why is it the movie of the month? Well because it also does a number of things right. For one, it’s about space vampires. Did you get that? Vampires from outer space.
Yeah.
Camp value aside, Tobe Hooper’s technical mastery is still impressive. Though he’s better known for the indelible mark he left on cinema with his 1974 “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and his one-time Spielberg collaboration “Poltergeist”, Hooper capitalizes on all of the bad tropes at his disposal and sneaks into the theater with an A-list budget. The result? A jaunty conflagration of “Species”, “28 Days Later” and Stephen King’s “Maximum Overdrive”, all with a touch of Vlad Dracul and softcore porn for our viewing pleasure.
Well-acted (at times), apocalyptically grandiose, inventive, scripted by “Alien” co-writer Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby (the guy who gave us ARACHNOPHOBIA...) and fitted to a gleefully martial score a la David Robidoux’s Autumn Thunder by the late great Henry Mancini, “Lifeforce” is a fun, weird and manic midnight movie that just plain sucks.
Be sure to check out the 116-minute UK cut. It’s worth it. You get to see Patrick Stewart make out with a dude and then vomit a blood sculpture (just watch the movie).
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