Lifeforce (1985)
Directed by Tobe Hooper
A race of space vampires arrives in London and infects the populace, commencing an apocalyptic descent into chaos.
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3 films that influenced Lifeforce
What critics say influenced Lifeforce
Most of the flick follows British secret agent Colin Cain (Peter Firth) and American astronaut Tom Carlson (Steve Railsback) as they try to locate the gorgeous naked vampiress by tracking her freshest victims, and that's where Lifeforce flips and goes from Alien to Dracula to The Quatermass Xperiment.
In a picture of so many extraordinary allusions, the most valuable is surely the most abstruse -- Antonioni's notion in Identification of a Woman of female mystery and human relationships manifested as an image out of sci-fi hokum.
Alien is an obligatory reference and screenwriter Dan O'Bannon gets it out of the way right off the bat with a tour of the innards of the intergalactic vessel; Haskin's War of the Worlds is spotted in the shot of Halley's Comet lighting the sky orange while Big Ben chimes in the foreground.
In Lifeforce, the film version of Wilson’s novel written by Dan O’Bannon (Dark Star, Alien) and Ron Jakoby and directed by Tobe Hooper, this didactic method has been translated into hurtling, headlong energy, a complex of Hammer Films–style huggermugger and the blackly comic craziness of George Romero’s Night of the Dawn of the Day of the Living Dead movies.
And to their credit, director Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and screenwriters Don Jakoby (Arachnophobia) and the late, great Dan O'Bannon (Alien, Dead & Buried, The Return of the Living Dead) make no apologies about approaching their multi-genre matinee movie with a great deal of enthusiasm, energy, and occasional wackiness.
Someplace in the heap of movies Hooper’s gifted horror lovers lies Lifeforce , penned by Don Jakoby ( Blue Thunder , Arachnophobia ) and Dan O’Bannon ( Alien , The Return of the Living Dead , Dead & Buried ).
It boggles the mind to think that within the span of a mere three months of the summer of 1985, two new and very different films penned by Alien scribe Dan O'Bannon were released.
This is not the action-packed space opera of a “Star Wars” likeness, but rather an overt attempt to recapture the magnificent terror of “Alien,” through shadowy corridors, jittery violin music (by Henry Mancini), operating rooms full of unexpected extraterrestrial yucks, creepy sound effects, and zero comic relief.