Lifeforce

Lifeforce

Cert: 18

A film based on a book called The Space Vampires was never likely to become a classic. A film produced by Cannon Films was never going to become a classic, full stop.

Cannon Films were the most craptacular film production company of the 1980’s. They were not the worst; plenty of moviemakers were worse. It was just that Cannon was so utterly unable to turn shit into gold, despite all its pretensions to becoming a major player. When I hired a VHS tape back in the eighties, pressed the play button and say that hexagonal logo disassemble itself on the screen, I knew that I was in for a couple of hours of low grade dreck and my heart would sink.

Cannon was the movie company that brought us such cinematic classics as Rambo knockoff MISSING IN ACTION, Lee Marvin’s swansong DELTA FORCE and Courtney Cox’s cinematic debut, MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. They were pretty cheap dumb action films, but Cannon also brought us SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE. How a franchise as big as Superman could go from something with the scale of SUPERMAN III to the utterly dire SUPERMAN IV is beyond me. Cannon’s owners, the flamboyant GO-GO boys Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan were famously cheap, but filming a Superman movie in Milton Keynes and pretending that it’s Metropolis is something else. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t another Superman sequel for almost 20 years, and that conveniently pretended that Superman IV had never happened. (For more about Cannon Films, watch ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: THE WILD,UNTOLDSTORY OF CANNON FILMS.)

LIFEFORCE features a space mission to Halley’s Comet that brings alien sex vampires (Including a perpetually naked Mathilde May) back to London, whereupon the capital starts looking like a bad episode of THE WALKING DEAD, while a couple of Colonels and Frank Finlay investigate what the hell is happening.

LIFEFORCE is crap. There’s no doubt about it. Vast chunks of expensive space stuff ended up on the cutting room floor, although I’m not sure that leaving it in could have saved it. The space stuff is pretty dull. And yet, it could have been great. It’s got a good director, Tobe Hooper, who made The TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and POLTERGEIST. It has a great QUATERMASS AND THE PIT vibe. It feels like a Hammer movie. It has Mathilde May in her birthday suit (I was 16 at the time; trust me, watching LIFEFORCE was a formative experience). It had a budget of $25 million, which in the mid-eighties was quite a lot. Some of its visual effects look a bit ropey now, but by the standards of the mid-eighties, they’re not bad. It even has a pre-Star Trek Patrick Stewart, camping it up rather creepily (“He’s been naughty”). Shit it may be, but it’s probably the best thing that Cannon ever made. It flopped badly, which is probably why they planned to give SUPERMAN IV’s $36 million budget, was cut to only $17 million.

The trouble is that LIFEFORCE has two major flaws. The screenplay is awful. The dialogue is spectacularly rubbish. Not even Frank Finlay and Harry off SPOOKS as an SAS Colonel can redeem it. It also has a dreadful co-lead, Steve Railsback, who cannot act for toffee. According to IMDb he’s been in loads of stuff, but I’ve heard of almost none of it, apart from THE STUNTMAN and Casablanca with tits remake BARBWIRE.

Mind you, they did cast Mathilde May. Did I mention her before?