Extremely R-Rated Sci-Fi With Shape-Shifting Vampire Aliens Is A Hidden 80s Masterpiece

By Robert Scucci
| Published 41 seconds ago

Has this ever happened to you? You’re flying around in a space shuttle when you discover an unidentified spaceship riding on the tail of a comet. You go inside with your loyal crew, only to find a bunch of bats, aliens, and bat aliens, all seemingly guarding the same thing: two naked men and a naked woman, each encased in their own glass coffin. You decide the best idea is to bring these bodies back home to Earth for research purposes, thinking to yourself, “This is going to go absolutely great. I foresee zero problems with what’s about to transpire!”

That’s the setup to Tobe Hooper’s 1985 cult classic, Lifeforce, based on the 1976 Colin Wilson novel The Space Vampires.

As a fan of Hooper’s work who still hasn’t seen everything he’s made, this might actually be his best movie. I’m not trying to throw shade at the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies or Poltergeist, because they’re bona fide classics for a reason. But Lifeforce is such an ambitious film telling such a ridiculous story that you can’t help but sit back in admiration over how completely insane it is.

Texas Chainsaw is one of the best slasher franchises of all time, but they’re still just slashers. Poltergeist is one of the best haunted house films ever made, but it’s still just a haunted house movie. Lifeforce has shape-shifting vampire aliens, or is it alien vampires, trying to take over the world. It’s a sample size of one.

Words Cannot Do Lifeforce Justice

I basically already told you everything that happens in Lifeforce, but there’s a little more to it that makes it interesting. When Colonel Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback) first investigates the spaceship and its contents, curiosity quickly turns into carnage. We don’t know exactly what happens to Tom right away, but it’s soon made clear that nobody aboard the Churchill Space Shuttle survived whatever transpired inside. The rescue mission confirms the entire interior had been incinerated and that one escape pod is missing.

Back on Earth at the European Space Research Centre in London, the bodies are examined, and this is where everything goes to hell. The female body (Mathilda May) awakens from suspended animation, and we learn how these vampires operate. She seduces her male victims, who become overwhelmed with uncontrollable lust before she literally sucks the lifeforce out of them, reducing them to ash.

When Tom Carlsen is found in his escape pod, he’s physically unharmed but deeply traumatized as he recounts what happened to his crew before setting the entire ship ablaze and jumping ship himself. We learn these creatures are harvesting humanity’s life force to power their spaceship, and they quickly overwhelm the human race with that goal in mind. Officials declare martial law, but humanity proves no match for the space vampires that never should have been awakened.

Just Let It Happen

If Lifeforce sounds like one of the most ridiculous sci-fi plots you’ve ever heard, you’re right. It’s an incredibly far-out concept, but Hooper plays the whole thing completely straight, which is exactly what makes it work as horror. Even better, it has my favorite kind of gore, which is barely any. There are some graphic moments, as you’d expect from a Tobe Hooper film, but it’s all so spectacular that it never feels like the kind of movie that will make you sick to your stomach. There’s an almost dreamlike aura hanging over everything.

Despite Lifeforce failing at the box office, earning just $11.6 million against its reported $25 million budget, it remains a cult classic because it’s willing to go completely off the rails without ever winking at the audience. It’s sexy, violent, and plays like the best kind of fever dream. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind film, and a must-watch if you’re a fan of Hooper’s more iconic work but want to see what he was capable of when given free rein to do whatever he wanted.

As of this writing, Lifeforce is streaming for free on Tubi.