The Naked Space Vampire Film

I am a known lover of Hammer Films. The British film studio, which started operations in 1934 and ran through the mid-1980s before ceasing operations (and then selling their name in the 2000s for other studios to take up the brand and make new films) produced a number of wonderful and atmospheric horror films. They produced the likes of The Horror of Dracula and The Curse of Frankenstein (to use names given to the works in America) as well as hundreds of other one-offs that spanned all corners of the genre (and if you’re interested in reviews of many of these works, I suggest you head over to The Inverted Dungeon where I’ve gone through a lot of Hammer’s genre films).

Lifeforce is not a Hammer film but it damn well could have been. It has all the elements that made up the best of their output. Naturally it has a predominantly British cast, it has moody atmosphere and wild sets, and it has vampires. Space vampires, no less. Naked space vampires. Hammer films never shied away from nudity (and, in fact, in their later output the titillation of naked vampire breasts was often the selling point of their works), but even by their standards Lifeforce absolutely goes over the top. If this film had opened with the Hammer logo, and not the logo from Cannon Film Group, I wouldn’t have doubted it for a second.

It is, however, very much a Cannon film. Cannon, formed by a couple of Americans in the 1960s after they found success making softcore porn (a start that really indicates the level of quality they’d eventually go for) made a ton of films across their 26 years of existence, very few of them good. Among their many, many releases they had a bunch of Ninja-alikes, Conan-alikes, horror sequels and Emmanuelle films, plus the fourth Superman movie, all eventually facing financial ruin with Masters of the Universe (and, a few years later, truly going under). It makes sense, in a way, that Cannon would take up the torch from other studios and try to make their own (much cheaper) version of what was popular at the time. Hammer Films style plus the need for more Sci-Fi (thanks to Star Wars) leads to a cheap, flimsy, space vampire movie.

Let’s be clear, the reason why anyone remembers this film is because it’s lead actress, Mathilda May, goes around easily ninety percent of the film completely and utterly naked. There’s no convenient covering up, no objects in the way to hide her nudity. This film was sold on the fact that a pretty, young woman was going to wander around buck naked the whole time (again, a reminder that Cannon was started by two softcore pornographers). For all its sci-fi trapping and Hammer Film allusions (which are pretty good, mind you), this is still the Naked Space Vampire Film, through and through.

But if you can get past that (or if you don’t mind watching it), Lifeforce actually isn’t bad. I remember my sisters taking me to see this film when I was way too young to see the nudity (I was four at the time, which is really on them) and also too young to appreciate the tone and style of the film. This is a movie deeply indebted to the filmic inspirations of Hammer, with all the ambience and loving cinematography those films were known for. All of that was applied to a film about space vampires which, really, should have been Hammer’s bread and butter. Right as that studio was going out of existence, someone else was making their kinds of movies. As a lover of Hammer’s style, I absolutely appreciate what this film was doing. But even I have to admit this film just isn’t for everyone.

When a joint NASA/ESA mission heads to Halley's Comet to view the celestial event, they find something extraordinary within: a massive craft floating within the tail of the comet, with hundreds of dead creatures floating in the remains. The team of astronauts head into the craft, and within they find three human-looking beings, two men (Chris Jagger and Bill Malin, whose characters are credited as first and second vampires) and a woman (May, whose character is simply named “Space Girl”). They bring the three, in their crystal coffins, back to the space shuttle for the return voyage… but somewhere along the way something goes wrong.

The shuttle is next seen floating in space above Earth and only one survivor, Col. Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback), escapes in a life pod. The investigators search the shuttle to find it a burned out wreck, but within are the three human-like beings in their cases still perfectly preserved. The three are brought to Earth for study, but almost as soon as they’re properly housed, the female wakes up and drains the life force from a victim. She then gets up, walks off (naked and uncaring) and heads out into London to search for more victims. Each of her victims, once drained and desiccated, eventually wakes up themselves to feed as well. It begins a spread of the space vampire virus that could threaten the city… and then all of the world. It will take a crack team of scientific investigators – Col. Colin Caine (Peter Firth), Dr. Hans Fallada (Frank Finlay), and Col. Carlsen – to track the female down and stop her evil spread once and for all.

What I appreciate about Lifeforce is how the film blends its sci-fi and fantasy horror elements. It’s pretty clear that the creators put thought and effort into working out how to marry vampires with alien tech, and to get these space vampires to Earth. The opening scenes do a lot to build anticipation and dread, creating real tension and horror. The whole first half of the film is one progressive moment after another that keeps the audience invested and interested in this new take on the vampire mythos, all wrapped in a very ambient package. It’s great.

The trouble is that once the woman gets up and walks out, the film completely loses its way. She disappears for most of the rest of the film, along with her two male cohorts, and the crack team of scientists are left to talk amongst themselves and try to track her down, and that’s a whole lot less fun than the crazy shit she was up to before then. It also greatly reduces the amount of vampire nudity on screen, which, if you were here simply because this is the Naked Space Vampire Film, would be a huge detriment to your viewing experience. All around, this was a really bad decision.

The big issue is that the main characters (who aren’t the naked space vampire chick) just aren’t that interesting. They aren’t characters, they’re job titles. This guy runs a paramilitary science division and he is no nonsense. That guy is a weird scientist who will stand around and exposit upon what’s going on. And then there’s the third guy who is clearly under the thrall of the lady vampire and will act as their clue to follow to find her. None of them have real character development or interesting personalities to latch onto, they’re all just there to do a job. Once the film is in their hands, that’s all it can do: the bare bones of its job.

What works so well about the first half of the movie is how bonkers and weird it is. One strange thing after another is thrown at the viewer and it never lets up. It keeps you hooked because it’s always escalating and giving you new sights. But the back half of the film is a pretty boring, standard investigation. It doesn’t really pick up again until the last twenty minutes, when the vampire zombie hordes unleashed by Space Girl are roaming London, and the guys have to try and get to her and kill her before she takes over the world. That’s a long stretch of time to watch dudes be boring and, for most viewers, that’s too much time investment for too little pay off.

Even with that said, I did like Lifeforce (and not just because I got to see a pretty, naked vampire lady walking around). This is a better movie than many of the cheesy horror films I’ve reviewed, and it has a lot of great ideas. It does get sloggy in the back half, but I feel like the front half almost makes up for that. For me, this was a solid little bit of British horror and I enjoyed it for that reason. I recognize, though, that I’m an outlier and that, for most, this film is too weird, then too slow, and then too done to be worth the effort.