Review of Lifeforce (1985) by Stefan G — 19 Jul 2015

This film is a rather interesting piece of sci-fi. It's a vampire film wherein the vampires are shape-shifting aliens who travel from planet to planet, absorbing whatever life energy they can. As ridiculous as that might sound, this film manages to handle the concept decently well, in the sense that the film's vampires really are on a different conceptual level, rather than just cheap Dracula knock-offs in spacesuits.

The story itself is quite interesting, with the central narrative revolving around attraction, but it's plagued by a somewhat slow pacing, and is hampered further by a rather inconsistent tone. The beginning of the film moves slowly with not much happening, then it turns into a kind of sci-fi mystery film, then it becomes a weird kind of erotic thriller film (if the term "erotic" even applies here), before finally shifting into an awkwardly paced zombie film, but with fire and explosions all over the place.

The characters don't exactly help much. They aren't bad, but, with a few exceptions, the performances seem are really stale and unconvincing. On the plus side, the film has a rather nice visual palette, though is mainly seen at the beginning and end of the film.

On the whole, the film isn't terrible. In fact, amongst all the other sci-fi and horror films, this one is a rare breed. At the very least, I liked the way that it tried to mix ideas that wouldn't go well together, and that at least is more than could be said about many of the films being churned out today.