Eye Candy #51 - "Lifeforce"

Lifeforce: It’s easy to see how this movie lost its head-to-head battle with “Cocoon” its opening weekend - for all its efforts not to appear as one, this is absolutely just your usual Golan-Globus hooey with a thicker veneer than most. The spaceship “Churchill“, captained by Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback, who has all the sexual appeal of a tree stump) encounters a giant asparagus-looking spaceship within Halley’s Comet. Upon further inspection, they encounter three “space vampires” that come back to earth and immediately start turning everyone around them into other “space vampires” through their overwhelming nudity and special lighting effects…except the people they turn look more like zombies than anything. The surviving Carlsen and SAS Col. Caine (Peter Firth, who himself has the action hero appeal of Art Garfunkel) need to figure out what’s going on before London is lost. And they pretty much blow it. Directed by Tobe Hooper, who gave us “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre“ and was credited with “Poltergeist“ while Spielberg ghost-directed it, this movie hasn’t aged well. On the long side (almost 2 hours), with good casting in some roles and inexplicable casting in others (particularly the 2 leads Railsback and Firth; Firth is as unconvincing as an SAS officer as Railsback is unsympathetic). Sure, we got lots of naked Mathilda May, and seeing her, I know exactly why Railsback took the gig (“I get to roll around and make the sexy on camera with HER? Where do I sign!”), but sadly naked Mathilda May cannot carry the whole picture . Not particularly engrossing, and down right silly at times with some of the special effects. Definitely a curio. Woodchuck sez, “For Hooper completists only.”