Lifeforce is the best Dracula from Space movie I’ve ever seen. I haven’t seen that many, mind you, and Vampirella and Dracula 3000 sure as shit didn’t set that particular bar especially high; on the other hand, Lifeforce is better-looking than many sci-fi/fantasy films released as recently as this the year of Our Lord 2022, vis-a-vis practical, mechanical special effects versus CGI and motion capture visual effects (it doesn’t hurt Lifeforce either that there’s generous full-frontal female nudity courtesy of French uber-babe Mathilda May). The script is not without its share of silliness (consider this piece of dialogue: "Sir, we've found a naked girl in Hyde park. The body is in an indescribable condition" — but you just kind of described it, didn’t you? I mean, "a naked girl" is a reasonably specific description), but the movie’s weak spot lies in a deliberate choice: comparing the plot’s events to the "vampires of legend," which the film’s quasi-Van Helsing eventually concludes "came from creatures such as these. Perhaps even from these very creatures." Somehow it never occurs to Dr. Fallada (Frank Finlay) to wonder, if "these very creatures" needed an astronaut to bring them to Earth in his space shuttle, how the "vampires of legend" arrived in our planet the first time around. How the good doctor correctly guessed that a "leaded metal shaft, penetrating not through the heart, but through the energy center two inches below the heart [how he knows so much about the creatures’ anatomy is anybody’s guess, considering the things human form is but a disguise]. Not steel, but leaded iron" (he calls this the "old way," but wouldn’t that be a wooden stake through the heart?) would prove fatal to the aliens is another secret I’m afraid he takes to his grave. There is also some mumbo-jumbo about how "The process of conversion releases a life energy" that "can be collected ... The male vampire's collecting life energy. But he has to send it through her to get it up to the collector" and some other such nonsense. The filmmakers should have treated the word "vampire" as anathema, and avoid any and all direct references to it. Take for instance the aforementioned space shuttle, which anyone familiar with Bram Stoker will identify as an allusion to the Demeter; this is a clever little touch, but it won’t impede any viewer’s enjoyment of the film if the parallelism escapes them. My point is that you don’t have to be the boy who cried vampire when the thought is already in pretty much everybody’s mind. There are shades of other works here (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead, Solaris, and even Ghostbusters), but the movie doesn’t feel the need to overtly draw attention to them — so why the hard-on for vampires? Other than that, Lifeforce is a satisfying minor diversion for fans of old-school horror.

*Lifeforce* sounded like it should have been a blast—space vampires, Halley’s Comet, and an apocalyptic London—but I found it mostly loud, silly, and painfully uneven. The movie jumps between sci-fi, horror, disaster spectacle, and exploitation so abruptly that none of its ideas get enough room to work. There are a few impressive effects and some memorably bizarre images, but they cannot rescue the clunky dialogue, sluggish stretches, and performances that never make the story feel grounded. Instead of becoming the wild cult classic it clearly wants to be, *Lifeforce* felt like a confused mess with an expensive-looking shell. Its reputation for being brazenly strange yet uneven—and criticism of its slow pace—fits my experience exactly.