Pancake House

Lifeforce (1985)
directed by Tobe Hooper
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

It isn't that the production design that opens Lifeforce isn't great (if there's anything inspired in these vampires from space, it's the way they hang like late autumn leaves in mid-air, suspended in zero gravity), or that Hooper doesn't understand how to escalate tension (the hallway of doors which open and close by excruciating turns to admit scientists to the room on the farthest side). What your first stop at Google Images can't tell you about the film's predominate fan base (or maybe it can) is that a pair of breasts in eighties sci-fi seemed to distract directors as often as it did their audience. All the atmosphere of the opening sequence (the look of the alien vessel, its transit in the tail of Halley's Comet), and especially that soupy spacewalk feel that lonelier ideas of deep space endorse (and the best sci-fi films propagate), go right out the airlock when the Churchill lands and the silly brunette starts killing. Dan O'Bannon wrote Dark Star and then Alien; Lifeforce should be the perfect fit, but isn't quite cogent enough, funny enough, or good enough to beg the comparison.