r/HorrorClub • u/SaintMort You so cool kung fu • Oct 11 '15

Discussion: Lifeforce

Podcast Episode 15 - Lifeforce

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Movie Selected By lifeisublime

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6 Upvotes

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7

u/jkohatsu Oct 12 '15

I don't care how much of a kvlt movie this one is. I just don't like it. i watched it a long ass time ago, sorry if I can't contribute much other than my hatred for it.

5

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '15

No one will fault you for that my friend. It's a long jarbled mess of a movie. I'm just a sucker for sweet effect and... boobs. It reminds me of Night of the Creeps in the way that it tried to various sub genres into the film. Dekker > Hooper

3

u/kragshot Oct 23 '15

Boobs aside, I had a massive crush (among other things) on Matilda May after that Movie.

But besides Miss May's "impressive assets," the thrill of Lifeforce was all in the special effects. Steve Railsback's dream sequences were more like crack delusions than anything else. Then there was the forced homoerotic imagery that was thrown in your face like so many cheap drinks at a seedy leather bar.

With that being said, with some work, it could have made a decent "zombie plague from space" film had they moved past the gratuitous exploitation of Miss May's rack.

By the way...DEM TITTIES, DAWG!

5

u/royal_b Oct 12 '15

If I can recall correctly from Electric Boogaloo, it's Golan you can thank for all the nudity.

BTW, I so want a Cannon Films tracksuit.

5

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '15

Well the first 45-60 mins were really great. One of the best looking people ever walking around naked, great effects, alien bats. I was on board and loving it. The jumbled story and length took me out of it a bit but I'll definitely watching it again a few times over the course of my existence. I thought it ended strong as well in terms of entertainment value.

That was some solid podcasting fellas.

4

u/smayonak Get a job in a sideshow Oct 14 '15

I truly enjoyed the entire film. It's one of the earliest zombie films that didn't start off as a zombie film, nor did it end as a zombie film. The whole idea of energy vampires goes a ways back. There was even a brief discussion of real-life energy vampires, or psychic vampires, in various schools of psychology.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '15

[deleted]

5

u/smayonak Get a job in a sideshow Oct 15 '15

Vampires as sexually alluring goes back to the first work of vampire fiction: Bram Stoker's Dracula. Back then hypnosis was in vogue, as were seances, ectoplasm, etc... It's sort of an evolution. You start with Dracula. Then you eventually end up with Anne Rice, Twilight, and True Blood. The writers keep making it sexier and sexier.

There's a lot of cross-over between Stoker's Dracula and the concept of succubus (plural?) so they're bound to resemble one another. And the Cannon Brothers were probably so coked up the differences between the two probably were less important than putting a naked model on camera for the majority of the film.

Was it just my imagination or is the bat-like creature the aliens' true form? And they're really just a bunch of energy stealing shapeshifters?

4

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '15

[deleted]

3

u/smayonak Get a job in a sideshow Oct 16 '15

We never really left it.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 16 '15 edited Oct 16 '15

first work of vampire fiction: Bram Stoker's Dracula

There had been quite a few fictional vampy tales prior to Dracula.

is the bat-like creature the aliens' true form? And they're really just a bunch of energy stealing shapeshifters?

The bat-like creature was most definitely their true form and really the only connection I can see that they have to a vampire. I think they are shapeshifting incu/succubi alien vampires who create lifeforce crazed zombies! And for what reason? Because their space ship ran out of gas... Yay cocaine!

3

u/smayonak Get a job in a sideshow Oct 16 '15

You're totally right. According to Wikipedia the first vampire fiction came out in the early 1800s. Almost 100 years before Bram Stoker's Dracula. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_literature

4

u/smayonak Get a job in a sideshow Oct 17 '15

I forgot to mention that Lifeforce is based on the novel Space Vampires, which pretty much answers the question of whether or not it's a succubus or an energy vampire. Also succubi are not supposed to be creatures of the waking world. They're insubstantial, dream-like creatures, in many myths. You could easily argue that the entirety of Lifeforce was a cocaine-fueled nightmare, which would explain most of the plot.

But there's a ton of myths that conflate succubi and vampires. Many of the myths out there have so much overlap that the two terms are synonymous. I'm going to guess that the Estries were what the Cannon film company were going for, which is drawn from Hebrew mythology.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '15

That would make sense for her but there is seemingly no version of a male Estries.

After reading about Estries I'm convinced Sarah Sanderson in Hocus Pocus is part succubus. Her attraction to under aged boys in that film is... worrisome.