#john graysmark

Tobe Hooper is a really odd director. In spite of the fact that his name leaps to mind in the company of American genre icons like George Romero and John Carpenter--and attached to an indispensable work of art like THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE no less--I still have a hard time remembering all of his contributions. The main reason for this is that they are so wildly varied in tone and content. Even though I enjoy them both on a  personal level, I’ve spent a lot of my life unable to keep in mind the fact that he directed both TEXAS CHAIN SAW and POLTERGEIST--the latter of which tends to be attributed more popularly to producer Spielberg, due to the family feelgoodery that overshadows spectacles like a guy ripping his whole face off in shreds. The gnarly bayou thriller EATEN ALIVE has more in common, narratively, with TCM, but its highly artificial, fairy tale-like aesthetics couldn’t exist in the same world as the more famous power tool opera. The brutally realistic TEXAS CHAIN SAW doesn’t even have that much in common, artistically, with its blackly hilarious immediate sequel, which is one of the most perverted and outrageous movies in its class. And, once you’ve reached the gore-soaked appalachian peak of TCM2, it becomes difficult to imagine Hooper directing a slick, european sci-fi thriller like LIFEFORCE. But, I’m sure glad he did.

Unfortunately, I’m apparently part of a minority of viewers who feel this gratitude. LIFEFORCE, the second installment in Hooper’s doomed 3-picture deal with Cannon (inspired by the promising POLTERGEIST, the company facilitated the production of the pornographically violent TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, and Hooper’s grimy, depressing remake of INVADERS FROM MARS), opened to poor box office returns in 1986, leaving critics bemused at best. Colin Wilson, whose more glibly-titled book The Space Vampires provided the source material, declared it to be the worst movie he’d ever seen. Personally, I find it very difficult to imagine how anyone could be so disappointed in a movie as lavishly rendered and willfully zany as this delirious nightmare about an outer space succubus who ushers in an invasion of the Earth that results in a full scale zombie apocalypse. I’m not a very upbeat person, but when I am confronted with facts like LIFEFORCE’s negative reception, I marvel at how joyless people’s lives must be, that they could reject such a gift.

Hooper and ALIEN scribe Dan O’Bannon did their very best to bring a spark of pleasure into our dreary existence by presenting the hauntingly beautiful and aggressively nude Mathilda May as “the Space Girl”, a powerful psychic vampire who issues forth from a huge dick-shaped astral body, leaving a multiplying horde of infected humans in her wake. These newly vampirized victims don’t settle for simply evaporating in the sunlight, but when starved too long for the lifeforces of the living, they actually explode. Steve Railsback is Colonel Tom Carlsen, the sole survivor of the spacecraft that originally intercepted the vampire ship, must use his burgeoning psychic powers to track the extraterrestrial typhoid mary as she moves from body to beautiful body (including, fabulously, that of Patrick Stewart), spreading her interstellar plague until it absorbs all of London. That’s about as simple as I can make this, so you’ll simply have to take me at my word that this feverish fantasy is a lot campier in practice than any summary could convey. 

Admittedly, I’m getting maudlin in my old age, but it really bums me out when I see a movie as lovingly crafted as LIFEFORCE just getting completely lost on most of its audience. Watching it now, I experience a lot of vicarious anxiety on behalf of Tobe Hooper, who must have been operating under a lot of pressure to follow up the generic success of POLTERGEIST, and who, for his part, must have been biting his nails hoping that the film would launch him out of the shadowy horror grotto and into the financially secure big time. I can’t help imagining the disappointment of production designer John Graysmark, whose eerie, psychedelic sets perfectly scaffold the Hammer Horror vibe of the whole movie. I can’t understand how anyone could fail to respond to the film’s visual effects, created by no lesser a person than Academy Award winner John Dykstra, whose contributions to STAR WARS are easily the best thing about STAR WARS. Perhaps appropriately, this movie always makes me feel like I must not be a genuine part of the human race, because I just have no idea what people want. If you haven’t already, see LIFEFORCE today; it’s a great way to find out if you’re a space alien, and a lot cheaper in the long run than getting your Thetan levels checked by those freaky zealots in the subway.