Lifeforce (UK Import) (4K UHD Review)

Reviewed by: Stephen Bjork
Review Date: Feb 20, 2025
Format: 4K Ultra HD

Director

Tobe Hooper

Release Date(s)

1985 (February 17, 2025)

Studio(s)

Cannon Film Distributors/TriStar Pictures (Arrow Video)

Film/Program Grade: See Below
Video Grade: See Below
Audio Grade: See Below
Extras Grade: A+
Overall Grade: A

https://diabolikdvd.com/

Review

[Editor's Note: This is a Region-Free 4K Ultra HD British import.]

The Eighties. A decade when men were real men, women were real women, cocaine was real cocaine, and renegade independent production companies with more money than taste were real renegade independent production companies with more money than taste.

What? Did you think that I was going to say that “small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri?” Sorry; that’s the Eighties of brilliant satirists like Douglas Adams. No, we’re talking about the Eighties as glimpsed through the somewhat disreputable lens of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, otherwise known as the partners behind The Cannon Group. They had purchased the company in 1979 and found some success producing and/or distributing low budget exploitation fare, but by the middle of the Eighties, their ambition started to exceed their grasp, leading to expensive failures like Over the Top in 1987. The Golan-Globus iteration of The Cannon Group started to disintegrate after that, and it was finally acquired by Pathé Communications two years later. It truly was the end of an era.

Yet ironically enough, Over the Top would have been a much more appropriate name for a runway Cannon production that limped its way into the theatres two years before the film that actually carried that title: Lifeforce. There’s over-the-top, then there’s over-the-top, and then there’s Golan-Globus/Tobe Hooper/Dan O’Bannon/Steve Railsback over-the-top. Compared to all of that, Sylvester Stallone as an arm-wrestling truck driver could never even stand a chance. Those who know, know, but for those who don’t, consider: we’re talking about a film featuring a fully naked female space vampire strolling around unashamedly ; sweaty Ken Russell-esque dream sequences filled with scandalous religious imagery; harshly overlit animatronic makeup effects; an abundance of cheesy visual effects produced by people who were capable of so much better than this; London being destroyed by a kitschy zombie apocalypse; and enough earnest overacting that it would make Nicholas Cage, Al Pacino, and even Tommy Wiseau blush. Oh, and Lifeforce also features Steve Railsback reluctantly kissing Patrick Stewart (in the extended international version, anyway), so there’s that.

Mind you, it’s that first element that created some immediate notoriety for Lifeforce back in 1985, and it’s a not-insignificant reason why the film quickly started to develop a cult following after that. There’s no way to discuss Lifeforce without addressing the 800lb gorilla in the room in the form of the 125lb Mathilda May, with her weight utterly unencumbered by even a modicum of clothing for a significant percentage of the film’s running time. So, there: consider it addressed. (Although it’s worth pointing out that the two nude male vampires in the film are actually wearing all-too visible jocks in a few shots in order to cover up their own naughty bits, so when it came to frontal nudity, the Cannon Group didn’t quite have the courage of its convictions.)

Lifeforce stars Steve Railsback, Mathilda May, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Patrick Stewart, and Aubrey Morris as... C’mon, people, none of that really matters, does it? Suffice it to say that Mathilda May gets naked; Railsback method acts his way into the cosmos; Firth delivers every ridiculous line with po-faced conviction; Patrick Stewart hams it up shamelessly; and Aubrey Morris is as Aubrey Morris as ever. Either I had you at “Mathilda May gets naked” or I didn’t, and no analysis of the dramatis personae is going to change that fact. Lifeforce isn’t a drama, it’s an experience, and an experience of the most visceral sort. The rest is largely irrelevant. And if naked women aren’t your bag, never fear, there’s still the two (mostly) nude male vampires as well, plus giant animatronic space bats; an abundance of desiccated yet still animate corpses; great gouts of blood assembling into corporeal form; an utterly baffling zombie apocalypse; and a comet-fueled light show of the sort that Night of the Comet promised but couldn’t deliver thanks to its shoestring budget. Lifeforce has something for everyone, kids!

Lifeforce is based on the 1976 novel The Space Vampires by writer/philosopher Colin Wilson. The screen rights to the book passed through the hands of Dino De Laurentiis first (because of course it did) before ending up with Golan-Globus, but it took a few years before they were able to get the project off the ground. Enter Tobe Hooper, who had signed a three-picture deal with Cannon under the stipulation that one of those films needed to be a sequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and good Lord, was it ever). Hooper secured Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby to draft a screenplay, and that’s when the strange journey of Lifeforce really started. Hooper shepherded the process through several drafts, but ultimately much of it was rewritten on the fly during production by a variety of others (including an uncredited Michael Armstrong). If Lifeforce sometimes feels like they were making it up as they went along, that’s because they really were making it up as they went along.

Cannon was notorious for penny-pinching, slashing budgets on a whim and trying to economize by reusing costumes and sets for multiple films. In this case, however, they actually encouraged Hooper to spend even more money, and the budget started to swell out of proportion. Yet even when Cannon shelled out larger budgets like this, they still had an uncanny knack for making everything look cheap, and Lifeforce is no exception. If Alien was a B-movie made on an A-movie budget that really looked like an A-movie, and showed every single penny of its budget onscreen, Lifeforce is a B-movie made on an A-movie budget that still looks like a B-movie, and that’s despite the fact that every penny is visible onscreen. Mind you, all of that is part of the film’s manifest charms, but still.

The chaos extended to post-production, with Hooper’s 128-minute final cut being rejected—as was the title Space Vampires, which was deemed too cheesy for a film that’s pretty much cheesy from start to finish anyway. That cut was trimmed down to 116 minutes, and then further hacked to 101 minutes for the North American market (plus a few others). References to vampirism were omitted, scenes were dropped, others were shuffled, and since Henry Mancini wasn’t available to work on the revised version, most of his score was abandoned in favor of some hastily-assembled cues written by Michael Kamen. Lifeforce was always going to be messy at any length, but instead of being a big, beautiful mess, it became a truncated, incoherent one. While Hooper’s 128-minute cut will never see the light of day, the 116-minute version (somewhat inaccurately referred to as the international cut) is now considered to be the definitive one—or as definitive as it can be, anyway.

In the end, it’s Peter Firth as Col. Caine who sums up Lifeforce better than anything else possibly can: “Take it from the beginning. Assume we know nothing... which is understating the matter.” Even taken from the beginning in its full-length version, Lifeforce can only be experienced, not understood. It’s Quatermass and the Pit on cocaine, minus any semblance of the narrative, thematic, and logical coherency that Nigel Kneale provided. We all know nothing, other than the fact that the naked female form is still capable of turning the whole world upside-down. In that regard, it’s probably Steve Railsback’s Col. Carlsen who really gets to the heart of the matter:

“It was the hardest thing I ever did.”

I bet it was. Say no more.

Cinematographer Alan Hume shot Lifeforce on 35mm film using Arriflex 35BL III and 35-III cameras with Cooke Xtal Express anamorphic lenses. 35mm prints were framed at 2.35:1, while 70mm blowups were cropped to full frame 2.20:1. This version is based on a 4K scan of the original camera negative, digitally cleaned up and graded for High Dynamic Range in both Dolby Vision and HDR10. Since the negative was cut to conform to the U.S. theatrical version, the missing footage for the international version was scanned from an interpositive instead. Thus, the international cut as presented here is a rebuild that uses the camera negative as its core and supplements it with the missing material taken from the interpositive. Of course, that statement is perhaps a bit misleading, because the base U.S. version already contained a significant quantity of dupe footage thanks to the abundant optical work in the film, both in terms of visual effects and title cards. Vintage effects films like Lifeforce never looked internally consistent anyway, so adding back the missing footage from an IP doesn’t necessarily stick out as badly as you might think. It’s a horse apiece with the effects footage that’s already in the film.

Where the negative footage is concerned, the image is as sharp and detailed as the vintage anamorphic lenses and film stocks will allow. There’s significant distortion at the edges of the screen, much of it due to the wide-angle lenses that Hume used in the cramped interiors, but it seems to exacerbate the anamorphic distortion that would have been there anyway. The moderately heavy layer of grain is sharp, arguably a little too sharp and exaggerated (this is one case where a delicate touch of noise reduction might have helped smooth things out a bit). The dupe footage from the international cut and the optical printer work in both is naturally a bit softer and coarser, but it’s not too bad in comparison. The HDR grade makes the various otherworldly light shows really shine in this version, although the flesh tones can be a little inconsistent and a few of the reds run too hot—the crime scene tape at 37:58 (in the international cut) is borderline iridescent when it shouldn’t be. Otherwise, there’s no damage visible, and while the grain can be a little ugly at times, the encode handles it well with no significant compression artifacts.

Audio on both versions is offered in English 2.0 LPCM, 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, and Dolby Atmos, with optional English SDH subtitles. 35mm prints of Lifeforce were released in matrix-encoded optical Dolby Stereo, while 70mm prints utilized six-track mag Dolby Stereo instead. The 6-track mix was in “Baby Boom” format, so the surrounds were also mono, which means that there probably weren’t many significant differences between the two (aside from the fidelity, anyway). The 2.0 mixes here definitely offer encoded surround channels, so they’re the original theatrical mix—you can tell immediately during the opening credits of the international version when one of the titles whooshes out of the front soundstage and into the surrounds. The 5.1 and Dolby Atmos mixes both sound like relatively straightforward discrete encodings of the original four channels, although some split surround activity has been added when appropriate, like at 47:25 (or 38:44 on the U.S. cut) when one of the characters smashes a radio console.

Here’s the thing, though: the algorithms used by the Dolby Surround and DTS: X upmixers do use data pulled from the front surround channels in order to simulate split surrounds, so practically speaking, there’s not much difference between the 2.0, 5.1, and Atmos mixes. The levels aren’t matched, but after accounting for that, the differences are minor aside from some more accurate steering in the discrete versions. You can’t really go wrong with any of them. I ended up sticking with Atmos for most of the film, but your own mileage may vary. Regardless of which version that you choose, they’re all lively mixes with a wide stereo spread and plenty of directionalized effects in the surrounds. The bass isn’t the deepest, but there’s some occasional punch from the energy blasts and explosions.

While it’s impossible to do a fair side-by-side comparison between the international and the U.S. theatrical versions since they’re on separate discs, the international Atmos soundtrack does seem to sound a bit more robust and immersive than the one on the U.S. version, with even better steering between the channels. The U.S. Atmos mix was produced for Shout! Factory by Post Haste Digital in Los Angeles, while the newer one was produced for Arrow by Deluxe Audio in London, and the differences appear to go beyond just the alternate scores. The lack of level matching complicates that comparison even further, but since the international cut is an improved version of the film anyway, it’s not much of a loss if the U.S. cut sounds a bit weaker. Again, YMVV. (Note that the international cut does contain one small but very noticeable warble in the music in the Atmos track at 85:52, either due to an edit or damage to the sound elements. It’s not present in either 2.0 or 51.)

INTERNATIONAL CUT (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO): C/A-/A-
U.S. THEATRICAL CUT (FILM/AUDIO/VIDEO): D+/A-/B+

Arrow’s Region-Free Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD release of Lifeforce is a two-disc set that includes the international cut on one disc and the abbreviated U.S. theatrical cut on the other. Like most of their 4K releases these days, it’s UHD only, with a Blu-ray version available separately. The insert is reversible, featuring new artwork by Dan Mumford on one side and one of the original theatrical poster artworks on the other. There’s also a 24-page booklet with a new essay by Frank Collins. The following extras are included (note that while they’re all encoded in HD, a few of them contain upscaled SD material, and the International Trailer was fully upscaled from SD):

DISC ONE: INTERNATIONAL CUT

Audio Commentary by Tobe Hooper and Tim Sullivan
Audio Commentary by Douglas Smith and Howard S. Berger
Audio Commentary by Nick Maley and Michael Felsher
Isolated Music & Effects Audio Track
Cannon Fodder: The Making of Lifeforce (70:04)
Space Vampires in London (9:59)
Carlsen’s Curse (7:08)
Dangerous Beauty (15:17)
Textless Credits (2:40)
Trailer Gallery:
- International Trailer (2:03)
- U.S. Teaser Trailer (1:14)
- U.S. Theatrical Trailer (1:29)

The extras are all ported over from Arrow’s 2013 Region B Blu-ray release of Lifeforce, many of which were duplicated on the Region A Blu-ray from Shout! Factory that same year. (The commentary with Douglas Smith, the Isolated Music & Effects track, and Cannon Fodder were all exclusive to Arrow.) The three commentaries include Hooper, visual effects supervisor Douglas Smith, and makeup effects designer Nick Maley, moderated by Tim Sullivan, Howard S. Berger, and Michael Felsher, respectively. They all tend to focus on their own areas of expertise, with Hooper naturally covering more bases than the other two do. He hits on the whole experience of making Lifeforce, including his relationship with Golan-Globus, the nature of the story, and the post-production woes that resulted in two different cuts. (Naturally, the subject of Mathilda May comes up, more than once.) The other commentaries are more focused on technical matters related to each subject’s areas of expertise, but they delve into the story and some of the concepts as well. Between all three of them, the Smith commentary is arguably the most interesting. Berger tends to be more focused on thematic and historical concerns than he does on technical ones, but he and Smith really clicked together, and they cover a surprising variety of topics. (My favorite moment as an effects junkie from the Star Wars generation is when Smith describes the differences in methodologies between fellow ILM vets John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, and Dennis Muren.) All three tracks are more like interviews or dialogues than they are screen-specific commentaries, but there’s still plenty to be gleaned between all three of them.

The Isolated Music & Effects tracks (on both discs) are pretty self-explanatory. They’re both presented in 2.0 DTS Stereo.

Cannon Fodder: The Making of Lifeforce is a documentary produced and directed by Calum Waddell that features interviews with Tobe Hooper, producer Michael Kagan, Michael Armstrong, editor John Grover, makeup artist Sandra Exelby, sound designer Vernon Messenger, effects artist John Schoonraad, and art designers Tom Adams and Roger Stewart, plus actors Aubrey Morris and Nicholas Ball. They all offer their own perspectives on making the film, working for Cannon, and working with Tobe Hooper. At least one of them openly accuses the latter of being on drugs, but others attribute his mania to a combination of cigars and Dr. Pepper. They cover the chaotic nature of the production, with the script being rewritten on the fly by Armstrong (although he refused to take credit for that fact), and they offer details about things like dealing with the uncomfortable Kirby harnesses for the weightless scene and handling May’s omnipresent nudity. They also discuss the painful editorial process and the last-minute title change, with everyone having their own views on whether or not that was a good idea. The whole project is summed up neatly by Armstrong when he describes what happened when he read the screenplay for the first time. His immediate reaction was to say, “But this isn’t the script that you’re shooting, is it?” When he was told yes, his response was, “Oh... Well, is it a spoof?”

‘Nuff said.

Or not, as far as the extras are concerned. Aside from the trailers and the Textless Credits sequence and the various trailers, the rest of the extras on the first disc consist of interviews that were conducted by Michael Felsher for his Red Shirt Pictures. Space Vampires in London is with Tobe Hooper, Carlsen’s Curse is with Steve Railsback, and Dangerous Beauty is with Mathilda May. (Comparing the running times of all three interviews, it’s interesting to see that May still gets more exposure, so to speak.) Of course, that’s not really all, because there’s still more on the second disc:

DISC TWO: U.S. THEATRICAL CUT

Isolated Music & Effects Audio Track
Electric Boogaloo Interviews (45:40)
TV Version Comparison (14:48)

The Electric Boogaloo Interviews are a compilation of interview footage with Tobe Hooper, Michael Armstrong, and John Grover that was shot by Mark Hartley for his 2014 documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. Naturally, there’s some overlap here with the stories told in Cannon Fodder and the other interviews on the disc, but there’s also some fresh information, too. Hooper left us just three years later, so it’s an invaluable archive of his thoughts on Cannon and Lifeforce from near the end of his own journey (and for the record, he liked both titles, although he felt that Space Vampires would have done a better job of putting viewers in a better frame of mind for what they were about to experience).

Of course, there aren’t just two finished versions of Lifeforce, but really three if you include the censored television version. The TV Version Comparison shows some of the changes that were made for television side-by-side with the uncut version. The television footage was sourced from a vintage off-the-air VHS recording of a 1988 broadcast of the film, so the quality is poor, but it’s still a hoot to see the lengths that the studio had to take in order to make Lifeforce at least semi-presentable for delicate primetime audiences. Unlike some other films from the period like 10 to Midnight, it doesn’t look like Hooper shot any alternate clothed footage, so they had to get creative in order to cover up the all the nudity.

The only thing missing from Shout! Factory’s Blu-ray and UHD releases of Lifeforce are the Stills Gallery and the vintage 1985 featurette Making of Lifeforce (although some of the footage from it is included in the Michael Felsher interviews). There’s also supposedly a German-language commentary track on the 2018 Blu-ray release from NSM Records in Germany, but I haven’t been able to confirm that fact. Considering that Arrow adds the Cannon Fodder documentary, the Isolated Music & Effects tracks, and an extra commentary, it easily has the edge in terms of extras. (Plus, the Making of Lifeforce is available elsewhere online). Yet all of that is pretty trivial compared to the fact that Arrow is offering the only 4K version of the international cut (with Atmos, too) that’s currently available, since Shout! and all the other 4K releases of Lifeforce include the longer version on Blu-ray only. So, Arrow wins, hands-down and while your own mileage may vary, it’s well worth double-dipping if you already own the Shout! Factory UHD (or any other UHD, for that matter). And if you haven’t yet picked up Lifeforce in 4K, then this is unquestionably the one to choose. Whether or not you should is up to what you know about yourself—and hopefully it won’t be the hardest thing that you’ve ever done, either.

-Stephen Bjork

(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).