Tobe Hooper at MoMA: Lifeforce

When the European Space Agency gets in trouble, NASA is there to rescue them. Unfortunately, everyone was already dead on the ESA shuttle, except for the space vampires in suspended animation. However, there is a survivor heading home in the escape pod. Of course, he was the one American crew-member. Perhaps that is why naked “Space Girl” (as fans refer to her) forged a telepathic connection to Col. Tom Carlson, but that link works both ways in Tobe Hooper’s cult classic Lifeforce, which screens again Tuesday as part of MoMA’s retrospective of Hooper’s 1980s films.

You would think screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (who also penned Alien and Dark Star) would have made Carlson a “Major Tom” instead. However, he was certainly on solid ground describing an unexpected encounter with a dangerous race of space aliens. Ironically, the early scenes of the space vampire’s lair on Halley’s comet have serious Prometheus and Covenant vibes. Understandably, most of the Churchill’s crew assume the three good-looking humanoids are dead—since they are not breathing. Yet, the comatose bodies still exert a strange disruptive influence over the humans.

Things will go very badly on the Churchill, but Carlson’s explanation must wait for a later flashback. Frankly, by the time he reaches Earth Dr. Hans Fallada of the ESA and Col. Colin Caine of the SAS have already figured out the aliens consume people’s lifeforce. Like vampires, their victims also turn into lifeforce-suckers, but they are not as powerful. Apparently, Space Girl ditched her conspicuously naked body, having assumed control over a chin of hosts, but Carlson can now detect her influence with even an incidental touch.

Admittedly, it is hard to explain Lifeforce, even though it obviously layers science fiction elements over the narrative bones of Dracula. However, Hooper’s film is still an under-heralded genre gem. In some ways, it represents a once-in-a-lifetime genre collaboration, including Hooper (the director of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist), narrator John Larroquette (who also supplied the voice-over intro to Texas Chainsaw), O’Bannon, special effects artist John Dykstra (notable for Star Wars in 1977 and Spider-Man in 2002), a grand symphonic score composed by Henry “Pink Panther” Mancini, and it even features Patrick Stewart in a supporting role, as Dr. Armstrong. Plus, it was produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, of Cannon Films, who contracted Hooper to a three-picture deal.

Despite some excesses, like Space Girl walking through the city of London without a stitch of clothing, Lifeforce holds up nicely as a hybrid sf-horror production. Arguably, many of the scenes aboard the Churchill have a look and texture that evoke the vibes of earlier Dykstra films, such as Star Wars and Silent Running, which is very cool.

Peter Firth and Frank Finlay also develop intelligent, crisply professional chemistry in the Peter Cushing-Christopher Lee tradition, as Caine and Fallada. They embody smart, coolly competent characters, who admittedly have an awful lot on their plates. As Col. Carlson, Steve Railsback has terrific freakouts and fully commits to some over-the-top sex scenes, but if there had been a sequel, Firth’s Col. Caine would have been the one to carry it.

Nightstream ’20: Shock Value How Dan O’Bannon and Some USC Outsiders Helped Invent Modern Horror

Everyone associates the USC film school with George Lucas--and that's probably just fine with the admissions officer. The film program played a pivotal role facilitating late 20th Century sf cinema, thanks to THX 1138, which led to Star Wars. However, USC alumni were also instrumental in the development of contemporary horror, particularly John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon (who wrote Alien and directed the cult classic Return of the Living Dead). Inspired by Jason Zinoman’s book, Dino Everett assembled five short student films helmed by O’Bannon, Carpenter, and their USC colleagues (as well as some tantalizing audio fragments from a lost Carpenter film) in the program Shock Value: How Dan O’Bannon and Some USC Outsiders Helped Invent Modern Horror, which screens on-demand as part of the online genre festival, Nightstream.

Logically, Shock Value starts with O’Bannon, but some might not consider Blood Bath exactly horror per se, even though it definitely has its grisly parts. The crimson-tinged tale of suicide motivated by boredom and accidentally executed through negligence is mostly memorable for O’Bannon’s muttering voice-over dialog. It is easy to see why his classmates would have loved it, but it feels like a one-off joke in retrospect.

However, it is followed by one Shock Value’s major revelations. Charles Adair’s The Demon is most definitely a horror film, but viewers could argue which subgenre. Helen Stone has just moved to an isolated farm house with her husband John, who seems to be gas-lighting her. Yet, there really seems to be an ominous “Demon” watching her. Whether he is a psycho or a zombie or whatever hardly matters.

Maurishka’s performance as the terrified Stone is truly haunting, something like a somewhat more resilient Barbara from Night of the Living Dead. Despite the minimal budget, The Demon is further distinguished by its stylishly surreal look. Frankly, the way Adair masterly instills a sense of evil foreboding suggest he might just be a terribly overlooked horror auteur.

O’Bannon’s Good Morning Dan is an unusually eccentric dystopian film, in which the title character is forced by Big Brother to reminisce over some incredibly awkward moments from his life feels very much like a product of its trippy time. However, the music composed by Ben Model (in 1968) and Frank Meyer (in 2006) is distinctively funky.

Expectations might be high for John Carpenter’s Captain Voyeur (from 1969), but it is really more of a quick and twisted gag film. Yet, there are scenes of skulking through alleys and around houses, from the titular perv-perp’s POV, that foreshadows his classic Halloween. (We can only guess what Lady Madonna could have been, but the religious themes hinted at in the surviving audio extracts make us what to revisit Prince of Darkness.)

However, Shock Value’s second great revelation is considered a direct and formative influence on Carpenter’s breakout slasher. By now, the story of Terence Winkless & Alec Lorimore’s Judson’s Release (produced in 1971) sounds quite familiar. A psycho fresh out of an institution (played by O’Bannon) fixates on Julie, a teenager babysitting alone. Nevertheless, this is a tense film that looks terrifyingly realistic. While it is widely thought to have influenced Halloween, it also predates When a Stranger Calls, both the short film and feature, which “shares” a key twist with Winkless & Lorimore’s film—you know, where the calls are coming from.

Sundance ’19: Memory—The Origin of Alien

1979 was a great year for movies, pound for pound. They were not all masterpieces, but in general, the films that year were remarkably re-watchable. We are talking about perennials, like Life of Brian, Rocky II, The Warriors, Love at First Bite, Apocalypse Now, and most of all Alien. Ridley Scott’s science fiction-horror classic still holds up, even when you know what’s coming. To mark its fortieth anniversary, Alexandre O. Philippe takes a deep dive into the mythos and influences of Scott’s most iconic film in Memory: The Origin of Alien, which screens during the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

Alien took Scott’s career to a new level, but screenwriter Dan O’Bannon is the hero of this origin story. O’Bannon co-wrote and co-starred in Dark Star, but it wasn’t what he had hoped it would be. Having fallen out with John Carpenter, O’Bannon started scripting a much darker alien encounter film, but he was blocked on page thirty-nine. It was a heck of a place to get stuck, because that scene would become the most memorable—some would say notorious sequence in Alien. You know the one. John Hurt is in the center of it.

Memory became Star Beast and finally morphed into Alien. O’Bannon hired his old colleague from Jodorowsky’s aborted Dune movie, H.R. Giger to create character designs (out of his own pocket), but his work freaked out the studio, who fired him. However, when Scott came on board, he got it and hired Giger back.

There is a good deal of this kind of interesting behind-the-scenes stuff in Memory (the doc), but Philippe really digs into Alien’s mythological and cinematic forerunners, likening the aliens to the Furies from Greek mythology and drawing parallels with earlier films such as It! The Terror from Beyond Space and The Thing from Another World (produced by Howard Hawks). The analysis of Philippe’s talking heads takes a decidedly archetypal Joseph Campbell-esque turn, but their contentions are quite grounded and well-reasoned. Some viewers might be disappointed by the absence of many original cast-members, but at least Tom Skerritt and Veronica Cartwright are present and accounted for.

Memory is not at all a case of all Giger, all the time, but there is still plenty of the Swiss artist’s macabre imagery, so his fanatical admirers should not feel cheated. Frankly, even fans who have seen the original Alien dozens of times might be surprised by the depth of Memory. It is definitely Philippe’s best documentary to date. In fact, Memory echoes our sentiments regarding the significance of genre films as a measure of society’s collective neuroses. Enthusiastically recommended, Memory: The Origin of Alien screens again this Tuesday (1/29) and Friday (2/1) in Park City, tomorrow (1/27) in Sundance Resort, and Saturday (2/2) in Salt Lake, as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.