a little slower than I remembered...and should have been anamorphic

I remember really liking this film when I was a kid, and rewatching it, I could see why--plenty of grizzly looking zombie-like creatures and stuff (especially near the end), but an added 15 minutes of footage--not that I can tell which footage was added--has clearly made the pacing of the film a bit slow. Still fun to watch, but just expect to get a bit bored now and then.

My real disappointment is that the DVD wasn't enhanced for widescreen TVs. With a very long aspect ratio of 2:35:1, without an anamorphic transfer, more than HALF of your widescreen TV is covered with black bars when you watch this film, on the top and the bottom of the film, and the film ends up looking very small in the center of your screen, and not as cinematic as you'd hope. However, the 5.1 surround mix is excellent, impressive sound separation for a movie this old.

If you love sci-fi AND vampires...

We start off with a space shuttle whose astronauts are studying Haley's comet up close. This sets the stage. Comets were seen as omens of disaster, death, destruction. When Haley's comet came in 1910, churches were packed; people were convinced it was the end of the world. This movie is supposed to be an explanation of the hysteria historically associated with comets.

Guess what? The comet is actually an alien ship (or is it that the ship is hitching a ride?)! Yep. Aliens bearing gifts of death and destruction.

The aliens work with the efficiency we've come to expect from sci-fi villany, yet the aliens' humanoid forms provide all the eroticism you'd expect from horror. Visceral and cerebral--no wonder it didn't catch on in the mainstream.

Three alien vampires shapeshift into beguiling human forms which they've extracted and selected from the fantasies of astronauts. Once on Earth, they instinctively coordinate (through human "converts") the harvesting of massive amounts of human life force.

These aliens are very much vampires, functioning as the calculating predators they are: they shape shift, they mesmerize, they infect, they drain. Beautiful yet deadly. Walk-by-a-rosebush-watch-it-wither-and-die kind of deadly.

This movie--for the most part--is about the race to contain the vampire threat as well as to track down the three aliens who are exponentially infecting citizens of London, England.

It's very sci-fi. It's very sexy.

One of my favorite vampire movies of all time. They're not depicted so much as romantic figures, but as the predators they really are! It becomes very obvious, very fast, how poisonous their beauty is.

Great campy fun

I noticed that just about EVERY reviewer who wrote a review for Lifeforce on here over-analyzed the film and took it too seriously. I hardly think Tobe Hooper was trying to make a blockbuster epic like ALIENS. Take the film for what it is. I'm a huge horror fan and the film kept my attention the whole way through. Far more original and entertaining than most films coming out in 85 and at least there was a budget even if the effects were kinda cheesy. Nudity, Zombies, action, giant bat creatures...B-Movie heaven. Get this film if you like campt sci-fi/spacey films. I enjoyed it.