40 Years Ago: Back to the Future (1985)

Do you want go back in time? Well, just consider, Back to the Future is 40 years old! Now that fact will take you back!

Yet it’s an appropriate thought with which to commence this review, because Back to the Future and its sequels concern the subject of family, and the inexorable passage of our generations, the passage of time.

Specifically, the trilogy involves the cycle of falling in love, marrying, and raising children. 

Whether we are riding horses or hover boards, the things that matter remain identical, no matter the calendar year. 

To quote Huey Lewis and the News, that’s the “power of love,” right?  

It’s the universal condition that exists regardless of our historical epoch or specific technological know-how.

Intriguingly, Back to the Future’s leitmotif is not a common one, either, for a Hollywood-made time travel film. 

Historically, movies about time travel concern bigger, more “event”-oriented issues. 

What if a man went to the future and discovered the end of the human race? That was the subject of The Time Machine (1960), for example.  

Or what if the U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz went back in time to the hours before the attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941 and its crew had the chance to turn the tide of the war on the day it began? That was the subject of The Final Countdown (1980).

Back to the Future differs from the vast majority of time travel movies because of the stakes. The danger suggested by mission failure, simply, is not Earth shattering. 

What’s at stake instead is a personal apocalypse, the “negation” of one’s self because the right prospective family members didn’t connect in the past, and therefore didn’t forge the present that makes you…you.

The danger in all three Back to the Future films is of time being rewritten in a fashion, that, broadly-speaking, does not influence a lot of people, but dramatically influences a few individuals…a family. 

Indeed, the film playfully charts this idea by revealing how Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) does change the course of time on a micro-basis, and how largely, those changes are inconsequential. 

Unnoticed even.

Twin Pines Mall in Hill Valley becomes Lone Pine Mall because a pine tree is accidentally destroyed in 1955. But the location and existence of the mall remains the same.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to notice, does the time line care?

The overall lesson, perhaps, of Back to the Future is that time both connects us and separates us from those we love most. 

Though we may all be at different points on our individual journey or chronology, we have all been -- or one day will be -- the person attending his or her first school dance, or the one who grows up fearing rejection.  

Thus, Back to the Future is about seeing and understanding that parents, children, and even grandparents are all the same, even if the trappings that we believe define them are so very different. 

Back to the Future is, therefore, a generation gap movie that decides, in the end, that there is no generation gap at all, just the passage of time that blocks us, somehow, from recognizing how similar to one another we all are.

“That was the day I invented time travel…”

In 1985, eccentric scientist Doc Brown (Lloyd) unveils to his teenage friend, Marty McFly (Fox) a time machine that he has invented. Equipped with a “flux capacitor,” Doc’s time machine is actually a car, a DeLorean that will break the time barrier when it accelerates to 88 miles an hour.

Marty, who has an unhappy home life because his father, George (Crispin Glover) is constantly being bullied by a thug named Biff Tannen (Thomas Wilson), ends up in the time machine when Libyan terrorists attack and presumably kill Doc Brown.

Marty inadvertently travels back in time to 1955, the year his parents fell in love and shared a first kiss at the Enchantment under the Sea dance. 

But Marty accidentally interferes in their relationship, preventing Lorraine (Lea Thompson) and George from falling in love.  

Marty consults with the Doc Brown of 1955, who determines that a bolt of electricity can get the DeLorean back to the future, and suggests that Marty must play Cyrano for George, so as to restore Marty’s personal time-line.

But even in this era, Biff is a danger to the McFly family, and the family’s fear of rejection could destroy everything.  

Meanwhile, Marty must also determine if he should share with Doc a foreknowledge of his apparent death in 1985…

“Whatever you need to tell me, I’ll learn through the natural progression of time.”

It is apt, perhaps, that the central symbol of Back to the Future is a broken clock; the clock that decorates Hill Valley’s Courthouse.  

As the film opens, the clock has been stuck in place for thirty years, inoperative. It thus no longer performs its intended function: to tell time (though it is still right twice a day.)  

Instead, the clock commemorates an event that everybody remembers. a storm that hit Hill Valley.

In a sense, this is how Marty exists too. 

He is “stuck” in a present that is not entirely happy or satisfying. His father, George, is bullied by his boss, Biff, and his mother, Lorraine, seems to have given up on herself and life. Even Marty’s siblings don’t seem able to realize their potential. Not a one of the McFlys seems to possess any self-confidence at all. 

The stories that George and Lorraine tell about their high school years, and the way that they fell in love, similarly share a “stuck” feeling. Those moments in 1955 are frozen, as if in amber, heard again and again, unchanging, and don’t seem to inform or impact the present. The stories sound more like the beginning of a prison sentence than of an epic love story

If George and Lorraine love each other so much, why don’t they try harder to be happy, to help their children, or to make something of their past? Why they didn't imbue their children with the notion that the future is unwritten, and they can make it whatever they want it to be (to paraphrase Doc in Back to the Future Part III)?

Marty then goes back to 1955, and sees all these (personally) historic and significant moments not as frozen in amber, forever unalterable...but as infinitely malleable; as ones that point a future in one direction, or in another. 

In the end, Marty finds he can tweak the future so that his parents aren’t stuck in the same rut. Through practical experience, in fact, George realizes he doesn't have to be afraid.  He stands up for himself to Biff, in order to save the girl he loves, Lorraine.

The only unfortunate side-effect in the movie, artistically-speaking, of this character trajectory is that it comes down -- in very 1980s fashion -- to money. 

Marty returns to his present and finds that he owns an expensive new pick-up truck, and that his parents are newly fit, youthful, and confident.  His Dad is a best-selling author.

The signs of their success in this time line are, alas, largely monetary. Even Marty’s brother (Marc McClure) has been assimilated into mainstream “success,” dressing in a business suit and tie instead of a fast food restaurant’s uniform.  

The overall point here is a good one: if you can overcome your fears of rejection, or learn to stand up for yourself, you can succeed in life.  It's great that Marty teaches his Dad that lesson, and learns it for himself.

But in a sense, the message plays out in Back to the Future like a yuppie fantasy. Change the past in your favor and you’ll be welcomed back to the present with an upwardly mobile life-style.

The later films, perhaps conscious of such a (presumably unintended) message, travel in a different, and wholly more worthwhile direction. Marty overcomes his fear of being called “chicken” but is not rewarded with money or rock-and roll-stardom, only the knowledge that he will avoid a crippling car accident.  

Thus the two sequels to Back to the Future seem more in line with the lyrics of “The Power of Love,” which state “don’t take money; don’t take fame, don’t need a credit card to ride this train” because love is not about those things that money brings you. It is about the things, instead, that “might even save your life.”

Despite the unnecessarily materialistic outcome of the film's valid and worthwhile message, Back to the Future is exceptionally clever (though its first sequel is even cleverer, frankly…), in the way it diagrams Marty’s journey as one of personal discovery and knowledge.

The things that he might not have really taken the time to care about, like the history of Hill Valley’s Clock Tower, or the Enchantment under the Sea Dance where his parents first kiss, are actually crucial elements that give rise to his very existence. They are as important, in a sense, to his psychic gestalt as his DNA is. 

One thread gets pulled out, and everything falls apart for Marty. He suddenly must also reckon with his Mom and Dad not as parents, but as real, honest-to-goodness people; as vulnerable, flawed human beings.  He sees that Lorraine was not "born a nun," but a young woman looking to buck authority and find love.  He sees that his Dad, like him, is fearful of rejection, and that he assiduously hides his real passion: writing science fiction stories.

The later Back to the Future films deepen significantly the friendship between Marty and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), and so further enhance the idea of personal connection as the motivator which makes new and better futures possible, but the same idea is also here, with Marty forced to reckon with his parents as impulsive teenagers.  He has to care for them, as friends.

This viewpoint gives him a new perspective on them, and also on himself. When the moment comes, Marty is able to perform in public, on stage, and not suffer from his familial fear of failure, because he has seen how his dad cowers in the face of a challenge.

Yet -- and here's the rub -- to see and recognize this particular foible in his father, Marty must see George (Crispin Glover) as a young man; as, roughly, a contemporary. 

It’s all too easy to gaze at a middle-aged parent, perhaps and draw the conclusion that age -- thus time itself -- separates you from him, when the contrary is true. Our parents (or our children contrarily), are not alien beings separated from us by strange ways. They are…us, only at a different point in their lives.

The movie actually literalizes this clever idea n-- of generational differences making people seem like aliens -- through visual imagery.

Marty can only get through to his stubborn father by becoming, actually, an E.T., an alien. He dresses up in a bio-hazard suit as "Darth Vader from the Planet Vulcan," and in that guise, is able to make progress with his dad.

Commendably, Back to the Future is one of those films that gets better once you factor in the sequels. Although the critics hated Part II in 1990, I find it to be the strongest of the three films; the Empire Strikes Back of this particular saga.  

But taken as a whole, the three films, by depicting the McFly/Tannen generations of 1885, 1955 and 2015, reveal how the the same story -- the power of love -- gets repeated, one generation to the next.

Every era has its chase in the municipal square, involving either horses, skate-boards or hover-crafts, 

Every era has a karmic (and manure-laden...) comeuppance for a bully.  

Every era involves a love story (Clara and Doc in 1885; Lorraine and George in 1955; Marty and Jennifer in 1985 and 2015), and every generation reveals how places and things change despite the fact that the story of life -- the power of love -- remains the same.

We see the life of the Clock Tower, from construction to damage, to intended re-construction. 

We see the birth of Lyon Estates as a great place to live, and then, years later, dinged by grafitti. 

We see the same in terms of Hilldale, the new development being built in Hill Valley where, in 2015, Marty and Jennifer will live.

The overall idea is, again, simply, that though objects, instruments and trends change radically, the essence of human life, and family, remains the same.

The great thing, of course, is that these ruminations about generations are set against rollicking action scenes (like the rousing skateboard chase), romantic interludes (like the first kiss at the dance), and, of course, a great sense of humor.  

On that final front, Back to the Future is extremely funny, whether pondering the journey of Ronald Reagan -- from Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) to winning the White House again in 1984 -- or imagining that the perfect vehicle for time travel is a DeLorean

As I noted above, these days I actually prefer Back to the Future Part II, but it was this 1985 film that started off the franchise, and proved a gigantic box office hit in 1985. I believe Back to the Future resonated with audiences then (as with now), because Marty's story is not so much about time travel, as the way that time travel can help us bridge a generation gap,

Guest Post: The Monkey (2025)

The Monkey

By Jonas Schwartz-Owen

The Monkey, based on a Stephen King short story, is more an exercise than a movie. Death becomes so trivial that the cornucopia of mutilations portrayed rolls off one’s back as innocuously as clouds in the sky drift on the screen. Without a point of view or commentary, the film is empty, even if it is a lot of fun. 

Twins from an erratic broken home fear that their new toy, a drumming monkey, is causing the violent deaths in their neighborhood. They bury the menace, but it returns with a vengeance years later. As an adult, Hal (played by Theo James, who also plays his twin Bill) can’t stop his life from unraveling. His wife has left him for a marriage guru (Elijah Wood in an amusing cameo), and he has lost custody of his child (Colin O'Brien). When he discovers the cursed creature has returned, he tracks down Bill to stop the toy once and for all. 

Written by Osgood Perkins, whose Longlegs made a splash last year, adapted the film with a mission of working out his own childhood traumas. He had told Empire Magazine, “The thing with this toy monkey is that the people around it all die in insane ways. So, I thought: Well, I'm an expert on that.' Both my parents died in insane, headline-making ways” – father, Anthony, Norman Bates of Psycho, publicly suffered with AIDS before dying, and mother, Berry Berenson, died as a passenger of the plane that crashed into the North Tower on 9/11. 

A spirit of futility oozes through the script and mise-en-scene. Perkins does capture an otherworldliness which works with the humorous tone despite the nihilistic nature of the story. For instance, this is the kind of movie you want to shout at the screen, “DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT MOVIE YOU’RE IN??? DON”T go to a hibachi restaurant!!!!!” to no avail.

Perkins exploits the design of the creature for maximum effect.  Its presence is pure menace: with huge eyes and a vicious grin, a pulled back face like it had a bad face lift, every tooth visible and ready to rip someone apart, uncomfortably stiff like it’s ready to explode. The big joke is that the creature barely moves in the film and physically commits no murders, making it creepier. A Rube Goldberg series of events leads to decapitations, skewerings and bursting blood vessels.

The performances set the tone, including Tatiana Maslany as the twin’s loopy mother, Wood as the self-impressed interloper (he should have been given more screentime), Perkins as an uncomfortably pervy uncle, and Adam Scott as the kid’s frenetic dad. James handles the weight of being the protagonist, the straight man in an insane world, and his parental chemistry with O’Brien makes you care about their storyline. 

The Monkey satirizes life and nightmarish adolescence in a clever, but ultimately unrewarding way. Nothing is to be taken seriously (even a funeral has no gravity). That can sting, especially in this current world order, but in a film where people are just meat with no control over circumstances and no weight in this universe, it is difficult to do anything but point and laugh. 

50 Years Ago: Rollerball (1975)

"Corporate society takes care of everything. And all it asks of anyone, all it's ever asked of anyone ever, is not to interfere with management decisions."

- Corporate Executive, Bartholomew (John Houseman) explains how it is in Norman Jewison's Rollerball (1975) 

Released the same year as the low-budget Death Race 2000 (1975),  director Norman Jewison's Rollerball is a dystopian film with many similar elements.  Both films are set in the future.  Both films involve "athletes" in incredibly dangerous contests, and both efforts suggest the notion of such violent contests as "bread and circuses" for the unhappy masses of America.  

When the chips are down, give us our gladiatorial games, and we'll forget that we don't have our liberty...

Of course, Death Race 2000 is more over-the-top, funny,and nasty in execution, and so Rollerball feels a bit reserved and staid by comparison.  And yet Rollerball is grave, impressive, and serious in its depiction of a corporate dystopia.   The film thrives on speed, acceleration and movement, and James Caan is a sturdy anchor in this tale of a world in which corporations use blood lust to control the people. 

Not all critics agreed.  Writing in The Film Encyclopedia, Science Fiction (page 327), a reviewer complained the film was "overly complicated" and mixed "political intrigue and romance for no purpose."  

Others felt the film was just a cover for violence itself.  Writing in Sci-Fi Now (Octopus Books, 1977), author Alan Frank noted that the film merely created a "special environment in which the film's use of excessive use of violence can be made justified."  

By pointed contrast, recent assessments of Rollerball have been more positive. Film Threat noted that Rollerball was "prescient about violence, corporations, and TV," and that's certainly a fair assessment.  The film is a valuable one because it questions what passes for entertainment, but more than that, what passes for "freedom" in an increasingly technological, media-saturated age.

"Ladies and gentlemen, will you stand please for the playing of our Corporate Hymn?"

 

Rollerball's action takes place after the world's nations have gone "bankrupt," and after the destructive "Corporate Wars" have come and gone  

Now, corporations "take care of everyone," and the violent, team sport of Rollerball has been created by big business to remind people of "the futility of individual effort."  The goal of the corporations is to be essential to every individual's life, and for "the few" to make important decisions on "a global basis."

Unfortunately, there are serious downsides to corporate rule as depicted in Rollerball.  For one thing, all citizens are treated as powerless employees of the "Executive Class."  This means that your beloved wife can be transferred to another man's possession with the ease an on-the-job departmental transfer.  Indeed, this is the indignity that the world's greatest Rollerball player, Jonathan E. (James Caan) has suffered...and never forgiven.   He still loves his wife, but an executive in Italy had more power and stature...and took her.  And she was paid handsomely to leave Jonathan, rewarded with a villa in Rome, and extreme wealth.  

Early in Rollerball, the company -- represented by John Houseman's stern executive, Bartholomew -- also delivers another despotic edict: Jonathan must retire from the game for "the common good."   This demand doesn't sit well with Jonathan E., and he encourages his ever-increasing fame on the court, even in the face of attempts by the company to kill him.   

Before long, Jonathan finds the corporation changing the game's rules on him.  First, the Executive class eliminates penalties for rough play.  Then it eliminate replacements/substitutions, so that no injured players can leave the game in progress.  Then, finally, the corporate men push a game with no established time limit.  The final Rollerball game ends only when the last man is standing...

As you might expect, the Rollerball tournaments serve, in many ways, as the highlights of this classic sci-fi film.  Staged with meticulous attention-to-detail and with an eye towards speed and acceleration, these games grow increasingly violent throughout the film.  The set-piece against the Tokyo team, in particular, descends into a blood bath.  One player even catches fire before the game is done.

If possible, the film's climactic contest -- New York vs. Jonathan E.'s Houston team -- is even more vicious.  Scarlet blood is seen spilled all over the game arena, and in one horrible moment, the first aid responders are actually run down by a speeding motorcycle.  Then our protagonist, Jonathan, kills a player right in front of Houseman's character, and before a live TV audience.   

All the while, a packed house cheers and applauds wildly over the violent action...  

"Jonathan, there's one thing you ought to know, and nobody's said it, but I'm sure of it. They're afraid of you, Jonathan. All the way to the top, they are."

On one level, of course, Rollerball satirizes the hyper-kinetic, overtly-commercialized world of modern  organized sports, where the strongest, hunkiest lunkhead receives the most admiration based on the size of his... muscle mass.   

This notion of making athletes "heroes" is made clear in a Rollerball scene set inside a locker room, as Bartholomew speaks to the players' egos.  "They dream they're great rollerballers," he tells them, speaking of Executives.   "They dream they're Jonathan; they have muscles, they bash in faces." 

  

On the other hand, and on a much deeper thematic level, Rollerball muses directly on the topic of freedom in a technological, mass-media Adams) makes a points relative to life in the 1970s and today.  Ella asks Jonathan why he simply doesn't do what the Executives want him to do especially since he would be paid handsomely for his compliance.  

Jonathan notes that it is a choice "between having nice things...or freedom."  Ella responds -- terrifyingly -- "But comfort is freedom."   

By contrast, Jonathan suggests the truth: "That's never been it. I mean, them privileges just buy us off."

In other words: Don't sweat things like individual freedom or liberty.  There are items to purchase, things to own.  Don't you want an Italian villa?

Incidentally, this very-Rollerball sentiment was mirrored rather dramatically in President Jimmy Carter's famous and much-derided "Crisis of Confidence" speech five years later, in 1979.  He said: 

"In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose."

Rollerball depicts a society in which the people have indeed accepted control by a ruling elite...in return for being "provided for," in return for "privilege."  

But, in accordance with the President Carter quote, these same people have no sense of meaning or purpose.  

Part of the reason the people live with such an unjust arrangement is because of a deliberate black-out of educational materials and information.  Rollerball tournaments play endlessly on the television, and local libraries are impersonal computer centers that feature only "summaries" of important literary works and ideas.  

Instead, the corporations own history itself: "What do you want books for?," Jonathan's team-mate, Moon Pie asks innocently.  "Look Johnny, if you wanna learn somethin', just get a Corporate Teacher to come and teach it to ya'. Use yer Privilege Card..."

It's clearly an Internet-less world, and in one scene in the film, Jonathan E. goes to Geneva to visit a computerized archive where all the answers about "corporate rule" are purported to exist.  Not surprisingly, the computer librarian, named Zero, proves absolutely unhelpful. in providing such data.  In fact, the machine has lost the totality of the "13th Century" in terms of knowledge.  Thus, there is no place to turn to in this world to learn about history, science, or nature.  Everything is the game.  Everything is blood lust.  

Because as long as you think about the game, and which team is winning or losing, you aren't thinking about who is gaming the system and for what agenda.

Based on William Harrison's short story, "The Roller Ball Murder" (1973; Esquire), Rollerball runs for over two hours, and it features essentially two modes. The first mode reveals the kind of listless, purposeless, meaningless existence of "comfortable" citizens like Jonathan E.  The second mode involves the game matches themselves, set on a circular track.  The game play is urgent, pointed and murderous, a deliberate contrast to the film's lackadaisacal first mode.  I imagine that some audiences today would probably find these aspects of the film boring, but as the first mode concerns the existential angst of a futuristic gladiator, the insight into his daily life and routine is entirely appropriate.  

Uniquely, Rollerball also makes widespread use of classical music, including Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and Adagio in G minor from Tomaso Albinoni.  These musical selections comment on the action  (and understand the action) in a way that the film's knowledge-challenged dramatis personae cannot.  The music -- so distinctly of the human past -- connects Jonathan E's futuristic struggle for freedom to such struggles in man's long history, and arises specifically from the Baroque tradition, dealing intentionally with the "affect of man."  The musical selection that opens the film, Toccata and Fugue, renders the accompanying imagery (of game preparations in the vast Rollerball stadium) almost religious in stature and transmits the idea that we are witnessing an important ritual being played out.

Rollerball's production design is, accordingly, relatively impersonal and dehumanizing in nature.  Citizens visit vast "luxury centers," mall-like locations -- places to shop -- in keeping with such kindred fare as Logan's Run (1976).  The Executive Suites as seen in the film are palatial and extravagant.  The opulent life-style of the executive class is revealed in one dinner party scene, and the sequence ends with the drunken, entitled elite mindlessly blowing up trees with futuristic guns.

The Rollerball arena is itself an important metaphor in the film.  The track is a loop, a track that never ends, with no end and no beginning.   Teams battle one another for supremacy, going around and around on this track endlessly (kind of like a NASCAR race, I suppose).  But one individual -- a Spartacus of the future age -- breaks out of this circular trajectory and takes the fight right to the stands.  

One spectacularly effective  composition in the Jewison film finds Jonathan E. braced against a transparent wall on the Rollerball rink. Behind him is Bartholomew, the executive, scowling.  And reflected on the transparent glass are out-of-control flames  

Here we have all three critical elements: the gladiator, the villain who is "untouchable" and the fire of revolt -- of individual achievement -- threatening to burn out of control.

The enduring genius of Rollerball, I would submit, is that it artfully exposes how powerful people become addicted to controlling the lives of others  The corporate stooges of the Executive Class wage full-bore, murderous war against a citizen because they want one player -- one damned player -- to retire from "their" game.  They apparently don't consider tolerating Jonathan E's presence for a few more years, followed, presumably, by a peaceful retirement.  Instead they seek to dominate and defeat Jonathan E. -- a champion and competitor -- and in doing so, incite his sense of competition.  

For Jonathan, "Four or five little things make one big thing," and the retirement demand, on top of the loss of his wife to an executive, constitutes a tipping point.  By pushing the stubborn and tough Jonathan E. to his line in the sand, the Corporate Culture only assures that Jonathan E. proves the very point they don't want established:

The will of the individual matters.

40 Years Ago: Lifeforce (1985)

"Lifeforce may come to be considered a noteworthy science-fiction film precisely because it is so relentlessly unsentimental and edgy.  This film displays a sensibility so odd, so unfamiliar, that it may prove one of the most subtly original sf films of the 1980s...[T]he film has something to offend almost everyone but offers much for serious analysis."

- Brooks Landon, The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 1988, page 276.

Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce (1985) is another one of those great horror films, like John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), that mainstream and genre critics seemed to venomously despise, and yet which I admire with something akin to enthusiastic passion. For me, Lifeforce remains one of the essential titles in modern horror cinema history.

The Cannon film -- based on a novel by Colin Wilson called Space Vampires -- was a gigantic box office failure upon release, and yet a generation of admirers quickly found it on home video...and the film became legendary in some circles.  

I admire Lifeforce so deeply and so thoroughly because I feel that, like Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1973), the film goes (far) out of its way to shock and transgress, leaving no taboo related to its subject matter -- sex -- untouched.  

Hooper is never one for Hollywood-styled movie decorum, and I've always found his subversive, bracing takes on horror tropes (vampires, ghosts, cannibals) authentically disturbing because of that very fact.  His movies, while speaking trenchantly in the language of film grammar, almost universally lack...tact.  You just don't know where this director is going to take you, or what he is going to show you.  As fellow horror maestro Wes Craven famously noted, a "filmmaker like Tobe Hooper can convince you you're really at risk in a theater." (Entertainment Weekly, October 23, 1992, page 41), and that is the essence of Hooper's ethos as far as I'm concerned.

I've written these words before, but a great horror film should: a.) deal cogently with some topic relevant to the culture of the movie's context and b.) deal with that subject matter in a fashion that genuinely troubles the psyche.   Lifeforce conforms to both points quite ably.

In short, Lifeforce is a big-budget, colossal-in-scope meditation on the consequences of sex in all sizes, shapes, forms, and perversions.  In part, the film is a straight-faced walking-tour of late 20th century sexual proclivities, from voyeurism to masochism, from homosexuality to fetishistic obsession.  Among other things, Lifeforce is about your deepest, most personal desires taking over, and that content is reflected in the film's dazzling, jaw-dropping form.

Even in the development of this core idea about sex, Hooper chooses incredibly unconventional pathways for his epic horror film.  In Lifeforce, the film's sexually-transmitted space vampire disease becomes a zombie epidemic that transforms London into something half-way between a George Romero Living Dead film and the weirdest orgy in cinematic history.  

Some reviewers viewed this ending as a mistake, an out-of-character u-turn for the film and a lapse in serious tone.  Yet if you're a longstanding Hooper aficionado you may realize that the strange climax of Lifeforce boasts clear antecedents in films such as Poltergeist as a kind of post-narrative, almost anti-narrative detour.  Remember, L.M. Kit Carson called Tobe Hooper the "no deal" kid, and that's the go-for-broke, breathless quality of Lifeforce that keeps me watching it more than a quarter century later.

Given the weird and controversial subject matter here and the blunt vetting of it by a confident, at-the-top-of-his-game Hooper, perhaps it is only natural that the film so divided critics.  Bruce Eder of Video Magazine called Lifeforce (possibly) "the last great science fiction film to come out of England," while film scholars Bill Warren and Bill Thomas (in American Film: "Great Balls of Fire, March 1986, page 70) felt the film got "the spectacle and weirdness right" but that the film lacked a "much-needed sense of humor."  

Others were less open to the Lifeforce experience.  Janet Maslin in The New York Times jokingly termed the film "sterile," while People Magazine's Ralph Novak found it "tiresome."  Cinefantastique even termed Lifeforce (in October 1985) "an object lesson in failure." Space Vampires author Wilson called Lifeforce "the worst movie ever made."

I can't know this for certain, but I suspect that a great many of these critics actually found the Hooper film offensive.  Visually and narratively offensive.  They were responding to the decorum-shattering images and plot-line.  

But of course, being offensive is kind of the point in the horror genre, isn't it?  Horror can show us things that mainstream movies can't, or won't.  A truly strong horror film will rock the audience back on its heels so it is unprepared for what comes next. And in that state, a talented director can mold audience expectations and emotions like putty.  

I would suggest that's exactly Hooper's accomplishment in Lifeforce. Here he corrals such controversial visual elements as rampant frontal nudity and extreme gore to craft the feeling of a world rapidly spiraling out of control, consumed by an unquenchable desire in our very blood. Replete with narrative blind alleys and daring, unconventional imagery, plus controversial subject matter, Lifeforce establishes again that Hooper is the genre's most underrated, underestimated genius, a legitimate provocateur extraordinaire.

"I'm fascinated by death itself. What happens as we die, when we die. What happens after we die..."

As the space shuttle Churchill -- a joint American/European space exploration venture -- nears Halley's Comet, something alien and colossal is detected inside.  It's a vessel 250 miles long and two miles high.

Mission commander, Colonel Carlsen (Steve Railsback), leads a small team on a mission inside the derelict.  There, he finds a crew of dead bat-creatures, and more mysteriously, three perfect and naked humanoids: two men and a gorgeous woman (Mathilda May).

Sometime later, on Earth, a European Space Agency discovers the Churchill limping home from its rendezvous with the comet, unresponsive to communication attempts.  A rescue team finds all crew aboard dead, save for the three nude aliens.  These creatures are promptly brought back to Earth for study, and the Space Girl soon awakes.  She drains the "lifeforce" from a guard, and then escapes from the facility.   

Soon, soul survivor Carlsen's escape pod makes a landing on Earth, and he teams with England's stoic Colonel Caine (Peter Firth) and Dr. Hans Fallada (Frank Finlay)  to locate the Space Girl before she can pass her vampiric disease on to more unsuspecting humans.

While Carlsen and Caine track the Space Girl to a home for the criminally-insane outside of London, Dr. Fallada determines that the Girl and her brethren from the stars may be the source of  Earth legends of vampires.   Meanwhile, the Space Girl has been leading Carlsen and Caine on a very lengthy goose chase as the vampire "infection" multiplies and sweeps London. 

Now Carlsen must confront the "feminine in his mind," as the Space Girl begins to deliver disembodied human souls or life-force to her orbiting starship...

"In a sense we're all vampires. We drain energy from other life forms. The difference is one of degree."

The societal context bubbling beneath the surface of Lifeforce (1985)  is the rising of the "wasting disease" of the mid-1980s, soon-to-be identified as AIDS and recognized as an epidemic that impacts individuals of all sexual persuasions.  

A comparison to Carpenter's The Thing is illustrative here.  Both horror films of the 1980s involve a shape-shifting evil passed from person-to-person, very much like a sexually transmitted disease. 

In the case of Lifeforce, the metaphor is more overt, since sexual hypnosis/coupling -- with an alien vampire -- is actually the primary mode of disease transmission.   Invisible to conventional medical and visual detection, the alien infection in both of these films subverts people, unbeknownst to their neighbors.  Affected individuals appear normal to all outward appearances, healthy even, but in fact they are carriers of a secret, dreadful death.   

In terms of context, "disease" was one of the biggest bugaboos of the 1980s horror cinema, featured in films like Prince of Darkness (1987) as well as The Thing. The point was, largely, that in the superficial world of Olivia Newton John's Physical, Jane Fonda's Aerobic Workout, or Jamie Lee Curtis's Perfect (1983), the worst thing that could happen to a person would be to discover that his or her beautiful, athletic lover was actually carrying a hidden disease, one that could sabotage the flesh, and also an individual's carefully cultivated physical beauty.

In particular, some film scholars have suggested that both The Thing and Lifeforce feature a substantial same-sex undercurrent.  

In The Thing, a deadly plague passes in the blood from person-to-person in an exclusively all-male setting: an Antarctic research outpost.  

In Lifeforce, the argument goes, there are also significant male-to-male couplings.  First, there is the jarring and impassioned kiss between Carlsen and Armstrong (Patrick Stewart), an embrace that is inarguably homosexual in form (even though May's Space Girl inhabits Armstrong's mind). 

Secondly, a male victim of the Space Girl awakens on the operating table early in the film and mesmerizes a male pathologist. He quickly converts the poor physician into one of the disease's transmitters.  As Edward Guerrero described the scene in "AIDS as Monster in Science Fiction and Horror Cinema:"

"The film foregrounds homosexual transmission by focusing on the ravished bodies of male victims and by depicting in a key, horrific autopsy scene, an emaciated young male corpse who -- with outstretched arms -- hypnotically draws one of the male pathologists into a fatal energy draining, homoerotic embrace and kiss...the camera moves through...close-ups of the faces of the doctors trapped in the surgery as they register various reactions to the act and its gay proclamations, ranging from frozen panic and disavowal to an ambivalent fascination."

Guerrero also writes that Lifeforce's grisly corpses -- which receive considerable on-screen attention -- are depicted as young and starkly emaciated, resonant with the media's description in the 1980s of the "wasting" effects of the AIDs virus.

I agree with Guerrero's supposition that there is a homosexual component to be excavated in  Lifeforce, but I don't agree that it is foregrounded in the film proper.  

Rather, it's just one dish on the smorgasbord.

I submit that Lifeforce is actually a more general morality play and warning against succumbing to all manners of wanton sexual urges. Early in the film, Carlsen faces this weakness: "She killed all my friends and I still didn't want to leave. Leaving her was the hardest thing I ever did," he declares.  What he fears is being unable to control himself, unable to assert his rational mind over his body's sexual desires.

Taken in its entirety, the film plays no favorites, targets no one lifestyle, and homosexuality is merely one aspect of the universal human sexual equation. As I wrote above, the film is a tour through sexual proclivities of all types.

In charting this trajectory Lifeforce is actually as bold -- perhaps brazen -- about depicting sexual issues as The Texas Chainsaw Masssacre is about recording horrid, graphic violence.  Throughout the film, Hooper deploys one powerful symbol to represent "lust" in the human animal: the Space Girl. Hooper parades this character about naked throughout the film in an absolutely immodest sense. The film breaks ground and shatters decorum in this key approach. And the content, a so-called tour of human sexual issues, reflects the chosen form.  We are constantly reminded, in the nude persona of May, that Lifeforce concerns sex.

To wit: when Carlsen first boards the alien spaceship early in Lifeforce, he discovers that the interior chamber of the spaceship is something akin to a massive birth canal. The similarity is so telling, in fact, that Carlsen states unequivocally, "I feel like I've been here before."  The tiny astronauts probing deep into the long tunnel to the hidden chamber beyond  this organic-looking tube may as well be tiny sperm navigating a woman's uterus.  

When the astronauts reach the hidden chamber, they discover May's Space Girl there, and their instant lust "births" her in some sense  When she is returned to Earth, she returns, importantly, as a creature of lust herself; a child of the astronauts' overwhelming desire.  She is "the feminine" of Carlsen's mind and begins her exploration of human sexuality, according -- it seems at times -- to his subconscious desires.

Consider, for a moment, the specific events portrayed in the Space Girl's walkabout outside of London. 

She encounters sex as casual infidelity (with a married man in a parked car).  

She experiences male-to-male contact in the body of Armstrong in his homosexual kiss with Carlsen.  If she is part of Carlsen's mind, she must believe that some part of him desires this "form" of sexual encounter.

For a time, the Space Girl's consciousness also enters the body of a nurse who is described in the dialogue as a "devoted masochist." This woman takes great joy in the fact that Carlsen must beat information out of her. She showcases no modesty about this desire, and again, Carlsen showcases no trepidation about engaging in sadistic behavior to get the information he needs, and also provide her pleasure.

Even the staid Colonel Caine acknowledges his own sexual side when he notes that he is a natural voyeur, and quite willing to watch Carlsen rough-up the masochist nurse.   

Finally, even sex as grounds for political scandal is briefly touched upon here when the film's prime minister spreads the sexual infection to his unsuspecting secretary.

Beyond this Alice in Wonderland tour of human sexuality, there is also all the fiery, heterosexual coupling between Railsback and May, a devastating relationship that ends, incidentally, in a climactic double penetration (by sexual organs and by a fatal stab in the "energy center" from a sword blade.)

Considering the wide breadth of indiscriminate, unloosed sexual behavior that Lifeforce visualizes, it is no surprise that the film relies upon the vampire as a villain.  Traditionally, vampires are alluring, magnetic and filled with strange, unsated appetites. They thrive on blood and can transmit their own illness to unaware victims.  Their kiss brings only death.  But the space vampires of the film steal souls, not merely blood, and that's an important distinction in Hooper's allegory about the perils of promiscuous, wanton desire let loose in the Age of AIDS.  

What is at stake when you let go so fully?  When you shed all control and give in to your most base desire?  Is your soul at stake?  Or just your life?

Given such questions, the film ends appropriately in a grand British cathedral, a sanctuary for the pious, one would assume.

There in the church, the infected bodies of the sexually depleted await their judgment...spent and sick.  Their souls are carried away on a ray of light which focuses itself on the altar: the very fulcrum of all sermons and messages about chastity and abstinence.  

Consider the symbolism. These souls have been dispatched to a nether realm, the alien spaceship, and it is surely an allegory for Hell.  In terms of visuals, this is a moral conclusion, a literalization of Christian puritanism.  Indulge in indiscriminate sex, and if it doesn't make you sick, it's still going to cost you your soul, and you'll dwell forevermore in Hell.

It's a harsh comment, perhaps, but given what some might view as the rise of casual sex in the culture (following the era of Looking for Mr. Goodbar [1977]) and the dawning of AIDS awareness and paranoia in the early 1980s -- which proved so strong it turned even James Bond into a one-woman-kind of guy -- it's an accurate reflection of what people seemed to fear at the time. Carlsen's triumph at the end of the film is that he controls his desire again, and kills the Space Girl.  His victory asserts that human kind is not out of control, in thrall to subconscious appetites and desires.

If Lifeforce is an examination and perhaps even condemnation of promiscuous, rampant sexuality, it is also a supreme, unsettling entertainment. It surprises constantly, and features a number of nice homages to classic horror cinema. I  mentioned George Romero's Dead cycle, but Lifeforce also harks back to an older, British tradition: the Quartermass and Nigel Kneale's legacy.  There, aliens from space were the source of our mythology.  They came to Earth and were reckoned with in terms of scientific and military solutions.  Lifeforce is very much the same animal...plus huge heaping helpings of sex and visual effects.  I also happen to believe the film does possess a sense of humor, but that it makes those jokes straight faced, in a staccato rat-a-tat-tat of overlapping dialogue.

Lifeforce is about a "destroyer of worlds," but if you read the film closely, it suggests that our desires -- and our inability to resist them -- is the very thing that could destroy humanity.  It's a point that's easy to lose sight of when you're watching Mathilda May cavort about with no clothes on.  

But in terms of May, Hooper's directorial acumen, and the sexually-charged plot line, Lifeforce is absolutely impossible to resist.