Lifeforce is a very odd, but interesting, horror film directed by
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Tobe Hooper and written by
The Return of the Living Dead's Dan O'Bannon, so it clearly has something going for it.
A joint British-American research team is aboard the space shuttle Churchill to study Halley's Comet, when they detect a mysterious signature located in the comet's tail. American commanding officer Tom Carlsen orders an investigation, and the explorers discover that it's an ancient alien spaceship of some sort. Carlsen and others board it and discover dozens of dead winged creatures and three naked people (two men and a woman) contained within crystal spires of some sort, apparently in a kind of suspended animation. It's decided to take all three of them, plus one of the dead creatures, back aboard the Churchill for study, although Carlsen begins acting a little weird in regard to the woman, creepily insisting to his colleagues that she is "perfect."
Thirty days later, and Earth hasn't heard a thing from the Churchill. A recovery team is sent up, and they discover that the interior of the ship has been almost completely destroyed by a fire, reducing the what appears to be the entire crew to ashy skeletons. The escape pod was launched, however, so perhaps someone survived. The three naked people from the alien ship are still inside their crystals in the cargo hold, though, completely untouched by the flames. They're brought back to a research facility in London run by Bukovsky. He enlists the aide of biochemist and thantologist Dr. Fallada to try and determine if the three individuals in the crystals are alive or dead, or even human. All Fallada is able to determine is that he can determine nothing at all; not even what the crystals are composed of.
The woman is removed from hers and taken into an operating room for study. A security guard, alone in the room with her, decides to risk his job by molesting the apparent corpse. One boob-grope later and the woman wakes up. Observing via security cameras, Bukovsky races over. The woman kisses the guard, causing bluish electricity to surge violently between their bodies. Bukovsky arrives just as the guard backs up out of the operating room. As he collapses, Bukovsky catches him, and is horrified to discover he's been reduced to a shriveled up dead husk. The naked woman emerges and begins putting the moves on Bukovsky, as well, and he finds himself equal parts excited and terrified, unable to resist her lusty, predatory advances. Before she can finish him off, though, Fallada and others arrive, prompting her to exit.
The woman encounters resistance to her efforts to leave in the form of some more security guards, but they don't fare any better than her initial victim. She hits two of them with blasts of energy from her hands, while the third guy wisely backs off and does nothing else to impede her exit, which she makes by blowing out the huge front windows of the building, apparently using the power of her mind, and then moving away naked into the night, heedless of the fact she's walking barefoot over shards of broken glass.
The SAS' Colonel Caine is sent in by the British government to find out what the fuck just happened. A visibly shaken Bukovsky and very disturbed, somewhat withdrawn Fallada do their best to bring him up to speed about things. An APB is sent out with the woman's description (presumably something along the lines of "naked lady"), but all this nets them is another victim: a naked woman (a different one) is found dead in Hyde Park, her body drained and dessicated like the guard's. Her nakedness makes Caine realize she has acquired clothing and can therefore move more easily among the population of London without attracting too much attention.
Back at the research center, two soldiers are guarding the crystals containing the two male individuals from the alien ship. Suddenly the room explodes, and, freed, the two men begin marching purposefully towards the soldiers. Bullets from their Steyr AUG assault rifles do jack diddly, as the men stride forwards with Terminator-like intensity, heedless of the rounds upon rounds of ammunition penetrating their chests. The soldiers finally resort to grenades, and this succeeds, blowing the two attackers to bloody bits. Hearing the explosion, Caine and Fallada race in and Fallada orders the remains quarantined.
Elsewhere in the building, doctors attempting to perform an autopsy on the guard who got killed discover that the corpse is extremely uncooperative; he awakens before they can begin and sits up on the operating table, then grabs the lead pathologist. A mysterious bluish vaporous light shoots out of the pathologist's eyes and mouth and into those of the corpse; the dead man begins to look livelier and healthier, while the pathologist starts to shrivel into a dried husk. Moments later, the pathologist hits the floor, dead and mummified-looking, while the previously shriveled up corpse of the guard has returned to a very alive, healthy and virile young man. Having observed from a viewing room, Fallada orders him locked up in a cell. And just to be on the safe side, he has the same thing done with the bodies of the pathologist and the woman from the park.
After two hours, something begins to happen to the revived guard. He begins making animalistic roars and growls and reaches through the bars of his cell at the men observing him, before he collapses to the floor and shrivels up into his previously dessicated self, and then turns hard and brittle. In the adjoining cell, the body of the pathologist springs up and lunges ferociously at the onlookers, running headlong into the bars, his extremely frail body exploding into a cloud of dust as he hits them. Fallada orders the body of the woman from the park strapped to a table and monitored. She, too, awakens, and roars and struggles against her bonds before perishing just as suddenly as she revived, then her corpse blows up into a big puff of dust. Fallada theorizes to Caine that whatever the alien humanoids are, they survive by sucking the lifeforce out of their victims, and that said victims will revive and become like them, dying and turning into dust after two hours if they fail to feed.
Fallada explains his fear that the escaped woman will attack more and more people, and that those victims will return to life, and seek out others to drain, spreading a plague of life-suckers throughout England and eventually the entire world. They then get a call about an escape pod landing in Texas. It's the missing one from the Churchill. But who is in it? And are they human, or now one of the living dead?
Watch this incredibly weird movie to find out!