The nude vampire girl; or, Mathilda May made quite an entrance

Warning, NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

Also not for those too young to be looking at nudity on the Internet. Kids, be good and leave now. I mean it.

Lifeforce, a movie directed by Tobe Hooper and released in 1985, is unusual. It is unusual because it had talents like John Dykstra (2001 A Space Odyssey) on special effects, and Henry Mancini doing the music. It has actors like the underrated Steve Railsback (Helter Skelter) and British actors Peter Firth (Equus), Frank Finlay (The Three Musketeers) and even Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard himself!) But it was made by Cannon Films, a company with a checkered reputation for pure exploitation and frankly, many of its movies were crap. The documentary, Electric Boogaloo, currently appearing on Netflix, tells the history of Cannon and its executive producers, Menahem Goran and Yoram Globus.

When Lifeforce came out I remember it had odd and mixed reviews. No reviewer really knew what label to put on it, science fiction, horror, action picture, psychological thriller...the documentary shows Leonard Maltin calling it “berserk.”

What the movie also had, besides dessicated corpses sucked of their lifeforce by a space vampire (done with mechanicals in that pre-CGI era), was Mathilda May. May, who was French, had been a model and a ballet dancer. She also had an incredible body. A quote by Tobe Hooper from the documentary is, “Finding Mathilda May was an achievement. One of the most striking young women I’ve ever seen.” Indeed! From the moment she comes back to life in a laboratory on Earth, until she exits the facility, leaving behind some carnage of stupified men with their lifeforces now kissed out of them, in three-and-a-half minutes she presents the most incredible introduction of any “striking young woman” I believe I have ever seen in a mainstream motion picture.