The Lifeforce Experiment

"The Lifeforce Experiment" is a Canadian made for TV film. It is about a mad scientist (Donald Sutherland) who is working on some very unethical and ridiculously improbably experiments. In particular, he's trying to communicate with the dead! And, the CIA is involved with this...for good or bad.

The technology in the film is pretty dopey. They have a hypnosis machine that almost instantly induced hypnosis. Hypnosis is a very inexact thing...and it just doesn't work that way. But even more ridiculous is the scientist's ability to read dreams and see them vividly on a television monitor. I laughed at one of these scenes, as the lady on the device was seeing her toddler crawl to his death...even though she was not there to witness this. How did the machine reproduce this?? It's all completely silly---and you add to that the CIA angle and you've got a film that is just stupid. Sorry to be so blunt...but I tired of this movie very quickly and it's pathetic score of 4.8 seems awfully high considering the script.

As I watched this movie, I couldn't help thinking that it was right out of the 50's., and I half expected Vincent price to poke his head around the corner at any moment. Movies that verge on "the mad professor" type stories, are rather limited in their appeal, but this one seemed to have more going for it than most, but, unfortunately, it was quite flat. Sutherland [who never seems to get the sort of roles he richly deserves,] and in fact all the cast, do their best, but it doesn't really help. The plot is too predictable, and ultimately just doesn't hold the interest.

Jessica Saunders (Mimi Kuzyk) is a bureaucratic CIA agent in charge of an unsuccessful operation, where her agent dies and gets no information. She is assigned for a field operation due to her computer skills: she should investigate Dr. Maclean's (Donald Sutherland) experiment. She flies to the distant place where Dr. Maclean is working and there, she meets the twenty-one years old Ken Ryan (Corin Nemec), the girl Niki and Dr. Maclean's team, and she gets very close to Ken. She finds out that Dr. Maclean is making experiences with lifeforce, trying to store this energy. Further, Ken has leukemia, is going to die very soon and has given his death for the success of the experiment; and Niki has autism and is the link to reach the `world of the dead'. This theme having a better director, an improved screenplay and a more adequate cast could be a good movie, like those sci-fi from the 1950's or 1960's. However, the character of Jessica is very confused and makes the story very boring, and many situations are not well resolved. I really did not like this movie. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): `Morte Programada – Desafiando a Última Fronteira' (`Programmed Death – Challenging the Last Frontier')