wrote, '[I]ts style is shrill and fragmented enough to turn Lifeforce into hysterical vampire porn." Michael Wilmington, in the Los Angeles Times, wrote that the film was 'such a peculiar movie [that] it's difficult to get a handle on it'. Jay Carr wrote in The Boston Globe that 'it plays like a tap-dancing zombie'. John Clute dismissed Lifeforce as a 'deeply silly flick'. Leonard Maltin called the film 'completely crazy' and said it was 'ridiculous, but so bizarre, it's fascinating'. On the other hand, horror and comic book writer C. J. Henderson praised the film: "Lifeforce is an incredible film, and may by be the most intelligent vampire movie ever made...[the ideas presented in Lifeforce] are beyond [other vampire movies,] beyond all of them, light-years beyond...the story is what makes this movie hum....Lifeforce is a true, thinking sci-fi fan's film". Andrew Migliore and John Strysik, in their Lurker in the Lobby, explained that Colin Wilson wrote The Space Vampires as a consequence of H.P. Lovecraft's publisher August Derleth challenging Wilson (who was critical of Lovecraft's writing) to write a Lovecraftian novel himself (a challenge that resulted in three such novels, The Mind Parasites, The Space Vampires, and The Philosopher's Stone), and they continued, "Lifeforce is big, splashy, and...the scenes of an apocalyptic London are not to be missed. And the film, an obvious tribute to Nigel Kneale's Quatermass, has deep roots in Lovecraft's mythos". Film critic Gene Siskel, of Siskel & Ebert, called the film a "guilty-pleasure", awarding it 3 out of 4 stars. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Lifeforce holds a 57% approval rating based on 30 critic reviews, with an average rating of 5.6/10. The consensus reads, "Brazenly strange and uneven in its execution, Lifeforce is an otherworldly sci-fi excursion punctuated with off-kilter horror flourishes." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 50 out of 100 based on 12 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Home media The first release on video in the UK was the heavily edited US "domestic cut". The full "international cut" was not available until it was released by MGM in the 2000s. The first US release of the "international cut" was MGM/UA's 1994 release on deluxe widescreen letterboxed LaserDisc. Scream Factory announced they would be releasing Lifeforce in a Blu-ray/DVD Combo Pack on 18 June 2013. This included the US domestic cut, as well as the international