(Say “Hasta La Vista“ to catnaps and beauty sleep….)
CAST: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, Lelia Goldoni, Kevin McCarthy.
DIRECTOR: Philip Kaufman
WARNING: Some SPOILERS and pretty strong reasons to stock up on No-Doz - straight ahead…
If one is an avid horror buff, there’s not much one finds frightening on the silver screen. Zombies, psycho killers, mutants, vampires, werewolves, aliens, or even Vin Diesel pretending to be a babysitter. Oh, wait… THE PACIFIER was not a horror film - it just felt like one. My bad. Anyhow, a horror fan knows his/her way through the pantheon of beasties and baddies that occupy the genre.
But every horror fan has his/her weakness. For some, it’s zombies - something to do with being eaten alive. For others, it’s vampires - something to do with, uh, being sucked to death (personally I think that’s a great way to go - whether you’re the sucker or the suckee, but I digress). For yet others, it’s slashers - something to do with the possibility that Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees is about to crash your party.
For me, though, it’s the idea that everyone you know will suddenly change and turn into… someone else. Yup. Your crackhead best friend. Your rambunctious little brother. Your lush boyfriend. Your whiny commuter mate. One day, you wake up and discover that they have all… changed. They all behave the same way, like a bunch of goodie-two-shoes trying to impress Teacher. In other words, welcome to Stepford - only somehow worse. Far worse.
This premise is at the core of our next review, the classic sci-fi horror thriller INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Basically, space seeds rain down on the Earth one stormy day and blossom into odd-looking plants that the silly humans can’t resist but take home with them. Not the best idea, considering these plants are actually aliens - and they achieve human form by cloning us when we sleep. Then the original, uh, copy of us withers and dies. If you know what I mean. The “clones” or “pod people” basically assume our identities - only without any kind of emotion, empathy, or individuality. This happens over and over until no human are left - just “body snatchers”. People who look like us but are actually stone-cold dickheads…
A few of the folks who gradually realize that something sinister is afoot are: (1) Miles Bennell (Donald Sutherland), civil servant for the Department of Health; (2) Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), Miles’ lovely colleague; (3) Jack Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum), quirky writer who never met a conspiracy theory that didn’t give him a raging hard-on; (4) Nancy Bellicec (Veronica Cartwright), Jack’s high-strung wife who never met a situation she never screamed her head off over; and (5) Dr. David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), celebrity shrink and friend of Miles’ who can’t figure out why everyone in the Bay area is suddenly complaining about their husband and wives “changing”. Hey, David… maybe you should tell them it’s because of this thing called “marriage”.
At any rate, our quintet of heroes soon find themselves faced with the prospect of being the only humans left in San Francisco. Will they succumb to the need to sleep and be cloned, too? Or will they find a way to fight back against the ever-growing army of emotionless “carbon copies”? What do the “pod people” want, anyway? What’s the point of traveling all the way across the universe to Earth to clone people - only to sit around and stare at each other?
Personally, I think the dipshits took a wrong turn somewhere between Orion’s Belt and Mars…
BUT, SERIOUSLY: A remake of the 50’s classic, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS moves the action from a small town to the bustling city of San Francisco. There are arguments for and against this. The original film capitalized on the familiarity of the townspeople with one another to starkly illustrate what happens when they begin to change, one-by-one. Radical changes in behavior would be noticed much faster in a small-town setting than in big city one.
You’d think that the 1978 remake’s decision to set the story in San Francisco would diminish the dread which the original film so masterfully orchestrated. It doesn’t. It just provides the audience with a different set of chills. Director Philip Kaufman appears to be making a point about the impersonal nature of city living. How well do we really know our own neighbors? And when they “change” would we even know them well enough to notice? In the end, the remake seems to be saying that even before the invasion occurs, the people of San Francisco - or any other city - are already disconnected from one another. The “alien duplication” is merely window dressing.
The cast is uniformly terrific. Donald Sutherland turns in a warm, appealing performance as Miles Bennell, a guy who only realizes how much he loves Elizabeth when he is faced with the threat of being cloned and never experiencing human emotion ever again - which makes him fight for it all the more. Brooke Adams similarly finds Elizabeth’s quirky center, making her both offbeat and strong. She matches well with Sutherland, as do the characters they play. A lovely moment in the film before the madness starts sees Elizabeth playfully performing an “eye trick” in front of Miles to convince him she’s sane. This passage solidifies our empathy for this couple - and makes us want to see them survive with their humanity intact.
Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Leonard Nimoy round out the roster of major players. Their characters, just like Sutherland and Adams’, are all just a little odd - which makes them ring true. In this day and age, characters’ edges and quirks are often sanded over to “sanitize” them. I miss the days when movie characters felt like real people - and not plastic concoctions created to artificially push the plot forward.
Director Philip Kaufman imbues INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS with a palpable tension that builds and builds until a terrifying climax. Not to give too much away, but this is one ending you will not forget for a long time to come. Danny Zeitlin’s odd musical score also adds to the “off” feel of the proceedings.
Ultimately, this film can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with its predecessor from the 1950’s. Whereas that film explored small-town familiarity turning deadly, the 1978 version explores the isolation and disconnect that city-dwellers often experience - and how that lack of familiarity and humanity ultimately becomes their downfall.
