INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978) As good as the original ?

DIRECTED by Phillip Kaufman.

SCREENPLAY by W.D. Richter based on the magazine serial and novel 'The Body Snatchers' by Jack Finney.

STARRING  - Donald Sutherland as Matthew Bennell,  Brooke Adams as Elizabeth Driscoll,  Jeff Goldblum as Jack Bellicec,  Veronica Cartwright as Nancy Bellicec,  Leonard Nimoy as Dr. David Kibner.

PLOT  - One stormy night in San Francisco a strange rain falls. A rain that contains sentient spores from another world that have drifted through space looking for a new home. Where the spores have landed small pink flowers begin to grow...

Soon, people all over the city are picking these mysterious new flowers and taking them home. One such person is Elizabeth. The flower grows bigger and she puts it on her bedside table. The next morning she awakes to find her boyfriend acting cold and aloof and sees him disposing of some dusty, husk like substance in a garbage truck. Concerned she confides in her co-worker, Matthew, telling him that she thinks her boyfriend is an imposter.

Matthew notices that other people are saying the same thing wherever he goes, that thier husbands and wives have been somehow replaced. Very soon he receives a frightened phone call from his friend Jack. Jack and his wife Nancy have found the body of a man in the mud baths of the health spa they own - his features are half formed and he is covered in a sticky, weblike substance. As they watch in horrified fascination, the body starts to look more and more like Jack. The more Jack-like the body gets, the tireder and more physically drained the real Jack begins to feel.

Soon Matthew, Elizabeth and the Bellicecs are fugitives in the city. On the run from the authorities and the people in the dark city streets... all those who have been replaced by the insidious alien menace.  The Pod People are here and they get you while you're sleeping...

DIALOUGE  - Elizabeth - "I keep seeing these people, all recognising each other. Something is passing between them all, some secret. It's a conspiracy, I know it."

Tagline - "WATCH OUT ! They get you while you're sleeping !"

PERFORMANCES  - The overall standard of acting in this film is very good. Donald Sutherland gives a brilliant performance as Matthew Bennell- a man who's life is going increasingly out of control as he uncovers the full horror of what is going on around him. He's more reserved than Kevin McCarthy was in the original, he doesn't fly off into full on hysteria, instead opting for a more determined, grim resolve.

Brooke Adams is also good as Elizabeth, she has a pleasant chemistry with Sutherland, they have quite a sweet, flirtatious friendship that is slowly blossoming into love as they are thrown together in the ensuing catastrophe. The fact that this promising romance is sadly doomed to be tragically cut short adds a level of personal horror to the story. You're rooting for this pair to get out alive together but you know that the odds are stacked against them.

A ridiculously young looking Jeff Goldblum plays Jack. This must have been one of his first roles. Here, he is yet to mature into the solid leading man he was later to become, a person who can carry an entire movie on his own, but he still puts in a good performance. Goldblum's Jack is much less laid back than Jack was in the original film, he's prone to rages and panic attacks as the situation quickly escalates out of control. More grounded is his wife Nancy - played by Veronica Cartwright. She's a strong, intelligent and resourceful woman, totally unlike the near hysterical wife of Jack in the first film. Its bizzare how Jack and Nancy are still total opposites in this film but thier characters are flipped - Jack was cool and laid back with a terrified wife in the original, here, the wife is the one that keeps her cool and Jack is the one on the edge.

Leonard Nimoy shows up as Mister Spo...sorry...Dr David Kibner. He spends most of the early part of the film disbelieving the other characters, trying to find a rational explanation for what's going on until he himself succumbs to the alien duplication process. With his disbelieving, condescending tone you half expect him to start telling people that they're being "illogical". Basically he's playing Spock, if he was a 1970's psychoanalyst rather than a Vulcan Star Fleet officer. He was typecast by that point...

There's also some interesting cameos in this version. Kevin McCarthy (the original Bennell) makes an appearance - he's still shouting hysterically at traffic and still being ignored. Don Siegel - the director of the original movie - also shows up playing a taxi driver.

SFX  - There are some great practical effects in this film. The Pod People in thier nacent forms are very creepy and stuck with me when I first saw this film on TV aged about eight years old. Its how slimy they look coupled with the web that covers thier bodies, the way that they mewl and squirm like foetuses that have been removed from a womb too early but are somehow still alive and functioning. Truly disturbing stuff...

There's a weird moment where we get to see a pod duplication that's gone wrong. The result being a dog with a man's head. At first it looks a bit ridiculous, like somebody has just stuck a rubber Halloween mask over some poor dog's face...

And then its face moves and it looks great...

OK, so it's still a dog wearing a mask but it does work, and next to the Pod People themselves it adds to the creepy, unnerving vibe that this film possesses.

In this version of the story, we also get to see what happens to the original humans once the duplicates have come to life. Its every bit as horrible as we imagined it might be when we watched the original. The humans wither away, becoming dessicated corpses that decompose into piles of dusty semi solid ash. Its a horrible and effective bit of work.

SEX & VIOLENCE  -  Pod People get hit with spades and splatter like watermelons, human victims decompose like vampires in sunlight. Kevin McCarthy gets run over by a car and bleeds to death all over the pavement. There's not a lot of violence in this film but what there is remains short, shocking, brutal and memorable.

RATING  - There's a pervasive sense of unease that runs throughout this film from its opening moments right through to its shocking ending. As you watch the film during its early scenes you start to notice people in the crowd looking at the central characters as they go about thier business. These background people just stare, unblinkingly at our protaganists. Sometimes its a face looking out of a window, sometimes its a passer by turning thier head mechanically to spy upon Elizabeth and Matthew. You find yourself, as a viewer, spending as much time watching what's going on in the background as you do watching the foreground. It makes the film incredibly immersive and adds to the sense of lurking evil and uneasy paranoia. 

It's a different beast to the original film but just as good in its own right. The aliens are more convincing here and way more horrific. The grotesque pod foetuses and THAT terrifying, blood curdling screech the aliens make when they spot someone who isn't one of thier own. All these things stick in the memory long after the film has finished. The big city setting raises the stakes and adds to the sense of alienation that is central to the story's theme. Its a much bleaker film than the original, the 1956 version at least ended with a glimmer of hope that the problem might get sorted, here we get nothing. Basically the aliens win.

This film sets out to mess with the audience's heads and it succeeds admirably in its goal. I'm giving this 5 life sucking alien parasites out of 5. That all too rare occurrence of a remake that is every bit as good as the original. Also, look out for that ending, its still chilling to this very day...