An alien seed pod lands on Earth and begins to replicate
and replace the people of San Francisco one at a time. HORROR/SCI-FI
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Invasion of the
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It's hard to spin gold into more gold. The first Body Snatchers may just be the greatest horror film of the 1950s, and it's a personal favorite now. I looked forward to seeing the 1978 version, and it definitely improved on certain things, particularly the visual effects and the scale of the invasion. However, I did feel that this version lost points for the first half of the movie. It takes quite a while for things to get started, but once they do, the scares get quite insane. There's one instance of an alien dog with a man's face. You couldn't do that in 1956.
Our hero is a health department official named Matthew Bennell (Sutherland, in some of his best work), who comforts his coworker Elizabeth (Adams) when she tells him that something is wrong with her husband Geoffrey (Hindle). Slowly but surely, Matthew and Elizabeth come to realize there's an alien spore that's creating emotionless duplicates of every person on earth, and they become the only ones left who are still human. A lot of the terror comes from the paranoia at not being able to trust anyone, even your friends and family. The ending is remarkably bleak and iconic, thanks to that image of Sutherland and his ungodly shriek. There's a lot to like about this remake. I totally get why people call it one of the greatest remakes of all time. I just have a preference for the 50s one, which I think was a tighter film. The 1978 one drags quite a bit in the first half, but starts to make up for it once the body snatchers start dominating the screen. I'd definitely watch it again, and I'll probably find more to like. |