Wel­come to The Pod Peo­ple Film Fes­ti­val, The Dork Report’s third mini movie ret­ro­spec­tive. After catch­ing up with Rid­ley Scott and George A. Romero, we now take a look at four adap­ta­tions of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatch­ers, plus one unof­fi­cial homage / satire.

1. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1956)
2. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1978)
3. Body Snatch­ers (1993)
4. The Fac­ulty (1998)
5. The Inva­sion (2007)

Yet another remake of Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers might seem an odd project for icon­o­clast direc­tor Abel Fer­rara, known for gritty urban crime sagas cen­tered around pro­foundly com­pro­mised pro­tag­o­nists. In stark con­trast, the lead in Ferrara’s most con­ven­tional movie is a good-natured teenage girl, a world apart from the crazed Har­vey Kei­tel of Bad Lieu­tenant or Christo­pher Walken of King of New York. Marti’s (Gabrielle Anwar) biggest prob­lems are a nomadic lifestyle, a moody lit­tle brother, and a new stepmother.

This ver­sion of the bodys­natch­ers story sheds “Inva­sion” from the title, which is strange con­sid­er­ing it ought to be the key word for a movie focused on the U.S. mil­i­tary, at home not long after the first Gulf War (a con­flict thought to be resolved at the time). With Amer­ica at peace and a Demo­c­rat in office, Body Snatch­ers was prob­a­bly one of the first main­stream fea­ture films to directly men­tion the con­flict, along with Courage Under Fire (1996) — David O. Russell’s ruth­less satire Three Kings being still some ways off. Abbre­vi­at­ing the title was a missed oppor­tu­nity to play with the ambi­gu­ity between a mil­i­tary con­firmed as pro­fes­sional, government-sanctioned invaders, and an extrater­res­trial force that eas­ily infil­trates them. But don’t worry, the word “Inva­sion” would be picked up again for Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2007 abom­i­na­tion star­ring Nicole Kidman.

Gabrielle, sweetie, you should know bet­ter than to take a bath dur­ing a hor­ror movie…

On home soil, an Alabama army base under the com­mand of Gen­eral Platt (who else but R. Lee Ermey?) must suf­fer the indig­nity of bend­ing over for The Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency as it inves­ti­gates the army’s stor­age of chem­i­cal weapons. The sym­pa­thetic Major Collins (For­est Whitaker) reports increas­ing cases of men­tal ill­ness in his infir­mary (para­noia, fear of sleep, etc.). He sus­pects the toxic chem­i­cals, mak­ing it impos­si­ble to miss the allu­sion to the con­tro­ver­sial Gulf War Syndrome.

Marti falls in love with heli­copter pilot Tim (Billy Wirth), so bland and flat that it’s hard to tell if he’s a pod per­son (to be char­i­ta­ble, maybe this was a delib­er­ate cast­ing call, meant to keep the audi­ence guess­ing). She is befriended by Platt’s punk daugh­ter Jenn (Chris­tine Elise), a refresh­ing dose of non­con­formism among the rank and file — indeed her rebel­lious­ness serves as a canary in the coal mine to mea­sure the progress of the inva­sion. We gen­uinely feel for Marti’s lit­tle brother Andy (Reilly Mur­phy, a rare child actor that does not annoy) as he senses his school play­mates are “bad” and wit­nesses his step­mother (Meg Tilly) die first­hand. Inci­den­tally, Tilly’s per­for­mance as the pod-stepmother is excel­lently weird.

“Where you gonna go, where you gonna run, where you gonna hide? Nowhere… ’cause there’s no one like you left.”

Like Philip Kaufman’s 1978 ver­sion of the same mate­r­ial, Fer­rara indulges in the gore and female nudity de rigueur to the hor­ror genre. Marti dis­robes for a very close encounter with grop­ing alien ten­drils in a bath­tub, and later runs through an infir­mary full of gross, half-formed pod peo­ple. The very pretty Anwar is so con­vinc­ingly young-looking that her unex­pected nude scenes make one feel decid­edly uncomfortable.

In all three ver­sions of the story so far, a pod per­son deliv­ers some vari­a­tion of the fol­low­ing warn­ing to human resis­tors: there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and there’s no one else left like you. So why do the pod peo­ple always work so hard to chase down the few remain­ing humans? On the evi­dence of Body Snatch­ers, they’re still very eas­ily defeated, and the cli­mac­tic end­ing is some­thing of a dud.

The infected army base plots to dis­trib­utes pods to other bases, and even­tu­ally amass an armed force capa­ble to tak­ing over the world. But Marti and Tim man­age to blow up the base and as entire con­voy with just one heli­copter. Why was it fully armed dur­ing peace­time, any­way? The first film ended with humans just begin­ning to mobi­lize against the invaders. The sec­ond ended with human­ity totally over­swept. Now the third ends with us win­ning. How will Nicole Kid­man fare in Inva­sion? Tune in after our next review, an inter­lude to look at Robert Rodríguez’ enjoy­able homage The Fac­ulty, to find out…

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.