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)

Philip Kaufman’s re-imagining of Don Siegel’s 1956 clas­sic para­noid night­mare Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers imme­di­ately sig­nals its unique­ness with a strange and beau­ti­fully abstract open­ing sequence. Psy­che­delic spores float off the sur­face of an alien planet, tra­verse through outer space, and fall to Earth as gelati­nous rain. A glimpse of a news­pa­per head­line describes a simul­ta­ne­ous epi­demic of “spi­der web­bing,” an omi­nous por­tent of what turns out to be the des­ic­cated remains of the invaders’ victims.

Matthew Ben­nell (Don­ald Suther­land) is a piti­less health inspec­tor pin­ing after his excitable col­league Eliz­a­beth Driscoll (Brooke Adams). When her slob den­tist boyfriend sud­denly starts wear­ing suits and loses inter­est in tele­vised sports, she becomes con­vinced a lit­tle too quickly that he’s an impos­tor, and leaps from there to even grander notions of an alien con­spir­acy. But, being a lab worker at the Depart­ment of Health, and the type that keeps a green­house in her bed­room, per­haps she is after all emi­nently qual­i­fied to iden­tify malev­o­lent walk­ing and talk­ing plants bent on world domination.

Leonard Nimoy would like to encour­age you to stop sleep­ing around. There will be no more tears.

The orig­i­nal film imag­ined a sub­ver­sive alien inva­sion of sub­ur­bia. In con­ser­v­a­tive small-town Amer­ica, or at least the fan­tasy thereof seen in movies, every­body knows every­body else’s busi­ness. This remake takes place in the lib­eral urban set­ting of San Fran­cisco, where rela­tion­ship net­works are frac­tured into neigh­bor­hoods, socioe­co­nomic classes, and cliques. As our cur­rent fears of avian and swine flus attest, infec­tions spread faster where humans con­gre­gate in tight spaces: schools, slums, pub­lic trans­porta­tion, etc. The aliens in the orig­i­nal plot­ted a slow takeover of American’s already homoge­nous heart­land, while their cousins here tar­get our pop­u­la­tion cen­ters for max­i­mum shock and awe. Still, some secrecy is required at first, and the crea­tures prove them­selves adept at subterfuge.

The great­est deceiver is self-help pop shrink Dr. David Kib­ner (Leonard Nimoy). It’s a cry­ing shame we haven’t got­ten to see Nimoy play more roles like this in his career — by which I mean any­thing other than Spock. Far from a San Fran free-love lib­eral, Dr. Kib­ner is actu­ally a con­ser­v­a­tive reac­tionary, decry­ing the ease with which mod­ern cou­ples mate and part. He believes mod­ern soci­ety as a whole is suf­fer­ing from a fear of respon­si­bil­ity and com­mit­ment. Sadly, out of every­one we meet, he was arguably already a pod per­son all along (we never find out for sure when he his body was snatched). The most inter­est­ing facet of the film for me is the irrel­e­vance of whether Kib­ner was a type of alien advance guard writ­ing books espous­ing pod phi­los­o­phy. I believe the point is that he rep­re­sents a human view­point already sym­pa­thetic to the invad­ing veg­gies: one that longs for a return to con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues and like behav­ior. But why is Kib­ner wear­ing an archery guard on one hand? That’s just a weird affectation.

OMG! Look out for the trolley!

Easter eggs include cameos by Don Siegel as a sin­is­ter taxi dri­ver and the original’s star Kevin McCarthy repris­ing his crazed rant “They’re here already! You’re next!” A young Jeff Gold­blum brings all his quirk to bear as neu­rotic poet Jack Bel­licec. His wife Nancy is played by Veron­ica Cartwright, repris­ing essen­tially the same shrieky, pan­icky per­for­mance she deliv­ered in Rid­ley Scott’s Alien.

The orig­i­nal film was a a thinly veiled metaphor for the McCarthy­ism of the period. In the late 1970s, the same story works just as well at the tail end of a dying sex­ual and cul­tural rev­o­lu­tion that began in the 1960s. After the dis­il­lu­sion­ment of Viet­nam and Water­gate, peo­ple may have sensed the com­ing con­ser­vatism and con­for­mity (in other words, Tom Wolfe’s mas­ters of the uni­verse and bon­fires of the van­i­ties) of the 1980s.

This Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers is largely a psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror film, but fea­tures at least one true gross-out sequence in which the alien growth process is explic­itly depicted. Matthew aborts his own bud­ding dupli­cate with a gar­den hoe (a wholly appro­pri­ate weapon for sen­tient veg­eta­bles). The orig­i­nal film avoided detail­ing the process, pos­si­bly to elude ques­tions that couldn’t be addressed with­out vio­lat­ing stan­dards of decency (What hap­pens to the orig­i­nal bod­ies? Why aren’t new­born pod peo­ple naked? Now we know — hey, look! Brooke Adams’ breasts!). Gore aside, the one truly unset­tling image is a glimpse of a body snatch­ing gone awry: a dog with a human face, an acci­den­tal hybrid being cre­ated when Matthew inter­rupts the process of an alien tak­ing over a hobo with a pet doggie.

But what Kaufman’s ver­sion is chiefly known for is its bleak, bleak end­ing, in total con­trast with the faint hint of hope that closes the orig­i­nal. The baton wouldn’t be picked up again for another 15 years, when Abel Fer­rara trans­posed the action to the obe­di­ent, con­formist, oppres­sive world of the mil­i­tary in the tersely titled Body Snatchers.

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