Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978)

A Pod's As Good As A Wink

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978)
USA 1978 Directed by Philip Kaufman
United Artists/Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Okay so, hot on the heels of the original, it was time for me to rewatch the first of the official remakes of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. I say ‘official’ because, I think there were at least three horror movies which came out in 2019 which had kind of absconded with a variation the same concept and not acknowledged it (in the hopes nobody would notice presumably, one of them very high profile). This version of the story, which I would have first seen on television around 3 - 5 years after its initial cinema release (which was the earliest a TV show would have been allowed to show it back in those days), is one of those few remakes which is almost as good as the original (which I reviewed here). Don’t get me wrong, the original is always going to be the one I watch to death but this one looks and feels like a 1970s film, which is in its favour anyway but, also, kind of takes its own things from the original and makes them its own by adding stuff and just treating the whole concept from a slightly different angle. Highlighting some of the ideas of the basic template in a slightly different way.

The opening credits has a quite nicely done look at the tendrils of the alien seed pods drifting through our solar system and then landing on earth. Danny Zeitlin’s music on this part is ‘full on’ 1950s B-movie in tone before suddenly transforming, for the first hour of the movie at least, into something far more subtle and unsettling, or, if not subtle, at least less prescriptive to what some of the other horror films were using in those days.... although, I have to say, for a professor of psychiatry who only ever scored this one movie, I could honestly have done without the old cliché of the heartbeat on the soundtrack at one point. There’s even a ‘mickey mousing’ moment when we jump cut to one of a series of establishing shots to relocate the audience on Earth. I’ll get back to Zeitlin a little later on.

This version stars Donald Sutherland as ‘Matthew’ Bennell, rather than ‘Miles’ Bennell, which is the version played by Kevin McArthy in the original. Also, he’s not a doctor in this but a government health inspector who seems to take great glee in his job of closing down restaurants. As his ‘almost love interest’ we have the wonderful Brooke Adams playing, not ‘Becky’ Driscoll but ‘Elisabeth’ Driscoll, who works in the same Department of Health that Bennell works in. Wow, they certainly seem to have a problem with first names in this version of the film. At least they had no trouble with Bennell’s writer friend, who is once more Jack Belicec, here played by Jeff Goldblum in one of his earlier, feature roles. Alas the curse of the first name does extend to the character of his wife, instead of ‘Theodora’ Belicec like in the original, she’s ‘Nancy’ Belicec, played here by genre queen Veronica Lambert, who you will probably best know from her role in Ridley Scott’s A L I E N or, perhaps, in her role as the young girl in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Actually, she’s the only other member of the cast, besides Kevin McCarthy, who has been in two versions of this story (she was also in the fourth version of the film, which should get a review on here towards the end of this week).

And talking of the great Kevin McCarthy, here he appears in a wonderful cameo scene earlier on in the film, more or less playing the original Miles Bennell role, wearing pretty much the same costume and still running down the street, banging into cars telling everybody to “Watch out! They’re here already!”, just as he did in the pre-bookend scene of the original, which was where that version was supposed to end. This time, though, there’s a chilling end game to the scene which is one of the first things that tips off Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adam’s characters that, yes, there really is something worrying going on. It’ a lovely homage and one that McCarthy would repeat again a couple more times, just not in remakes of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Another cameo in this movie is a taxi driver, played by director Don Siegel, who helmed the original film.

Right from the outset of the film, though, we’re way ahead of the lead protagonists and, if you’re already familiar with the story and not a 'Body Snatchers virgin' when you go in, you can’t help but notice little non-sequitur sequences like an uncredited Robert Duvall cameoing as a priest on a swing in a children’s playground as being an example of a pod person not interacting correctly with his new environment. We also have Elisabeth finding a flower that she calls a ‘grex’, which is perhaps a little more of a complicated term, from what I can make out, than what she describes it as here... which is a hybrid of two plant organisms to create a third one. She’s basically found a flower which grows into one of the alien seed pods but it’s also, of course, a perfect analogy for what is about to happen when the seed pods drain their human victims to become facsimiles of them. So, yeah, nicely done.

Other nice tell tale signs that the aliens are ‘already here!’ are the constant shots of garbage trucks hauling away what obviously are, if you’re already familiar with the concept of the story, the leftover remains of the humans who have been replaced.

Actually, there are a lot of nice things the director does here to really push the paranoia inherent in both the original story and the first movie adaptation. For instance, there are a lot of roving camera shots which are made to feel like chaotic ‘point of view’ shots... so you kind of sense a presence of a great number of ‘antagonists’ observing things. Ditto when the camera constantly catches groups of people just staring from the background at what our main protagonists are doing in the foreground of various shots. Just, people watching people and, I wonder how many of these were really just people watching the shooting, which the director managed to utilise into the concept or, if every extra in these sequences was, indeed, placed there deliberately.

Another nice way it ramps up the tension is with unusual angles, overlapping dialogue (like you’d get in an Altman movie or, you know, the original The Thing From Another World, reviewed by me here) and shadows. For instance, Bennell’s psychiatrist friend, who is important to the way the story moves forward... and who is, in fact, played here by Star Trek’s most famous Vulcan actor, Leonard Nimoy... is having a book release party and the atmosphere at that party, where you get the impression that there’s a lot of pod people in the crowd, is somewhat chaotic with lots of things going on, conversations clashing with each other and, in a wonderful moment of in-camera distortion, Jeff Goldblum talking to Donald Sutherland on either side of him. That is to say, Donald Sutherland is on the middle of the screen talking into a phone while Goldblum is talking at him (rather than to him), with Goldblum three quarters turned away from us on the left of the screen... and his features hugely distorted and in close up on a trick fairground type mirror to Sutherland’s left. It’s an amazing shot actually and must have been somewhat difficult to set up.

Also, the scene where Bennell breaks into Elisabeth’s house to whisk her sleeping form away from her pod husband and the seed pod spawning next to her is filled with so many dutch angles combined with very dark, shadowy shots that it just drips paranoia. It’s a well thought out film and must have been fun to shape in the editing room.

There are also some less than subtle things about the movie, for sure.

For instance, the whole hand cut scene with Belicec to reveal the pod is replaced in this version by... Jeff Goldblum having an unmentioned (a casualty of the cutting room floor?) but fairly visible nose bleed. Also, Danny Zeitlin’s score does, towards the end of the movie, roam back into 1950s B-movie territory again with some nice nods to Carmen Dragon’s score from the original, I think... and it’s much more frenetic against the images. Indeed, the whole film has an almost intoxicating quiet to it for a lot of the movie but, in the final reel, it feels like, to borrow from a famous, fictional pop group... the sound is almost turned up to eleven. 

 Another moment in the original where Becky gives herself away because a dog is almost run over is much less subtle although, to be fair, it’s one of the iconic moments of this film. In an earlier sequence, Sutherland’s Bennell has accidentally damaged a seed pod as he goes past it, which is next to a tramp/busker sleeping on the street, his dog laying next to him. Later on, instead of the moment from the earlier movie, we have a pod version of a hybrid of the dog with the tramp's face chasing after them. It’s a nice addition, though and, I remember at the time in the school playground, one of the talking points of the movie.

A nice addition to the Body Snatchers concept is the ‘alien screech’ and pointing finger when one of the pod people recognises a human. This is used to good effect in a key moment of the film but I’m not going to mention where because, although a certain scene is actually quite heavily telegraphed (no matter how much the director tries to sell us about the absolute opposite being the final fate of one of the characters), it’s such a nice moment and goes some way to bringing the film back in line with the intentions of Don Siegel when he was directing the 1950s version.

So that’s that one. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978) is certainly no substitute for the first movie but it is a lovingly rendered version which exists as it’s own thing, with the occasional nod back to the original (such as the town square scene where the crowds of aliens are distributing the seed pods). If you liked the 1950s version then you’ll probably love this one too and vice versa. Definitely the first two versions are things every genre fan should watch at least once. For my next review this week, I shall be revisiting the 1993 version of the film so, check back with me if you want to see what I made of that one. 

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers at NUTS4R2

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956)

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978)

Body Snatchers (1993)

The Invasion (2007)