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)

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956)

Pod’s Law

Invasion Of The  Body Snatchers
USA 1956 Directed by Don Siegel
Olive Signature  Blu Ray Zone A

So I finally got around to re-watching one of my all time favourite horror movies for the blog. With certain reservations, I mostly like all four official cinematic versions of Jack Finney’s serialised novel The Body Snatchers, made in various guises over the decades. A lot of people feel the second version, the 1970s one, is the best and, while I’d have to say that it’s indeed a truly great film and follows the tough act of the 1956 version with a certain amount of style, this original one is always going to be, for me, the better movie. It’s also the one closest to Finney’s novel, as I remember it from reading it in a tie-in version with the second cinematic version in the late 1970s.
 

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is such a good film that I almost don’t know where to begin to review it. I first saw this version back in the 70s sometime and then hooked up with it more thoroughly when it was released as one of the very first ‘budget priced’ VHS cassettes back in the 1980s. It blew me away then and... whenever I’ve re-watched it over the years (I must have seen it something like 20 times over the course of my life... so far), it's never failed to entertain and amaze me.

I’m not the biggest fan of director Don Siegel, who’s most famous film is probably Dirty Harry, as he’s not one of those film makers who I can see an easy cinematic signature from but, in spite of that, there’s no argument that he did an amazing job here.

The film starts off with the first of two book ends where a slightly energetic Kevin McCarthy (he’s brilliant in the main body of the film itself but, for the book end scenes, which were shot six months later for reasons I’ll go into in a while, he’s very... well... extreme in the way he plays it) is pulled into the care of a psychiatric doctor (played by the one and only Whit Bissel) and tells the story. The film then segues into the proper tale, as told by McCarthy as Dr. Miles Bennell, who arrives back in his home town of Santa Mira after being away for a month or so at a convention. Here he is reacquainted with his high school sweetheart Becky Driscoll, played by the lovely Dana Wynter and the two strike up their old romantic interest, once it’s established that both of them have recently been to Reno to get divorces. Which, now I think of it, is a mite unusual in terms of the background of an on-screen romance between two characters at the time but, I've never really questioned it before now.

However, while he’s been away, Bennell has been sought out by a lot of patients who, when he’s back, mostly seem to have ignored the fact that they wanted to see him. Then he gets wind of something which has been afflicting the town in his absence, where people think their close friends and relations are, somehow, imposters. He talks to his psychiatrist friend Dan Kauffman (played in this version by Larry Gates) and is told that it’s nothing more than a mass hysteria which has been plaguing the town over the last few weeks. And he buys the story until...

His friend Jack Belicec (played by the always watchable King Donovan) and his wife Theodora (played by Carolyn Jones, who would go on to fame as Morticia Addams) find a body on their billiard table. Miles and Becky go around to take a look and the ‘corpse’ has ‘vague’ features and no fingerprints. When it’s noticed by his wife that the ‘corpse’ bears a striking resemblance to Belicec, he cuts his hand and, later that night while he sleeps, the corpse develops the same cut on its palm. From then on, it’s chase shenanigans as Miles and Becky attempt to get out of Santa Mira before they are replaced by emotionless, alien seed pod facsimiles in their sleep. Which sounds kinda silly but I can assure you, this film is extremely well made and has a very intelligent script which plays on the paranoia invoked by the ‘are they or aren’t they pods’ attitude of anyone they meet as they try to flee town and also to stay awake.

And it’s amazingly well put together. Incidents that might telegraph future moments in the film they are setting up are completely disguised here by the naturalistic acting style (everyone is good in this... even director Sam Peckinpah in a little cameo scene has a small contribution). For example, the moment where Jack cuts his hand and Miles bandages it up is so brilliantly played that, the first time you watch it, you forget to think that it might well be a key plot detail a little later in the story.

The biggest ‘what if’ of the film, which had a lot of the humour removed from it by meddling and misunderstanding executives after a preview, is the addition of the bookend sequences and the narrative voice over. This is a powerful film and the ending is where it truly deviates a lot from the source material. In the original cut, the conclusion which leaves the aliens winning and about to take over the world was deemed to be so bleak that a happier ending and narrative were added six months after the original 1955 shoot to soften the blow for it’s proper cinema release. The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari in 1920 had suffered the same fate, where a book end set in an insane asylum which threw the credibility of the central characters added narrative tone and, years later, Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner was similarly deemed too downbeat and also confusing, so a similar ‘happy ending’ and voice-over narrative track was added (actually, I much prefer that original studio cut in the case of Blade Runner). It seems to be a thing in certain areas and genres of movie making where a powerful ending is destroyed by studio executives losing confidence in the product.

In all honesty, although the original ending is still present before it cuts to the... “no, it’s going to be alright after all” bookends and you can see just how powerful and devastating it would have been to leave it there with no follow up. The new material doesn’t really do much harm to the film and doesn’t detract at all from the sheer brilliance of the movie. Of course, the 1970s version would go a little further than the bleaker ending here but... that’s for another review.

Carmen Dragon’s score for this is pretty good and, by modern standards, might be thought of as a little heavy handed. But, you know, it actually does its job very well (and is great as a stand alone listen on the beautiful, limited edition CD that La La Land records put out five years ago). Think, for instance, of the scene where Miles first looks at the half formed pod person on Belicec’s billiard table. The music is almost completely over the top but, if you take it away then nothing much is happening in the scene and it’s certainly not scary without it. Dragon’s score may well be considered over cooked here but it certainly sets up a creeping menace warning the audience that something here is basically wrong... alerting us, in no uncertain terms, quite effectively. It’s good stuff and it’s interesting that Dragon didn’t do much film work, he was mostly noted for conducting classical music concerts at the time. He seems to have had a real grasp of what was needed from the score here though.

Kevin McCarthy would, of course, not escape the role throughout his life. He turns up in a reprise of his original ending to the movie in a moment early on in the 1978 remake and has been in a few cameos as the character as time has drifted on, notably in the films of Joe Dante, who talks to both him and Dana Wynter for one of the commentary tracks to the movie on this particular, fully loaded, Olive Signature Blu Ray edition.

The film is commonly believed to be a comment on the growth of communism in Hollywood at the time but both the actors and writers say that this wasn’t intended. Indeed, when the film was first released, it’s said on one of the many extras here that audience members and critics of both political extremes thought the film was parodying them and were objecting to it equally. So that’s something to think about.

And there’s really not much more I’d want to say about the 1956 version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers because I really don’t want to spoil all its wonder for first time viewers. It’s rightfully regarded as one of the all-time classic science fiction horror movies and I don’t think you’d find many film makers disagreeing with that. A truly brilliant movie and one I’ll probably go on watching again and again over the years without getting bored. A truly remarkable piece of cinematic art. 

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)

Piranha

The Long Fish Goodnight


Piranha USA 1978
Directed by Joe Dante
MGM Region 2

So I finally took a look at the Roger Corman produced, lets-all-ride-the-Jaws-bandwagon movie Piranha because, frankly, I can’t resist the allure of the Piranha 3DD trailer which has been doing the rounds (using a bust size to denote a movie’s chronology... genius) and so I want to see the previous four Piranha movies before this one gets unleashed in cinemas (that includes the first remake of Piranha if I can get it, the TV version called Piranhas). So that’s why, if anyone asks, I’m watching movies about fish with teeth.

However, there’s good compensation to be had from sitting through some of this twaddle. For instance, this first movie in the sequence is only the second feature film by a director you may have heard of... you know, Joe Dante? He’s a great director and some of his trademark signature points are already showing up in this one, such as the use of cartoons on television. It’s also got a few of his usual cast of character actors turning up to help him out including the one and only Kevin McCarthy in the role of a crazy over-acting scientist. Of course, he doesn’t run down a street shouting “They’re here! They’re here!” but, you know, good enough.

In addition to a raft of great character actors, the cast includes Bradford Dillman as the male protagonist Grogan (in kind of a lethargic Burt Reynolds mode) and TV's Jessica 6 from Logan’s Run, Heather Menzies, as the main female protagonist. In addition to these two, there’s also genre favourite Barbara Steele (Black Sunday, Pit and The Pendulum, The She Beast, Shivers etc) as a military scientist and ex-lover to Kevin McCarthy’s character. So there’s a real display of interesting actors (or at least “personalities”) to look at in this one.

And all this is wrapped up in a package scored by the popular Italian composer Pino Donnagio... it’s not his best score but it does have some interesting trademark flourishes and, though I’m used to watching Joe Dante movies when they’ve been scored by Jerry Goldsmith, I’d happily take Pino Donnagio as an alternative.

Oh... and did I mention it’s the first story and screenplay to make it onto the screen that’s been written by John Sayles? So, yeah... there’s that too.

Now you might think that, with all this incredible talent both in front of and behind the camera on this one, it means we have an absolute masterpiece of “death fish” mayhem on our hands. Alas, I’m afraid that’s not true. It certainly wasn’t as trashy or exploitational as I’d expected it to be but, with films of this nature, I find that a lack of sleazy fun injected into the proceedings is not neccessarily a good thing... it could have done with being a lot trashier in my book. Because of the quality of the artists involved, what you have is a movie which strives to be more than its budget allows and, though this is not neccessarily a bad thing, in some ways it’s to the movies detriment. On the other hand, it’s a not bad showcase/calling card for some of these artist’s talent so there’s that too. Worthwhile creatives have begun to forge a career off the back of this one.

There have been attempts made, probably by Corman post-rough cut I should think, to “trash the movie up good”... and I guess in some ways this works better than others. There’s an obvious flash-cut (if you’ll excuse the pun) where a body double has been unceremoniously cut into the footage to make out that Heather Menzies is flashing her breasts... this is so obvious and it kinda kills the mood. Doesn’t work well at all. Kinda makes you wonder what Heather Menzies was thinking, getting involved with a Roger Corman movie.

There are, however, a lot of plusses to the movie as well. For instance, a completely superfluous stop-motion animation a-la-Harryhausen styled miniature creature is wandering around Kevin McCarthy’s lab in some of the early scenes. It doesn’t interact with the human characters, just gets out of their way, and the human characters don’t see it at any point. Now it could be argued that this loosely animated character is there to show the demented nature of Kevin McCarthy’s experiments for the military (in almost direct contradiction to what he tells our main protagonists later) but my guess is that this little creature wasn’t even mentioned in the script. I think it’s probably Joe Dante practicing his craft for his future movies where knowledge of how to handle such scenes would be more than relevant. As it is, it’s a cute curiosity which adds another little layer of interest to this film.

Piranha is certainly, and perhaps surprisingly, not a terrible movie. Nor is it a particularly good creature feature, although to be fair to the producers... it was popular enough to spawn a sequel, a remake and then a rebooted franchise, so it was obviously liked by enough people to make these things possible. I wouldn’t personally go out of my way to recommend it to anyone but for fans of this genre of film (technically I think this counts as a horror film since the plot deals with a genetically altered and mutated school of fish) then it’s always going to be worth a watch and, certainly, for anybody interested in the early careers of some of the cast and crew, it’s a bit of a modern historical document. Fish around for a while in this movie and you might find something interesting.