Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) - film review

Government scientist Elizabeth Driscoll becomes concerned when her partner starts to behave strangely, doing odd things like getting up early and emptying the dustbins.   Her colleague, San Francisco health inspector Matthew Bennell, is initially sceptical over her anxieties but comes around to her way of thinking when several other people make similar claims, only to retract them a few days later.  The clinching proof comes when Jack and Nancy Bellicec contact Bennell and show him a strange body in the mud bath establishment that they run.  The inanimate creature is recognisably human, but its features are not yet fully formed.  Elizabeth and Bennell soon discover the terrible truth.  The Earth has been invaded by an alien life-form from a distant galaxy, one that intends to replace the entire human race...

Philip Kaufman’s slick and exciting reinterpretation of Don Siegel’s 1956 sci-fi classic (both adapted from a novel by Jack Finney) is a rare thing - a remake that is practically as good as the original.  With the benefit of a much greater budget, Kaufman manages to make the threat of an alien takeover by overgrown marrows appear even more frighteningly believable than in Siegel’s film.  Whilst the film has one or two niggling flaws (mostly to do with the calibre of the acting) it still holds up as one of the most gruesome and chilling entries in the sci-fi horror genre.  It can just as easily be enjoyed as a scurrilous black comedy, if you are in the right frame of mind.

Busy San Francisco is the setting for this take on Finney’s story, in contrast to the sleepy small Californian town seen in Siegel’s film.  Contrary to what you might expect, this change of location makes for a far more claustrophobic and intense kind of film, which is partly down to the fact that most of the action takes place at night.  The neon-lit urban setting contributes a great deal to the film’s unrelenting mood of oppression, achieved through some highly effective camerawork, with camera movement and unusual angles serving to create a terrifyingly dreamscape that is suffused with a gradually mounting sense of panic and disorientation.

At the time of its initial release, this film, whilst highly popular, was criticised in some quarters for its showy mise-en-scène, and yet today it feels surprisingly modern, almost an auteur piece (certainly by the standards of Hollywood at the time).   Kaufman would go on to make one or two other notable films – including The Right Stuff (1983) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) – but rarely would he show this degree of inspiration, ambition and creativity in his directing.

The rampant cinephiles will doubtless appreciate Kaufman’s overt references to the 1956 film.   Don Siegel makes a cameo appearance as a taxi driver in one scene, whilst Kevin McCarthy appears briefly as a man shouting hysterically at passing cars, replaying a sequence seen near to the end of Siegel’s film.  The ending to this version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is much closer to the one which Siegel had planned for his film, before the studio execs stepped in and vetoed it.

If the original film can be regarded as a parody of the anti-Communist paranoia that swept America in the 1950s, this remake equally serves as a satire on 1970s conformity, which had come about as a result of the consumer revolution and the growing power of the large corporations.  This notion, of the fascism of mindless capitalism in a world bereft of cultural identity and political ideology, would find an even more powerful expression in George A. Romero’s cult horror masterpiece Dawn of the Dead, released the same year.

© Chris Alderton 2010

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