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"I've lived in this city all my life. But somehow today I felt everything had changed. People were different - not just Geoffrey - but everybody. Yesterday it all seemed normal. Today, everything seemed the same, but it wasn't. It was a nightmare."
We're now in the second generation of alien invasion movies! Congratulations everybody, we made it. I've been waiting a long time to get here. We have great goddamn movies to get to. The next three days will feature three of the most beloved horror movies of all time.
All throughout the Fifties filmmakers were making fun B-movies on limited budgets with intriguing concepts. But the limitations are manifest, and I don't mean just in terms of effects or budgets. I love me a cheesy guy in a suit, Godzilla is my personal hero. No, it's also the craft, it's the style, it's the cultural mindset that. Even as late as Horror Express, these movies have been very stage-y, with theatrical performances on sound stages. There have not been too many close-ups, in general our movies have not been too interested in the psychology of our heroes. Most of our protagonists have been scientists, rationally explaining what is happening, often sexless or very chaste. The well-groomed professional representing social order must be the hero, because ultimately, everything about Western Civilization was correct. By the Seventies though, that assumption was heavily in question. Now the style was about individuals suffering under irrational systems. In 1956 the aliens cut off the phone lines to the authorities, in 1978, maybe it does not matter, will the authorities bother to help at all?
In fairness, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the movie with the most interest in its hero's humanity. There were a lot of crooked shots as slowly the normal world became utterly unreal. The 1978 version has even more Dutch Angles, even more delirium. There's a whole montage of Donald Sutherland on the phone in his office, then on a public payphone as he gets more and more unsure of his safety, surrounded by suspicious faces passes by, as nobody on the phone will help. Paranoia was so core to that original Invasion that it fits perfectly in the Seventies post-Vietnam, post-Nixon state of social unease.
There is a ton added by shifting locations from the Anytown, USA location of the '56 version to late-Seventies San Francisco. Philip Kaufman lived in the Bay Area for a time, he was part of the counterculture in the Sixties, and most importantly, he seems to deeply love the place. A lot of Seventies urban filmmaking is about the grit and misery of the space, see the dead-eyed NYC of Taxi Driver or the bleak SF of The Conversation. Kaufman's vision of the San Francisco is warm, celebrating its diversity. He cherishes moments like our protagonist cooking Asian cuisine with a wok, a homeless man street busking with his dog, men with wild accents soaking in mud at a bath house, frustrated poets getting into literary arguments with pop psychiatrists at a book store. The whole movie was shot on location, an increasing lost art when Atlanta fills in half the time these days. I think even the interiors are on-location.
All of it has a terrifying quality when San Francisco suddenly dies. Nobody realizes it until it is too late. One night everything is normal, the Warriors are gonna make the playoffs, there's some crooked French cuisine to investigate. Then the next night so much of the city is drained dry that the porn theater owners are begging for customers, the grit and humanity wiped clean. A kind of instant intergalactic gentrification.
Quite literally the aliens are always cleaning up, since they we see garbage trucks in the background of most scenes. In the back are these huge stacks of ashes, which we learn are bodies being disposed of at an industrial, Holocaust-like scale.
A few days ago with Beware! The Blob, I had very little good to say about the Seventies, especially that movie's sour beer-stains-in-shag-carpeting vision of it. Body Snatchers '78 is a movie that something on its mind about the post-Counter Culture era, a more positive vision of the period. It is interesting that the voice of the alien collective is a celebrity self-help guru, Dr. David Kibner (Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy). It is not clear when Kibner has been taken by the aliens, but even in his first scene he's a very conservative voice, moaning about too much free love and failed relationships, blaming that for the "mass delusion" of believing your spouse is a Pod Person. Meanwhile, Jack (Jeff Goldblum), a more leftist failed writer is disgusted by Kibner's work. He's furious even if he cannot really say why, struggling to find the exact buzzwords (for example "post-industrialist"). When a husband turns into an emotionless alien, there is a suggestion he might have turned into a Republican. San Francisco is this place where people can live happily unmarried and have too much wine while out at their co-worker's house, flirting. Then suddenly, the alien virus comes in, and all the vibrancy and difference just ends. Nobody wants to see the Warriors play. It is like the Squares turning back the clock to 1956.
Obviously, I need to talk about the effects, and uniquely for a SciFi horror movie, I'm actually more intrigued by the city and how gorgeous it looks in Kaufman's filmmaking. But yeah, let's talk genre movie stuff. We open on some very B-movie footage of alien worlds with goo floating upward towards the Earth, a kind of final send-off to the cheesy era we're leaving behind. Eventually this moves to a montage of plants in the city and pods growing on them. There's great special effect of a pod in the middle of a leaf suddenly grow tendrils and expand outward. Unlike the 1958 movie, we do not shy away from the goop. There's even full-frontal nudity. Kaufman stages a scene where we see the pods open up, and we get a full birthing of the Pod People, as they grow from slimy babies to near-replicas of our cast. When our heroine, Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) finally fades away and dies, we see her face collapse into just a husk.
And I can't not mention this: there's a man-faced dog at one point, a SciFi play on a classic Japanese demon. That's just weird for weirdness's own sake. You'll never forget it once you see it. Speaking of odd: why is there a cameo of Robert Duvall dressed as a priest on a swing set. What is with that??
Much of Body Snatchers '78 plays out very similarly to how the original movie went. Our main character this time is Matthew Bennell (Sutherland, RIP), a great health inspector but not the city's most popular man, as seen by his shattered windscreen. His best friend and unanswered crush is Elizabeth, whose boyfriend, Geoffrey (Art Hindle) one day goes from a fun-loving sports fan to a cold, uncaring automaton. Eventually we find pod replicas trying to replace Elizabeth and Jack. Matthew's good friend, Dr. Kibner, turns out to be no help at all. Also, Veronica Cartwright is here, who will go on to be in Alien in just a year. She's a great screamer, which is a talent that will come in handy with the ending.
One major improvement on the original comes when Kaufman corrects the 1956 version's ending. While Matthew and Elizabeth are driving in the city, a crazed man ranting about aliens rushes at them in the car. It is none other than Kevin McCarthy, the original star of the first movie, repeating his same dialog. Where the '56 movie then cuts to McCarthy in safety, this one sees him run over, and a silent crowd gathers around without emotion. No deus ex machina of good authorities stepping in will save the day. Matthew cannot even get the police to care over the phone. Is it due to interstellar infection, or is it due to the very human failure of this institution? We never know.
Speaking of without emotion, Sutherland actually underplays many of his scenes. Most shots of him walking around the city show him as fairly cold. Which works great for the finale when the language of cinema implants in the footage all this interiority in him. You see him quietly walk around a city overrun by the Pods, with reaction close-ups. You think you see sadness of what has become of Elizabeth, what has become of the world. Only there is no interiority, not anymore. The rules of the medium are tricking you. Matthew is one of them. We then have an all-timer great ending of horror movies, a jumpscare to equal Carrie from 1976, with goddamn terrifying sound design on that monster scream. The '56 aliens did not point and scream like banshees, from now on Pod People will. That's too iconic to ever leave out.
There will be more versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but I'm not sure if we'll cover them. (31 Days sounds like a lot until you realize how many friggin' alien movies there are.) The next swing at the material will be Body Snatchers, the 1993 remake, directed by Abel Ferrara. That is not as good as this but does have its moments, namely any scene with Meg Tilly. There's also a 2007 version, The Invasion starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. I'm really curious but it seems like nobody enjoyed it. The 1978 version remains the iconic one. Trying to remake this is as thankless a task as trying to make a prequel to The Thing thirty years later and with CG effects. You're doomed from the start.
Next Time! The alien movie, the one so important they simply called it Alien
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