Abel Ferrara's 1994 version is very, very underrated
I sort of went on a "Body Snatchers" marathon last night and today and finally saw the 1994 version and.....damn, I wasn't expecting to like it so much, but it scared the crap out of me.
Not saying it's better than this version or the '78 version--they all have their qualities--but since the CW was that Ferrara misfired I thought I should let people know they should give it a second look. This time the story is more intimate--it's about a close, dysfunctional family that has moved onto a military base and starts to realize that something is afoot.
Spoilers follow:
Like the other movies, this one builds tension very well in the early scenes. Here, there's a young kid going to kindergarten on his first day. We see the class fingerpainting, and then all of the kids hold up their pictures---to show that they're all exactly the same. The teacher scans the classroom muttering "Good job" to each kid until she comes by the boy with his one unique drawing, and gives him a blank stare.
You'd think by now pulsating pods and imploding faces would be hokey, but damn if they didn't get a jolt from the first time I saw Meg Tilly's face sucked in. And then the scene where Gabrielle Anwar dozes off in her bathtub and little tentacles work their way from the ceiling to her body, working their way around her face and into her nostrils and mouth.....
The movie has some genuine shocks and surprises--it doesn't devolve into gore or excessive violence but it is one of the few sci-fi thrillers out there that has the balls to kill off the characters you don't expect.
The endings for these movies have alternated between the bleakness of Donald Sutherland's screech to the rosier scenarios of the original and "The Invasion." This one finds a nice note ambiguity between the two--an escape, a victory, and then the creeping suspicion that there might be something wrong with that helicopter pad operator before the credits begin.
Meg Tilly's performance may be the heart of the movie, though. Her reading of the assimilated wife's lines is so weird, creepy, and even a bit seductive that it has the power to really unnerve you. I think I've also heard her utter the most frightening two words in the history of movies:
"Go......where?"
And then:
"There's no one. Like You. Left."
Damn, it gave me chills just to write that.