BODY SNATCHERS:
THE INVASION CONTINUES
Three movies, and incredibly, still no happy endings
Standing quite alone in the critical crowd, Roger Ebert enthusiastically praised this movie - indeed, gave it his highest rating. It was also the last horror movie to receive such a rating from him until The Blair Witch Project came along. Roger ain't my be-all-and-all for anything, but he's the one reviewer whose work I always go out of my way to read, and he's less reluctant than most to get behind a movie that isn't, uh, "respectable". So when he gives a horror movie four stars, one eyebrow of mine would be raised if I could figure out how to raise just one. (however, I dunno what he's talking about when he suggests that the impetus behind a third Body Snatchers movie might be fear of AIDS) (yeesh, does every thriller since 1985 have to symbolize AIDS?)
When I first saw this movie, I was thrilled enough to rush out and buy a copy. After watching the tape I'd bought, I started wondering just what the big deal was - it certainly wasn't bad, but I wasn't half as impressed as I was the first time 'round. The third time - that is, today - I find a little of my original enthusiasm creeping back.
It's the ol' Body Snatchers story, which I'm sure you're all familiar with - they get you in your sleep, a pod is placed under your bed, and by morning a replica of you with all your memories is alive, awake and sentient but without emotion, and you? Well, that's why they make dustpans.
This film (written by rather unwieldy team of five writers, including Stuart Gordon and Larry Cohen) sets its action on an army base. It's a rather odd choice, which I'm not entirely sold on but it's often used well. The military is an institution founded on and dependent upon rigid conformity; the introduction of the pods creates these camo-clad simulacra that really are indistinguishable from the real thing. There's less of a feeling of losing the humans around us because of this; it's like the stakes are lower. What's really being lost here? But the previous pod people were fairly easy to single out. These guys? (spreading arms in a great shrug) Hell if I can tell. If every military guy I've ever known was replaced by a pod person, I wouldn't notice.
Our human center for the film is Marty, well-played by a foxy (if terribly thin) Gabrielle Anwar. In lesser hands, she might come across as terribly whiny (particularly in her exchanges with her dad, played by Terry Kinney) (it took me about three hours to figure out where I'd seen him before - as McManus on the TV show Oz, but with much, much less hair). But Anwar invites sympathy with her sense of isolation in the family she moves (temporarily, she hopes) to the army base with. She?s there with her father, her half-brother Andy, and her stepmom, Meg Tilly.
In Marty's narration, she makes explicit that she thinks of her stepmom as "the woman who replaced my mom". Hell, she's already a pod person, so far as Marty's concerned; all the headaches of a real mother with none of the benefits. To Marty, this woman is conspiring to push her out and make a happy home for herself, her husband, and her son - not really all that far off from what comes to pass when the ol' hag gets snatched.
Billy Wirth shows up later as a hunky chopper pilot who romances Marty. Check out the scene when those two meet - I don't know if Wirth had such a comical presentation in mind, or if he was sincere, but it's the most hilariously overdone "seductive, sexy look" I've ever seen a man come up with. And he keeps this up for their entire conversation. I can't help but crack up when I watch this scene; I keep wanting to watch it with my sister or a female friend and ask her if she actually finds this attractive. (she probably would, which further bolsters what I said last week - I don't understand them, and I don't think I ever will)
Christine Elise also crops up as the only person on the army base with a margin of personality - the daughter of the crusty general (R. Lee Ermey - can't this guy find any other roles?). She takes the whole "funky individualist" thing a bit too far, but she's still pretty engaging and likeable, and hey, didn'cha just love her on E.R.?
Stealing the show, however, is little Reilly Murphy as Marty's half-brother. Take one scene in the kitchen with his dad; the previous day, the kid went through two rather traumatic experiences. First, at school, everybody is asked to draw a picture, and every single kid comes up with the exact same picture (a really abstract paint-smear that looks like a representation of the ebola virus). The teacher glares at him with stark disapproval as he looks around in that class, very much alone. Then he comes home, and when he goes to talk to his mother about it, she crumples inward into a desiccated husk. Then mom (or, obviously, a replica of mom) steps out of the closet, completely naked (body-doubled by Meg's sister Jennifer). The kid understandably tries running away, but is taken back by hunky chopper boy. Anyway, back to the kitchen with dad; the kid is asked "So, do you want to go to pre-school today, or do you want to spend the day with mommy?" Talk about being caught between Scylla and Charybdis. The kid sobs "My mommy's dead." I'm floored by how well this kid - he's what, four years old? - is able to capture such despair and depression. The notion of a four-year-old killing himself is not something many of us like to think about (and NO, this does NOT happen in the movie), but one can easily imagine this poor kid at age four actually putting a gun in his mouth, something I've never really imagined before. He's that good in this role.
The suspense scenes are mostly done well, with Ferrara managing to actually give life to the silliest aspect of the previous Body Snatchers movies: The Scream(TM)! Y'know, when they know you know, so they point at you and let out an inhuman howl to let everybody else know you know and you must be dealt with. There isn't much gore here, although the snatchification process is shown in all its slimy, tendril-writhing glory. Not much violence either, and no profanity that comes to mind - I get the feeling that Ferrera stuck in the nudity just to get the R.
Great, slyly creepy opening-credits sequence too, with each letter in the title (printed in red) being turned to gray one at a time. And, of course, who could forget Tilly's super-creepy speech to her panicking husband:
"Where're you gonna go? Where're you gonna run? Where're you gonna hide? Nowhere. Because there's no one like you left."
Body Snatchers does, unfortunately, shoot itself in the foot occasionally with some things that amaze me in their presence in such an otherwise fine film. When our hero tries to pass among the alien-dominated simulacra, a suspicious alien tries to determine whether he's human with a taunt so childish and stupid, I cantt for a moment imagine that the guy would fall for it (and of course, he doesn't). I mean, what did this alien expect, for him to all of a sudden break down and cry out "You take that back!!!"?
There's also an awkward, protracted scene where our heroine begs her new boyfriend to shoot her father (about whom the viewer cannot yet be sure), which comes to a surprisingly limp payoff, considering what happens. The effectiveness of the climactic moment of the film is severely undercut with REALLY bad, hilariously bad visual effects (lookit his legs shake back and forth! It's like he's dancing!), and Forrest Whittaker seriously distracts with his two scenes as a chain-smoking, tic-cing army doctor who's noticing strange symptoms in his patients. And, klutziest of all, there's one scene where a couple of obviously human soldiers lay down a suppressing fire to help our heroic humans escape. We don't see what happens to these soldiers, when they figured things out, if there's a larger resistance at work - they just pop up arbitrarily to move the plot along, a particularly klunky and poorly thought-out deus ex machina. I really hope that this was part of a larger subplot that was cut out of the film.
These things got the best of me in that second viewing, but I didn't mind so much this time. Body Snatchers comes across, at the very least, as a great effort that presents its take on an old story in a refreshingly straight, stark way. My feelings about Ferrera are pretty mixed (he's done some killer stuff, but he also did the pretentious crapfest The Addiction, and he's gravely offended by The Lion King because it glorifies patriarchy), but this is the most professional - and enjoyable - work I've seen from him.
Got no clue what was with the scene with the false teeth, though - and this is the only movie I've seen to use the term "wierded out", which my sister uses quite a bit. She's never seen this movie. Maybe that has something to do with the "THE END", colored gray, at the end of the movie.