September 11, 2007 - The Son of the Bride of the Movie That Wouldn't Die Returns!!!

© 2007 by John Varley; all rights reserved

Not too long after they started issuing DVDs with a kajillion “extra features” I stopped watching most of them, except for the blooper reels, if they had them. Like so many people, I thought that “director’s commentary,” sometimes as many as four participants contributing, would be really interesting. Then I watched some. Then I watched a few more. Then I pretty much gave up. I’m afraid that I found most of them pretty boring, and some downright stupid. I was willing to listen to what Louis Malle had to say about Damage, for instance, but I couldn’t care less about Lars von Trier’s comments on Dogville, and when they started including the insights of somebody like the director of Taxi, I lost interest entirely. It’s hard enough to watch Taxi once … and now that I think of it, we didn’t. Left the drive-in after a horrible half an hour.

But the second version of The Body Snatchers is on DVD, and comes with a director track, so I decided to take a listen.

#2: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) Starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum (when he was still tall and skinny, before he got tall and pumped up), and Veronica Cartwright. Directed by Phil Kaufman, who did three very good films—The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid—and then some stinkers, like Quills and Twisted. The screenwriter, WD Richter, has a similar pedigree, having written some nice quirky things earlier in his career, like Slither and Nickelodeon and the underrated All Night Long, and this one, but lately has wallowed in shit like the Stephen King grinder Needful Things and the perfectly awful Stealth, redeemed only by the Holly Hunter Thanksgiving movie, Home For the Holidays.

This one takes a new tack, starting right out with the invading creatures themselves, which are shown blowing away from a dead planet and drifting through space to fall as a gooey rain all over San Francisco. Soon baby pods are forming. But these have little red flowers! Miles Bunnell has become Matthew, and Becky Driscoll has become Elizabeth. She’s still married this time, and they both work in the Department of Public Health, he as an inspector finding rat turds in fancy French soup, she as a forensic scientist. Kaufman goes for the atmospheric creepiness in almost every shot, and it works very well. People are seen running, and no explanation is given. People look over their shoulders suspiciously. Motorcycle cops whiz by. A priest (Robert Duvall!) is on a swingset, glaring at everybody, a nonsensical image that is somehow disturbing. The interior lighting is dark and ominous, with sickly colors, the exteriors are drab and gray, like San Francisco is much of the time. Without actually having done anything yet, Kaufman has managed to get you nervous and at least moving toward the edge of your seat.

(I have to add that, though Kaufman plays fair most of the time, I counted three separate instances of what I call “Whew! It was only the cat!” scenes. I hate those scenes, they are such an easy cheat! You know, it was a dark and stormy night, something makes a loud noise, our hero or heroine gasps … and it’s only the cat. This type of mind-fuck includes the arm extending into the scene to grab someone by the shoulder: “Jesus! It’s only you! You scared the shit out of me!”) (But I loved the “cat” scene in The Terminator, which I’m sure was a spoof. There’s a noise, Linda Hamilton jumps and squeals … Whew! It was only the pet iguana!)

(One more aside. There is an incident of jokus interruptus in the film. Matthew is telling a joke to Elizabeth. “These guys in the foreign legion have been besieged for a month, and the Captain calls them together. ‘Men,’ he says, ‘I have some good news and some bad news.’” And Elizabeth says she’s heard it. Well, dammit! But Kaufman completes the joke on the DVD. “The bad news is we have nothing left to eat but camel shit. The good news is, we’ve got plenty of it.”)

The movie delivers well when it comes to the critical scene of the pods reproducing themselves. All the special effects were practical, not optical, and of course there was no CGI in those days, so many scenes used the old trick of projecting the film in reverse, such as flowers unfolding from the pods. The emerging pod people were simply humans of different sizes, from dwarfs to the stars themselves, suitably wrapped in pink goo and spiderwebs.

Kaufman keeps emphasizing how this was a “low budget” production, being shot entirely on locations with no real sets except for a large warehouse where the finale happens, with explosions and fires, but fairly restrained when you compare it with similar scenes these days. The budget of the first movie was $300,000, or $417,000, depending on who you believe, not bad for a B-movie at the time, and the remake came in at $3,000,000. I’d call that medium budget in 1978. It made back a lot more than that, something like 24 million. The original was shot in 19 days. Don’t know how long the remake took. It is loaded with familiar San Francisco scenes, including the famous “painted ladies,” the Victorian houses around Alamo Square. There are two significant cameos, one of them obvious: Kevin McCarthy running around banging on windows, as though he’d been doing this since 1956! The other is original director, Don Siegel, as a pod taxi driver. Many scenes evoke similar scenes from the original, including Sutherland hiding below a bridge as pod people thunder along overhead. And I thought it was interesting that in the original, when they are running away, Miles and Becky are struggling uphill, while in the new one everyone spends most of their time running downhill. If that’s symbolic, I don’t know what it means.

The music is very, very effective, using early synthesizers combined with sound engineering such that it’s hard to tell where music ends and sound effects begin. One new touch was the “pod people shriek,” and I remember it being very effective the first time I heard it, back in 1978. In the original the pods never did anything that wasn’t completely human, lacking only emotion. In the new one, there is this one thing, a nails-on-a-blackboard call to alert the others. Makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

All in all, this is one of the better instances of what I’ve always felt is a dubious enterprise in the first place: the remake of a classic. Usually it’s a bad, bad idea. There are exceptions, and I exempt the remaking of classic tales for a new generation with stars they are more familiar with, and in a style that doesn’t look so stodgy. Because let’s face it, acting was different in 1956 than it was in 1978. Even the best stuff was more melodramatic. But I reject the notion of remaking something simply because we can now do it with more spectacular effects. And this film does, too. Kaufman felt this story would say different things to different generations. In the ‘50s it was creeping communism or blatant McCarthyism. Here, he feels it is the blandness he saw taking hold all around him, exemplified by Leonard Nimoy as the feelgood psychiatrist. There are those who say the subtext of the third one is the spread of AIDS. I dunno, I haven’t seen it yet. But it should arrive in the mail any day now …IMDb.com

#3: Body Snatchers (1993) … and here it is! And it is definitely the underachiever of the bunch. In addition to having a rather brainless ending like #4, it doesn’t achieve nearly the sense of creepiness that #4 had. Like #1, this one has B-movie written all over it, but it doesn’t really transcend its genre like #1 did, and I’m sure that in 50 years this one will be forgotten while people are still watching #1.

It’s directed by Abel Ferrara, who has 21 film credits, including at least one that is hardcore pornography (Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy) from back in the days when some porn actually told a story. Looking at the list, I see that I’ve seen several of his films, but can’t recall anything about any of them. Not a good sign. (Wait a minute! I actually thought Bad Lieutenant was okay … but I don’t recall why.)

It stars Gabrielle Anwar, who has had a rather undistinguished career, mostly on television, and who resembles Martha Plimpton a little and Ellen Muth a little, though she is prettier than either of them and less talented than both. Meg Tilly is here, and a lot more convincing after she’s zombified than before, and Forest Whitaker is overwrought in a small part. The only other recognizable name is R. Lee Ermey, the guy who played the D.I. (and actually was one in real life) in Full Metal Jacket and made that performance into a pretty good career as a character actor. Let’s hope he doesn’t run for president like that asshole Fred Thompson. Can’t you just see R. Lee in negotiations with the North Koreans? “President Kim, I’m gonna pull off your head and shit down your neck!”

This version has been completely re-imagined, with only the pods to connect it to any of the other stories. The main character is little Ms. Anwar, 16 or 17 years old (though she was actually 23, she gets away with it), who is brought by her EPA father to an isolated military base where chemical weapons are stored. Trying to appeal to the youth market, I guess. Her dad is a cipher, and her stepmom (Tilly) isn’t much more. She’s got a little brother. Things get creepy pretty soon. Having it on an army base was a good idea, I guess, though they didn’t do much with it. I mean, pod people is what the military wants, ideally, isn’t it? If soldiers were all the same height and weight, intelligent enough to shoot a rifle, not worried about death, and capable of being emotionless, cool killers, what general in the world wouldn’t be happy as a clam? Why do you think they call their clothes a “uniform?”

All four of these movies had plot and logic holes, but the ones in this one are tank-sized. We are encouraged to infer that the pods were the result of some chemical contamination in the swamp where they’re being grown (I don’t know, nor care), and yet they speak like an alien race, talking about other planets and the continuity of the species being all-important, individuality meaning nothing. At the end Anwar escapes in a helicopter with her new boyfriend, and they proceed to kick some alien ass. A lot of alien ass, leading both Lee and me to wonder just how many damn rockets that whirlybird carried. Damn, send a couple of those to Iraq and we could blow up the whole place in an afternoon and get the damn thing over with! Anwar shows very little reaction to the podification and death of both her father and little brother, just a tear leaking from her eye. And instead of a tacked-on ending like #1 or a downer ending like #2, this one opts for ambiguity. They’ve escaped … but have they? We’ll never know unless they make a sequel. Not bloody likely.

Anything good about the movie? Well, the pods and pod people and transformation is still scary, even in this rather inept mess. The story and concept is just so damn strong. Other than that … well, watching this movie was another example of me and Lee doing it so you don’t have to … IMDb.com

#4: The Invasion (2007) And now we come to the last iteration of this old story. I’ve been in love with Nicole Kidman since I first saw her in the little gem, Dead Calm. I was always a little sad about the Scientology thing, which Tom Cruise seems to have roped her into. He must be capable of considerable persuasion; now he’s got Katie Holmes in it, too. Believers in wacko cults always strike me as pod people, whether it’s the Christian Born Again, or Jim Jones, or Scientology, so it seemed ironic that Nicole would be in this. However, in a further irony, she’s playing a psychiatrist as a good person, and I doubt a Scientologist would do that, given their well-known antipathy. (They even have a “museum” on Sunset Boulevard devoted to the evils of psychiatry.) So I looked her up, and saw that when she remarried it was in a Catholic church, so maybe she’s reformed. I’m not wild about Catholicism, but it’s better than the Hubbardites.

So. What about the film? First, and it almost goes without saying, we over-50-somethings have to put up with the obligatory jerky camera movements, extremely short cuts, murky darkness, and out-of-focus shots that have been the rage for about 20 years now, and which I’m beginning to despair will never go out of fashion again. Okay. If you’re going to a thriller/action/horror movie today, that’s what you’re gonna get. Deal with it, or don’t go.

Second, they made quite a few of what I thought were fundamentally bad choices … and the story is still good. There is a genuine power in the concept of pod people that doesn’t seem to lose its sting even in the hands of less-than-genius writers and directors.

This time we’re off the military base and back in the big city, in this case Washington, DC. A likely place for pod people to hide, I think you’ll agree. I mean, who would notice? I continue to believe that a small town is the better setting for this story, but I guess it would be scary anywhere.

We begin with a space shuttle burning up on re-entry, with shots that look exactly like Columbia disintegrating over Texas. That will probably always be hard for me to watch. This was an “unscheduled landing,” and the astronauts were bringing something back with them. A man from the Centers for Disease Control is on the scene of some wreckage pretty fast, which tells us the government knows something about it. The fool manages to get himself infected with whatever it is they found out there in space. He just happens to be divorced from …

… Dr. Carol Benell, psychiatrist. The male equivalent of Becky Driscoll is Daniel Craig as Ben Driscoll, her medical doctor friend, the last names being pretty much the last remnant of the original film and book, except for the fact that in both they start out as “just friends,” though a puppy dog couldn’t be less transparent than Ben about his secret love for her, and the romantic interest develops as they fight the pod people together. Jeremy Northam as the pod person ex-husband, who has never wanted to visit his son much, suddenly wants him to come spend some time at his place. Said the spider to the fly.

I said they made some wrong choices, but having the son be the object of contention is one of the good ones. There are few themes more powerful than that of a mother trying to protect her child, and Nicole Kidman plays it very well, and it is this tension that makes the film work for as long as it does … which is about halfway. After that, though it is never boring, it loses steam in a fog of narrow escapes and car chases.

Wrong choice: The pod people here are entirely too zombie-like. It’s not a slobbering, staggering thing, this isn’t Night of the Living Dead, but you can instantly spot them, and it’s clear the director wanted you to. The true horror of the concept is that you can’t tell. Only those closest to the pod people get the feeling that “My husband is not my husband!” and they can’t explain why, because he looks exactly the same and remembers everything he should remember, and acts exactly the same, until finally cornered.

Disastrously wrong choice: The skinny is that early screenings of the final cut were not good, or at least someone at the studio thought so. At great expense, they brought in those masters of by-the-numbers mindless violence, the Wachowski Brothers, who made one good action/SF movie, The Matrix, and then squeezed it to death with endless stupid sequels. (Their current project? Speed Racer. Oh, gag me!! One of the dumbest animated cartoon series ever to squat there like an unmoving non-animated lump on your TV screen. Should make a terrific movie.) They also brought in a new helmer (as we say in Variety-speak), James McTeigue, who has up to now been only a second unit director, that is, somebody who goes out and shoots the action scenes the real director can’t be bothered with. (The director of record is Oliver Hirschbiegel, who up to now has only made films in German. The only one I’ve seen was Downfall—Der Untergang—which concerned Hitler’s last days. The original screenwriter—the one who seems to have done most of the good stuff—is Dave Kajganich. This is his first produced script.) None of those new guys got screen credit, but you can bet your life they got a ton of money. So earlier this year these script doctors went out at night on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles and filmed the climactic brainless car chase, the first part with dozens of “pod people” clinging to the car Nicole was driving, the second part with the car on fire and Nicole being directed by a guy in a helicopter. Whee!!! Yawn!!! During the filming the camera truck towing the car she was “driving” lost control and skidded into a lamppost, and several stunt men were thrown off and injured. Nicole was undamaged. Pod person?

Sign of the times: The pods are totally gone now. This virus spreads through sneezing, coughing, blood exchange and—what else?—vomiting. Lots of fun, that, watching pod people yorking up brown gruel into someone’s cup of coffee and then handing it to them. But that’s the age we live in, isn’t it? The grosser the better.

One problem I think all four films had was that people figured things out a lot quicker than normal people really would have. Even in the book, a lot of the conclusions Miles came to were simply by “intuition,” as he states it himself. Suddenly he just knew. Well, that’s not a major flaw, especially in an action movie, where events have to be compressed and things have to be explained as painlessly and quickly as possible to avoid big lumps of exposition. In this one they have researchers and powerful computers analyzing everything with amazing speed, and I guess that’s a sign of the times, too. You have to give the production’s computer programmer a chance to come up with some nifty graphics of the alien virus converting human tissue to alien tissue.

The major copout here is the same one as in the first movie, but even worse. Not only do we defeat the alien virus, but it turns out it can be cured. Pod people can be returned to normal with nothing worse than amnesia for the time they were pods. This was wildly unsatisfying to me, but I have to say I expected it. Major studios will seldom allow a big-budget movie to have a downer ending. Even the excellent Children of Men had the woman with her baby escaping to some ill-defined Shangri-La at the end. (They did kill the hero, so I guess that counts for something.) Remember Blade Runner, and the obviously tacked-on ending where Decker and his replicant girlfriend suddenly find themselves traveling though a beautiful wilderness, of which no hint had been given in the story to that point? It makes me long for something like Brazil, where the hero and girlfriend were driving into the standard happy sunset … and suddenly we’re jerked back to him strapped into a chair, dead, and we realize it had all been his dying fantasy. Or another Terry Gilliam film, Time Bandits, where the boy comes back home to find his parents dead. Gilliam has some guts, though he’s had to fight to express them.

What’s the matter with me? you may be asking. Why this insistence on unhappy endings? Well, I don’t insist on them, but happy endings are a dime a dozen in alien invasion movies. You’ve seen it all before. Whew! That’s the end of the giant ant (killer shrew, robot monster, Martian, giant tarantula, giant scorpion, 50-foot-woman, crop circle alien) invasion! Good thing they can’t stand being doused with water (or being jolted with electricity, or exposed to red kryptonite, or getting a case of the sniffles)! And when a hopeless ending seems to grow naturally from the situation, I think you should follow it to its depressing end. This is supposed to be a horror movie, right? What can be more horrible than that, after a valiant struggle, we lose? Of these four directors, only Philip Kaufman got it right, though Don Siegel tried. IMDb.com

So now you know a whole lot more than you probably want to about the various invasions of the various body snatchers. And I’ll leave you with this thought:

 DON’T GO TO SLEEP!!!