Cheap Body Snatchers (DVD) (Meg Tilly, Gabrielle Anwar) (Abel Ferrara) Price

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Customer Reviews of Body Snatchers

Abel Ferrera...I don't really know what to think of his movies. Some (like "New Rose Hotel")are dreadful beyond all probability, and some are quite enjoyable (like Body Snatchers).

Ferrera's "Body Snatchers" is entertainment that hits its mark. That is, it isn't a botched stab at "art" the way the inexplicably horrible "New Rose Hotel" is. The narrative moves along at a fast clip, the editing is slick, the acting on target. It just isn't as creepy as the earlier versions. In this version, the body snatchers take over military bases...well, a soldier's crisp demeanor is rather body snatcherish to begin with--as it should be! While one might expect this to heighten the sense of paranoia--"Is he one of them?"--in this movie, it doesn't.

There are some obvious holes in the narrative, and the pod people are not quite the emotionless drones that they were in earlier versions. They seem to show traces of malice.

Still, this is an entertaining flick, and worth a look.

This was a good scary movie
Well the monster made them switch bodys

"My mommy's dead."
Preschooler Andy sees his mother crumble into dust on her bed, and then sees her doppelganger come out of the closet and put on a robe to cover herself. We, and Andy, first see his mother's replacement from below the waist, and it's hard to tell if Andy's horror is caused by seeing his sleeping mother's body dissolve, the life sucked out of it by the tendrils of a body-snatching pod, or by the sight of her replacement's naked body. Which is more terrifying to the boy - - sex or death?

"My mommy's dead" is also true for Marti, Andy's stepbrother. As far as Marti's concerned, her father has already replaced her mother with a pod, her stepmother. Body Snatchers is about family dissolution as much as organic decomposition.

"Pod movies" are more terrifying than run-of-the-mill invasion stories (like Independence Day, The Day of the Triffids, The War of the Worlds) because the aliens don't want to just kill us or enslave us, they want to be us. In Body Snatchers, Major Collins tells the pod people before he blows his own brains out, "You won't take my soul!" Better dead than pod.

Abel Ferrara (director of Ms. 45, Bad Lieutenant, and The Addiction) has done what Don Siegel did in 1955 and what Philip Kaufman did in 1978 - - given us a version of Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers that reveals its own era.

Besides the Communist-McCarthyite argument everyone sees in it, Siegel's version set in 1950s "Santa Mira" was about rural America and its repression. Kaufman's film in 1970s San Francisco showed the emptiness and disconnection in urban life that couldn't help but lead to the Greedy Age of the 1990s. Kaufman even set it near Silicon Valley, the center from which the economic tidal wave washed over everything. Ferrara's version, besides being a story of families torn up, is about militarism and ecological catastrophe.

Marti and Andy are the children of civilian EPA scientist Steve Malone and his wife Carol. Steve is making a tour of military installations checking for hazardous wastes.

We first see Marti reading in the family car, isolated from dad, stepmom, and brother. (Marti never makes the distinction that Andy is only her stepbrother; he's always her brother and she spends half the movie risking her own life to save him from the pods. In this movie the children have a better sense of what family should be than most adults.)

At the next army post on Steve's list of possible polluters, Marti hooks up with Jenn, the punk daughter of the post commander. Jenn's mom is drunk, passed out on the couch as Jenn mocks social etiquette and formally introduces Marti to her. "Mom's an alcoholic. That means I'll probably be one too," Jenn says, finishing her mother's drink. You might escape the pods, but you can't escape your family.

In Santa Mira in the fifties, we saw pods being distributed from the back of a truck on Main Street. In San Francisco in the seventies pods were kept in a greenhouse from which they were sent on to the rest of the country. But in the nineties soldiers take them out of a swamp (possibly polluted from all the toxic chemicals on the base) when they're ready to replace human beings.

It's not just an unlucky coincidence that the water around the post is good for growing body snatchers. These chemicals were always meant for killing. ("You don't know a thing about chemical warfare, do you, Dr. Malone?" the commander asks the scientist.)

Once the pods have taken over the post, the commander gives truck drivers their assignments - - transporting pods to other military bases from which the invasion will spread.

The army itself is a family, like the race of pods. When the pods happened upon the army post, they found a family that already had an ethic of individuals subordinating their welfare to the goals of the group. Individual death means nothing.

At the end of the movie, Marti and Tim (a young helicopter pilot Marti's become attracted to) take their (perhaps futile) revenge against the invaders for destroying their families.