INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS @ 70 (Spoilers)

Local doctor Miles gets back to town to find a number of people are claiming that family members have been replaced. Mothers, Uncles, children have suddenly changed to strangers. They look and talk the same and even have the right memories but there's an essence lacking. Miles dismisses this at first but is haunted by the number of cases being reported. One night, he is called to a friend's house, the town bohemian, as it happens, and finds an indentical copy of him lying on the billard table. The body is perfect but lacks all the signs of decades of life. When the guy accidentallky cuts his hand, a cut appears on the copy. Phone calls here, hurried drives there, the town is being taken over by people who form in giant pods and takeover their assigned bodies while those are asleep. A quiet and thorough invasion from space.

This, the invasion and evasion, is the plot but the threads are concerned with the loss of that essential humanity. When the pod people have a chance to speak, they appeal to the painlessness of their new form, no love but also no hate, no shame, no guilt. A moment of cornered affection between Miles and his love Becky negates that promise and firms their resolve to resist. 

It's the question of resistance that has driven both ends of the political spectrum to claim Invasion of the Body Snatchers for themselves. In the '50s of its birth, you can easily see how the McCarthyite watchdogs would see this dehumanisation as communism, the collective over the individual. But it's just as easy to see a critique of the apple pie conformity assumed by the anti communists. If you've got sides, it's plain fun to accuse the other one of being pod people.

What is clear is that mobs are mobs and the threat of control by them is terrifying. The scene before the mobs form is one of chilling conformity as the small town seems to move as one organism, appearing from the footpaths and silently swarming to the town square to recieve their new pods from delivery trucks. If you saw this in the mid-'50s in the USA it would have frozen you, either way you looked at it. The idea that the other is yourself is a perfectly hit note for the times. While this film keeps things a lot more grounded than I Married a Monster from Outer Space (a LOT less cheesy than its title) it knows its audience well.

And it had durability. Body Snatchers is one of the few horror movies that is cited as an exception to the rule of the inferiority of remakes. Along with The Thing and The Fly, this one was successfully reinserted into later cultures only it was redone well more than once which gives it the edge. In 1978 the me-generation with its psychobabble gets infiltrated by pod versions of itself that are beyond empathy. 1993's Bodysnatchers put the story into a military context (nuff said).

This original from mid century America with its poster pefect couple (Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter) does carry the first told charm. Miles's lustful banter with Becky feels like old man entitlement now but it does get well batted back by Becky and then the stakes between them are raised as it resolves as love to face the challenge of never feeling that again. A little context tolerance allows that indulgence effortlessly. The incident that breaks the couple's humanity while surrounded by the pod people concerns the safety of a dog. Later, in 1978 (which did not fall back on the love switch) this has become the sight of a monstrosity. A scream will always turn you in.

The original cut of this film (which did not make it to the first release) did not include the framing scenes in a Los Angeles police station where the raving Miles is calmed and tells his tale. There was a home video release without these scenes which starts in normality an ends in panic as Miles screams futilely in the middle of a busy highway that everyone around him will be next, at one point yelling it down the camera to the audience. In the early days o' DVD I bought a cheapo with a terrible transfer which featured this ending. This was my first viewing of it and it played very strongly. There had been a campaign to offer this restored form but it couldn't make it to the people who made the decisions about it, even as an alternative version. That's a pity as, without the reassurance of the good guys in the big city taking control with an early warning, the prospect was nightmarish. My scrubbed up 4K which looks so beautiful might have been presented with the Ur potency. But no.

Lifting the filter of vintage cinema and mores and presenting this version to today's America makes things a lot less tame in light of the apparent shift toward authoritarianism and hive mindedness. Imagine the January 6th insurrection done as a quiet swarm and you'll get the idea.

Viewing notes: I watched Kino Lorber's excellent 4K release, choosing the standard widescreen presentation over the offered 2:1 alternative (both were released originally). I'm calling it a 70th anniversary despite it normally being considered a 1956 release as I noticed it said MCMLV in the credit sequence. I was using it as a pallet cleanser from the excerable V/H/S/Halloween which was mostly tedious garbage. It was good to see the clean lines, solid characters and thoughtful craft of this one after that mess. At time of writing there are no local releases of this on physical media. It can be hired through Prime, Apple and YouTube.

GINGER SNAPS @ 25

Something is ravaging the dogs in the quiet and flavourless suburb of Bailey Downs. Brigitte Fitzgerald emerges from her family garage, laden with lethal equipment, and sees her neighbour screaming about finding the latest victim. She tells the dog on the other side to shutup and returns to the basement bedroom she shares with her sister Ginger. Ginger is wondering about suicide methods, toying with a knife at her wrist. The pair are a pact of two, teenagers in opposition to the world at large. As Ginger says, offering a hand of solidarity, "united against life as we know it. Out by sixteen or dead on the scene. Together forever." They then go about videoing their school project Life in Bailey Downs, a series of staged suicides as the credits roll.

The Fitzgerald sisters keep to themselves at school and are taunted by the other girls and (Ginger, at least) lusted after by the boys. Their secretive dialogue is entirely resistent to the teen-go-round of playing and mating. After a run in with the local alpha chick, Brigitte suggests a prank with alpha's dog. If it works, great, if it goes wrong, they can always blame the Beast of Bailey Downs. While putting the prank together one night, they come across another victim of the Beast and Ginger's first period begins (both girls are years late menstruating) and then the werewolf attacks, leaving Ginger a torn and bloodied mess. At home, after escaping the monster (who gets splattered by a van), Ginger's wounds begin to heal before their eyes. 

Karen Walton's and John Fawcett's upgraded werewolf story drags the mythology of the werewolf from the traditional burden of secreted animalistic violence and even beyond a sexual motive and plonks the condition squarely into adolescence where we all wade through our own tales of  body horror, no exceptions. The voice changes, ball drops, periods and skin explosions and the myriad rest of it have been there for centuries waiting for such recognition. It's only taken a few millennia of tale spinning.

What about Teenwolf? Good point but while this shares a comedic approach with the '80s piece, the underlying darkness remains core. The Fitzgeralds have discovered the futility of fantasising a lifelong pass from doing what the world wants of them but then, when joining it, there is only more futility, more struggle, more life-crushing hosility. Teenwolf did get through a few similar issues but Ginger Snaps concentrates on them: the superpowers of the transformation just accentuate the brutality. Every teenager, apart from the very one percent at the top of the pecking order, would use the nuclear codes at the drop of a hat. Nothing, neither power nor sex changes that. In the end all they have is sibling love but even that gets tested toward tragedy.

If that just sounds like more downers about angst ridden teens, be aware that this is a constantly funny movie. Only at the end, when it has to stand up an be a horror piece, does that change. The dialogue might remind you of the inventiveness of Heathers or the TV version of Buffy. "The fuck, B, this is your idea. If you don't like your ideas, stop having them." But then there are moments of poignancy in the sass. A local buck sees Ginger in pain, buying tampons in the supermarket and suggests that a toke would take the edge off. Ginger quietly rasps, "maybe I like my edge." Thoughts that seem to transcend adolesence are set so strongly within it that they convince.

Ginger is given a stomping performance by Katherine Isabelle who runs through every sudden turn and rip. Her bludgeoning eyes get her through freezeouts and one of the strongest suddenly-hot-dweeb-girl-strolls-down-the-school-hall scenes in cinema history. Her elder sister ptoection of Brigitte is quietly authoritative and her growing wildness never less than convincing. By the end she is the monster she promised to deliver but still the girl who tried to wish it all away. Emily Perkins as Brigitte gets most of the screen time and gives us a constant cringe from acting out of ghastly necessity. It's over for her, as well, as nothing will be like the confident life-denying pacts she made with Ginger. Her negotiations with the local drugster and agent of help see her taking her protective role into a maturity beyond her years. It's a great push-pull turn. Necessary shout to Mimi Rogers as the ditzy parachute mum whose every scene is a belly laugh.

This is a tale of latchkey kids, X to Millennial, who were yet to have their culture conquered by screen time and needed to work things out themselves. It's a story of the pressures of girlhood and coasting "along the way the world works". It's a mini epic of the need for the kind of culture that sneered at cosmetics called Teen Spirit and had just been taken to the entrance to hell in a $2 indy called The Blair Witch Project. This was neither Heathers nor Scream. It was unsafe and its comedy was on the prowl. That it still works is its message.