For their 1978 remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, director Philip Kaufman (writer of THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES) and screenwriter W.D. Richter (later did BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA) updated the Don Siegel film and/or Jack Finney story into a chilling paranoia tale for their era. But it has held up incredibly well, remaining one of the more unsettling alien invasion movies in existence. The original was a low budget indie production, this is a much slicker production, but they were allowed to keep their gut-punchingly pessimistic ending, and that goes a long way.

This came out the year before ALIEN, and its opening has a similar combo of timeless practical effects and matter-of-factness about mysterious threats from the dark reaches of the universe. The credits play over a gorgeous sequence of strange plants on some planet somewhere – transparent tubes, whisps of smoke, I don’t know what – as their seeds float up and drift through space, as mentioned in the Siegel film.

In San Francisco the seeds land on some wild plants and, over time, produce some sort of slime. I have no idea how they did the shot of tiny tendrils reaching out from a leaf. Small pink blossoms sprout on top of other plants, and a woman notices one and plucks it off. She is Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams, SHOCK WAVES, DAYS OF HEAVEN), she works at the health department and has an interest in plants and says she thinks it’s a grex. “That’s when two different species cross-pollinate and produce a third completely unique one.”

Meanwhile her boss Matthew Bennell (future BACKDRAFT 2 star Donald Sutherland) is inspecting the kitchen of a fancy French restaurant, wearing a tan trenchcoat like a homicide detective, accusing them of having rat turds in their food. The chefs don’t take kindly to him and make a crack in his windshield that will obstruct his view throughout the rest of the movie.

The next day Elizabeth’s usually lazy-ass Warriors fan boyfriend Geoffrey (Art Hindle, PORKY’S II: THE NEXT DAY) is up before her, acting weird: already in a suit and tie, taking out the garbage. She watches out the window as he goes up and dumps the can into the truck himself, with the garbage man standing there watching him do it? Weird shit. One great gimmick is that throughout the movie we see garbage trucks loaded with huge wads of some kind of hairball/lint type stuff, I think it’s the debris from pods or bodies or something, and of course nobody pays enough attention to think much of it. Why would you?

But Elizabeth notices that it’s crazy for Geoffrey to give away his play off tickets to go to a meeting. Her boyfriend is a motherfuckin grex! She tries to tell Matthew about it (they’re close enough friends for her to go over and have dinner with him) but understandably he doesn’t believe her.

He tries to help by bringing her to meet his famous psychiatrist friend David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy, TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON) at a book signing. Kibner fulfills the role of the doctor who’s been hearing multiple claims of people’s family members not being themselves, and trying to rationalize it.

Famously, the original doctor Kevin McCarthy appears in the movie, running up to the car and trying to warn them that “They’re coming!” Presumably he’s playing a different character than 22 years ago, otherwise these are very slow invaders. His cameo stops us from hearing the punchline to a joke that Matthew starts telling the setup for, already drawn out by Elizabeth remembering that she’s heard it before and then deciding she wants to hear it anyway. It’s kind of a variation on the great scene in HALLOWEEN where the guy at the cemetery doesn’t quite get to the end of the story he’s telling Loomis. In both cases I think the deliberately withheld payoff knocks us even more off balance than we were before. It’s a good trick.

Elizabeth follows Geoffrey and sees him mysteriously walking up to people, most of them in suits and ties, acting kinda like zombies or drones. In other scenes we keep seeing extras giving each other conspiratorial looks. This version gets the paranoia down really good.

They reuse the name Jack Bellicec (now played by Jeff Goldblum, DEATH WISH) and make him a writer again, although we only know that from his complaints about Kibner churning out sucky, successful books. We don’t get any background on their feud but it may go both ways, because there’s a part where Kibner suddenly grabs Jack and throws him against a wall and then claims he did it to make a point about how Elizabeth would react. Poor Jack is too shocked to do anything about it. He owns/runs a mud bath spa with his wife Nancy (Veronica Cartwright, THE BIRDS). Pretty good place to find a pod person growing, right? Nancy comes to check on Jack laying in a booth under a blanket and sees that it’s not him, it’s one of those things. (But who put a blanket over it?)

Rather than wounding his hand pouring a drink as in Siegel’s version, this Jack gets a bloody nose because a terrified Nancy runs out the door right into him. A smart alteration, I think. They start to figure out what’s going on and band together to make a plan. A ruthless health inspector is an even a stranger choice to represent outsiders than Dr. Miles in the original, and this guy also goes into battle without taking his jacket and tie off, it really is crazy how attached men used to be to those things. I can’t really tell if Kibner is supposed to be the representation of the establishment, or a new agey figure (or joke about Dr. Spock?) but he’s a really effective character – do we trust him for his alleged expertise, or fear him for asserting himself as an authority? And as you can imagine from the other main thing you know him from, Nimoy conveys both the intelligence and the coldness needed to support either interpretation.

I think we all know they’re fucked, but Matthew is probly right to believe the existing system and infrastructure are the way to save the world. He wants to treat this like a cholera outbreak, thinks he can get his agency on board, but worries the National Guard will be needed in case people panic. He needs Kibner to help get the mayor – who’s one of his patients – on board. He makes calls to the deputy attorney general and mayor’s special assistant. Maybe they don’t believe his crazy story, or maybe they’re shutting him down because they’ve already been snatched. At one point he calls the police and they already know his name before he says it. Also you see many cops who are in on the takeover. Not surprising.

IMDb only lists Russel Hessey (HARD TO KILL) and Dell Rheaume (THE AMITYVILLE HORROR) for special effects, plus Ron Dexter and Howard Preston (“effects: Einstein motorscooter,” Cosmos) for the space sequence. Whoever was involved they did superb work, making these slimy duplicate bodies with disgusting white hairs all over them, tendrils crawling up Matthew’s sleeve as he sleeps, alien flowers opening up, their centers looking like pulsating testicles that grow into weird babies and then hairy mouthless copies of our characters – real nightmare shit. And this is kind of famous I think but maybe the craziest image is a dog with a human face – somehow the seeds fuck up and combine a banjo playing busker with his pet. Come to think of it this must’ve inspired one of the best parts of A NIGHTMARE ON ELMS STREET 2: FREDDY’S REVENGE. Animals with human faces are terrifying, it turns out.

And there’s simpler stuff that’s just as vital to the creep-out factor, like for example we got some crazy shit going on with eyes in this movie. When Matthew and Elizabeth are having dinner he jokes about “that thing with your eyes” and she laughs and does this genuinely unnerving thing where she spins her eyes in opposite directions. I was sure this would have to come up later as a way to prove she is or isn’t herself, but no, just a little joke between friends. However, there is a part where Geoffrey is around a corner eavesdropping on them and the motherfucker turns his eyes almost entirely sideways to, I guess, look at them. Maybe this grex hasn’t gotten the use of human eyeballs down yet.

When our surviving heroes are cornered and their podified friends try to sell them on the new world, pod-Geoffrey says, “Nothing changes. You can have the same life, the same clothes, the same car.” Being the self help author, Pod-Kibner adds, “You’ll be born again into an untroubled world, free of anxiety, fear, hate.” He says, “There’s no need for hate now, or love,” and when he says “The function of life is survival” is when I think it really sinks in how dark this is. We’re just weeds now. Trying to grow and spread, and nothing else.

As in the original, the non-weeds get to a point where they have to try to move undetected through a mostly compromised public. The idea of acting emotionless to blend in is old hat now from zombie movies and TV shows, but here it has more metaphorical heft. Suppressing your personality to conform. Depressing.

One question I kept wondering was, what happens to their real bodies? I couldn’t remember it being addressed in the Siegel film, I forgot that Miles theorizes “the original is destroyed, or disintegrates.” This version goes so long without explaining that part that I started to really wonder if they’d just not mention it. That tension is beautifully paid off when, near the end, we see a face collapse in and fall apart. Yep, the body disintegrates. Miles called it.

Another question I had was how to take Geoffrey’s claim that “you can have the same life.” You can, or you have to? In the last scene Matthew goes back to the office and all his co-workers are there, acting odd, clearly now pod people, having meetings and conspiring and everything. I don’t think this is some undercover operation everyone takes part in until the takeover is complete. I think the seeds not only imitate the human organism, but the larger organism of society. I think each of the plants has the memories of the person they replaced and will now do an inhuman, passionless imitation of their job at the health department, or whatever. Maybe Matthew will be less of an asshole during his inspections. Even if he’s not, the chefs won’t be mad enough to smash his windshield over it. They won’t be that invested. There’s something so very sad about going through the trouble to regrow and replace everybody on earth and then just… keep doing everything the same.

By the way, is there a pod rat that shits in the soup at the restaurant? There must be.

I watched INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS many years ago and didn’t get very into it at the time. I’m sure its many carefully lit night scenes (director of photography: Michael Chapman, THE LAST DETAIL, TAXI DRIVER, HARDCORE, Michael Jackson’s Bad) didn’t translate as well on analog TVs, but I knew it was beloved by many who had also only seen it that way, so I just must not have been in the right mind space. Now I watch it and I’m afraid I have to follow the masses – in this case they’re right, this is one of the great horror remakes. The first great horror remake? Would we not have THE THING and THE FLY without this? I wonder. Anyway, it’s up there in that category. A classic in its own right.