Abel Ferrara’s BODY SNATCHERS (1993) was my first body snatcher invasion movie. I saw it when it was new on video, and I knew it had been poorly received, so I figured my ignorance of the original and the original remake must’ve helped me to enjoy it more than everybody else. But watching it now with a deep appreciation for the other ones, yeah, it’s still good anyway. So maybe I liked it better because I’m a unique individual with my own feelings and not a plant programmed only for survival. Or because I was ahead of my time – it seems to have a pretty good reputation now.

The title sequence is admittedly chintzy compared to the one in Kaufman’s version. Something about the long sequence of the title flying through a crude starscape and letter-by-letter turning from red to black, set to the score by Joe Delia (MS. 45, FEAR CITY, THE SUBSTITUTE 2: SCHOOL’S OUT), was putting me in mind of a Stuart Gordon/Brian Yuzna type movie, but that might’ve been my subconscious remembering that this was actually from a screenplay by Stuart Gordon & Dennis Paoli, rewritten by Ferrara’s guy Nicholas St. John. Gordon was supposed to direct but couldn’t get a commitment from the studio to actually make it until leaving to do FORTRESS. He told Fangoria that his version was originally designed as a sequel to the Kaufman version and went into more detail about how the pod people are plants. “It’s not like they have a brain in their head. The creature’s consciousness is throughout its whole body, so that if you destroy the head, it doesn’t kill or stop it.” That would’ve been fun! But what Ferrara did is good too.

Gordon would’ve seemed like a more natural director for the material, but Ferrara does a great job with something very different from the rest of his filmography. Is this his only time ever working with creature FX? I’m pretty sure it is. It’s a fairly slick Warner Bros. production, low budget for them, but big for him. This was his followup to BAD LIEUTENANT.

The different spin this one takes on the story is to show it through the eyes of a moody teenager, Marti Malone (Gabrielle Anwar, TURBULENCE 3: HEAVY METAL), and yes, this means it’s the first cinematic adaptation of The Body Snatchers where you don’t keep thinking the protagonist really ought to change out of the suit and tie if they’re gonna be running around like that. She dresses comfortably. But she’s very gloomy about her family being on the road for two months as her father Steve (Terry Kinney, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS) inspects different military bases on behalf of the E.P.A. She also has a very young brother named Andy (Reilly Murphy, “Kid #2,” BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY… THEY GET EVEN) and a stepmother named Carol (Meg Tilly, PSYCHO II). Carol seems nice, but Marti doesn’t like her and describes her as “the woman who replaced” her deceased mother.

Before they even arrive at the base in Alabama, Marti is scared by a soldier hiding in a gas station restroom (Keith Smith, DON’T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS) grabbing her and warning her that “they get you wehn you sleep.” So the takeover has gotten pretty far in this area already.

On base, Marti occupies herself with the sad teenager activity of walking around brooding and listening to her Walkman, until she gets hassled by military police for being somewhere she’s not supposed to. She’s rescued by a fellow young person on the base named Jenn (Christine Elise, CHILD’S PLAY 2) pulling up saying, “What’s up, guys?” and “Get in the car, babe.” Turns out she’s the rebellious daughter of the general (R. Lee Ermey, soon to be in ON DEADLY GROUND) and an alcoholic mother (Kathleen Doyle, BRAIN DONORS) who’s passed out with a lit cigarette in her hand when Marti’s introduced to her. Jenn takes a drag of her cigarette and a sip of her vodka.

Jenn stands out on the base. She tells Marti that the m.p.s “always have a bug up their ass” and says of the soldiers training, “Will you look at these goons? They actually volunteered for that crap.” And when she hears that Marti’s dad is from the E.P.A. she says, “Cool. Hippies saving the planet.”

It’s pretty unusual when the movie starts following Andy – he looks like he might even be younger than the Andy in CHILD’S PLAY. He has the final girl power of observation, noticing things are off before the rest of the family. A highlight of this version is the scene where he’s in class fingerpainting and the teacher (Tonea Stewart, BLACK ADAM) has the kids hold up their paintings for her. The first one we see is all red and looks like musculature or something, kinda weird. Then you see that every other kid made the exact same painting, same colors, same strokes. Except for Andy. His is a pretty butterfly. And he does a really good “what the fuck?” expression when he looks around and realizes what happened.

The next scene is him walking through the base, against the current, right past all these soldiers training, running, driving by in huge trucks. He looks so vulnerable, this tiny kid dwarfed and swamped by a powerful (and now alien infiltrated) military force.

And when somebody finally notices him there and says something to him he makes a run for it. He says he’s trying to get away from “the bad people,” instead gets a ride home, tries to explain to his family what happened but obviously they don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.

Luckily the guy who picked him up is not a pod person, but still-human helicopter pilot Tim (Billy Wirth, THE LOST BOYS). He is, however, a grown adult man who flirts with Marti. That night Jenn shows up at Marti’s door saying “Hey chick. Let’s get out of here,” and takes Jenn to a bar where she sees Tim again and they end up making out. When he drops her off at home her dad says “You are aware she’s underage? Giving booze to an underage girl? You weren’t aware of that? Don’t come around here anymore.” Tim doesn’t do anything untoward after that, but doesn’t distance himself either.

In the Siegel version they go to a restaurant and it’s weird that no one’s there. Here, they’re surprised that not many people are at the bar. I wondered if the idea was that pods have no need for going out, but maybe not. I have suspicions about some guys here staring blankly.

Fulfilling the role of the doctor who keeps hearing stories about people believing their loved ones are imposters is Major Collins (Forest Whitaker, BLOODSPORT), who approaches Steve to ask if the toxic chemicals on base could be causing these “extreme delusional fixations.” Unlike so many movies that act like any scientist can know about anything, Steve says, “Well, I’m a chemist, I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t know.”

There are interesting insights into how the pods actually get into your house. We see soldiers harvesting them in water, loading them into trucks and delivering them to people’s houses in cardboard boxes. Marti catches the soldiers going into her dad’s bedroom and they play it off like it’s normal. Later there’s a great moment where an unfinished pod version of her dad reaches out from under the bed and grabs her ankle. Holy shit, that thing’s been growing under there for days! We also find out they’re shipping the pods to other military bases – a good strategy.

There’s some good melting and deflating of bodies, both pod and non-pod. I guess they must infect your original body to make it disintegrate? We learn that, as I’ve always suspected, the original bodies turn into powder and the pods sweep them up into a dustpan, tie them tight in a garbage bag and personally hand them off to the garbage man. Taking responsibility for their own messes.

One smart choice in the adaptation is to make peace with how far the audience is ahead of the characters, having seen other versions, and reveal everything to them earlier. Halfway through the movie it suddenly goes ape shit. Marti is falling asleep in the bathtub, Nancy Thompson style, and we see that there’s a pod above her in the attic, a translucent one with little pod-fetuses swimming around inside it. It reaches skinny tendrils down through (conveniently located) holes in the ceiling. They slide up her body and face, into her nose and mouth. It’s really fucking disturbing!

She wakes up in time to pull the things off of her, then the ceiling collapses, plopping her mostly-formed (but blond with a bald spot) duplicate into the tub with her. Personally I would hate that!

The makeup effects are by Tom Burman and his studio – he also worked on the Kaufman version and the remake of CAT PEOPLE. And he directed MEET THE HOLLOWHEADS.

From there it’s a chase and a battle, Marti and Tim trying to get out with whoever’s still human, beating back mobs of pods attacking like fast zombies. Carol unfortunately didn’t make it. I love Tilly’s unnatural hand movements when she plays the pod who replaced the woman who replaced Marti’s mother. She gestures like a politician meets Dracula.

The accusatory pointing and alien screaming that famously ended the Kaufman version is now a regular thing the snatchers do throughout the second half of the movie. I think that was a smart idea, actually – not using it at all might disappoint some people, but just doing it at the end again would be too much of a repeat.

Major Collins has figured out the don’t-go-to-sleep thing, so he pulls a Nancy Thompson of his own, with a pot of coffee on his desk and popping No-Doz. Since he’s a military doctor his plan is to get guns and fight. He says the line, “We’ll give them hell, Malone!” but I don’t know if that inspired the Thomas Jane movie GIVE ‘EM HELL MALONE or not. I like that he calls the pods “onion heads” and R. Lee Ermy “the head cabbage.” In fact, he has a bunch of good lines. When he’s told that as “a man of medicine” he’s “supposed to preserve life, not take it,” he says, “You bastard! You call what you are ‘life’?”

“Abandon yourself and join us” they say. They are bastards. “We’ve learned it’s the race that’s important, not the individual.”

You know it’s gonna happen and you just have to wait to be bummed by Jenn showing up as a pod. I guess having bleached hair, a leather jacket and a Nick Cave t-shirt (which Steve derisively calls “an interesting outfit”) doesn’t prove you’re a non-conformist. It turns out more “normal” looking Marti has a much stronger sense of her individuality – the pods fail to seal the deal on her multiple times. There’s a great scene where pod-Marti is naked and acting all alluring to Tim, but he yanks the tendrils off of sleeping-Marti’s face and it’s like he unplugged the pod. She falls over, writhes, is powerless.

There’s one last great turn of events as they escape on a helicopter. SPOILER. Little Andy turns out to be a pod and attacks. I could not help but applaud because #1 they throw a little kid off a helicopter, #2 there’s a pretty funny dummy shot, and then #3 there’s a combination pod-pointing/Hans Grueber fall. The compositing of the shot looks very phony but the idea is so cool you gotta respect it.

I would not choose this as the best body snatcher movie, but it’s a very good one, highly recommended to anyone interested in ‘90s sci-fi horror or variations on this particular story. There’s a simplicity to it with a relatively contained location and set of major characters, no epic set pieces, but I think that’s part of its appeal. Ferrara has said that the military base was a bad choice that they stuck him with from the start, but he also admits the movie is pretty good. I would particularly like to credit director of photography Bojan Bazelli for using lots of strange lenses and camera turns in an unsettling but not bombastic way. He started with Ferrara on CHINA GIRL but went on to work with Gore Verbinski (THE RING, THE LONE RANGER, A CURE FOR WELLNESS) and Michael Bay (6 UNDERGROUND). He and Ferrara know how to make a movie look interesting, that’s for sure. They’re not just podding it.