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.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Don Siegel’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956) is a fun movie and a bonafide sci-fi/horror classic for the resonance of its premise alone. A group of friends notice some people acting odd in their California town, then find a strange humanoid drone body that turns out to be the result of alien seeds that drifted through space and grew pods that create lookalike bodies of humans and replace them. The doppelgangers duplicate every cell and even the memories of the infected, but they lack human emotions. The more observant people start realizing their loved ones aren’t themselves, but nobody believes them.
A couple years ago, you may remember, I was kind of giving up on my Slasher Search tradition, because the pickings were getting really slim when it came to the type of undiscovered ‘80s slasher I was looking for. Some of you talked me into broadening or adjusting the criteria, so I’ve been experimenting with the mostly more modern horror obscurities that can be found scrolling through the horror sections on Tubi and similar free streaming services. That’s been going okay so far, so I’ll try dipping in a little again this year and see what happens.
For today’s special programming I tried out two movies that stretch the definition of “slasher,” but they seem at least tangentially related to supernatural slashers like Freddy and Candyman. Or at least one of them has Tony Todd in it. Okay, these are not really slashers, they’re action horror. Instead of a final girl running from a killer they have a martial artist who falls into monster troubles and has to fight.
IN A VIOLENT NATURE was one of this year’s most hyped and intriguing indie horror movies. It’s a slasher hailing from the land of Canada (see also: 
This may be lost to time now, but back in the aughts when 
A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE is something rare and kind of lovely: a big franchise genre movie that uses those expensive trappings for something modest, simple and beautiful. As the title implies, it takes place right before and during the initial onslaught of super-hearing monsters from space that eat anybody who makes a sound, quickly causing the fall of society and leaving a smattering of by-necessity-non-verbal post-apocalyptic survivors. We get those monsters, some tense set pieces, some clever ways to deal with them, some (I believe) new information about how they work and how mankind first reacted. But really it could be almost any disaster scenario, because what’s great about it is that it spends this day of almost certain doom with a protagonist who was already about to die anyway.
At some point in the last decade or so the movie-discussers really latched onto the term “body horror.” They kinda act like if you can identify a movie as body horror that means it’s legit. But also when they say it they almost always mean one thing: it has some David Cronenberg-inspired New Flesh type stuff at some point. I kinda wonder how many of the people comparing any vaguely misshapen flesh to Cronenberg bothered to see his last movie, but I suppose that’s irrelevant.
INFESTED (Vermines) is a very good French giant spider movie I watched on Shudder a while back and I’m happy to recommend it for your October viewing (or otherwise). It’s a movie with tons of style, energy and personality as well as, you know, spiders. The opening has almost an INDIANA JONES, adventure movie kind of feel, as we follow a pick up truck of Arab smugglers into the desert where they smoke a swarm of rare spiders out of a hole to capture in plastic containers. These things are so deadly that when one of their crew gets bit they have to put him out of his misery with a machete, but they still pack some of them up. And one of them will end up in Paris.
As I write this there’s a terrible sickness going around. All the world’s authoritarian assholes have agreed it’s time to whip out the ol’ “immigrants are scary” cliche to rile up the dumbest motherfuckers on earth. In my country there’s a specifically idiotic one where the two sweaty goblins running on the Keep Trump Unaccountable For His Crimes ticket purposely spread a racist myth about Haitian immigrants in a specific town in Ohio, leading to weeks of chaos, harassment and bomb threats. And of course they’ve refused to apologize, doubled down on the lies, and promised to deport these (legal!) immigrants if they manage to take power again.
KNOX GOES AWAY is, somehow, the second movie I watched in a week where a professional killer is diagnosed with the fatal neurocognitive disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In 
