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. (read the rest of this shit…)
SUITABLE FLESH is the latest from Joe Lynch, a director who has a certain credibility in my book because his debut was a DTV sequel. I was mixed-positive on 
You know how it is: you have these reoccurring nightmares about a sexy mermaid, and then you’re on a yacht trip with your girlfriend and an older couple, and a violent storm hits out of the blue and the boat wrecks and your friend is injured and you try to get help on the nearby island of Iboca but everyone’s weird and people have noticeable gills and tentacles and shit and a homeless guy explains to you that years ago a guy convinced them to give up Christianity and worship the sea god Dagon, who is different than Jesus in that he requires his followers to throw him women to impregnate with immortal monster babies. We’ve all been through it, and H.P. Lovecraft wrote about it in 1931, so Stuart Gordon made a movie about it in 2001.
The way Stuart Gordon tells it, CASTLE FREAK was made because he saw Charles Band’s poster for it before it was even really a premise.
“Confessions are only admitted under torture, otherwise you might confess just to avoid torture and it wouldn’t be a true confession.”
