In 1955, Jack Finney wrote a science-fiction novel about a race of alien seed pods that traveled through space and landed in Mill Valley, California. Those pods hatched into emotionless duplicates of the town's citizens and replaced them while they slept. A year later, this story would be adapted into the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers and would go on to become an American science-fiction classic. This was the first of four movie treatments that the original novel would receive over the next 55 years. The third of these adaptations, simply titled Body Snatchers, was directed by Abel Ferrara of Bad Lieutenant fame and features B-movie legends Larry Cohen and Stuart Gordon on the writing staff. Unlike all previous versions of this story, this film does not take place in California, but at a military base in Selma, Alabama. It begins with a family driving to the base. Steve Malone (Terry Kinney) is an agent with the Environmental Protection Agency that has been dragging his new wife Carol (Meg Tilly) and their two children around the country for months, most recently to Craig Air Force Base to investigate reports of wide spread anxiety and sleep loss. At a rest stop, Steve's teenaged daughter Marti (Gabrielle Antwar) is startled by a soldier that tells her not to go to sleep or "they" will get her. The seemingly unstable soldier is taken back to Craig Air Force Base and Marti tries to put his words out of her mind. Marti feels alienated in her own family and has never really connected to her step-mother Carol or step-brother Andy. (Reilly Murphy)
Steve notices several problems with the water surrounding the base when he discovers high levels of foreign contaminants and mutated plant life. Andy also develops some suspicions of his own when, in class, he notices that every kid aside from himself has produced the exact same painting. Andy's fears are confirmed later that night when he witnesses his mother's body turn to dust, and a duplicate emerge from the bedroom closet. Needless to say neither Steve nor Marti believe Andy's story of Carol being dead as it appears that she is still quite alive. The next night, while Marti is taking a warm bath, she falls asleep and is, very slowly and carefully, entangled by thin tentacles that stretch down from the ceiling. In the attic above her, a we see that the tentacles originate from a seed-pod that begins to grow a human-looking fetus within it as the tentacles suck out fluids and nutrients from Marti's body. As the larva grows, the ceiling gives way and the resulting noise rouses Marti from her sleep where she viciously tears the tentacles away from her skin, mouth, and nose. During Marti's struggle, the ceiling above her opens and her unfinished clone falls on top of her. While this film is not considered the best or most successful retelling of Jack Finney's original The Body Snatchers novel, it does feel more like a horror film than the two previous entries and holds much closer to the original seed pod idea than 2007's The Invasion. The effects shots, while sparse, are very eerie and disturbing to watch, and the move does do a good job of creating an oppressive atmosphere with many scenes dedicated simple to showing how uneasy the main characters feel as the people around them display faintly off-beat mannerisms. It really does a great job of building the sense of fear and foreboding that is necessary for a story about world conquest via alien duplicates needs to feel dangerous and real.
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