Review of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) by Devon — 11 Sep 2008
Starts off strong: little alien globules that look like smoke drifting through space and somehow wind up in our atmosphere, where they come down in the rain. Donald Sutherland is a city public health inspector who's be-friended a female lab analyst (he clearly has the hots for) who seems to have a hobby in botany.
She also has an obnoxious live-in dentist boyfriend who seems to be all about sports and not her. One day, she brings home a strange flower, which she can't find in any of her books. It's the alien life form, of course, which has assimilated itself to earth plantlife and transformed into some new species.
Obviously, the next step is to assimilate with human life forms and transform into a new species, right? Well, not so fast. In fact, for a 2 hour movie, it doesn't happen until the start of hour 2.
The 2nd half of the movie is pretty dreadful; full of pod creatures that ooze and lots of people running around after other people. But there's none of the menace of other "the whole world's gone crazy and we're the only sane ones" movies, such as Dawn of the Dead or 28 Days Later.
Everyone is sort of innocuous. Leonard Nimoy plays a "Dr. Phil"-type who refuses to believe that these crazy creatures exist. Jeff Goldblum is his chief book-writing rival, who DOES believe these crazy creatures exist.
Oh, there's one scene where a dog and human merge into one species with the alien, and the effects for that are hilarious (basically, they put a rubber mask on a dog). Other than the human/dog, the 2nd half of the movie was pretty boring and I read a magazine through most of it.
I can't recommend it.
This review of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) was written by Devon on 11 Sep 2008.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers has generally received positive reviews.
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