Review of The Change-Up (2011) by Shiira — 06 Sep 2011

"The Change-Up", more so than prior body-swapping movies(three of them in 1987 alone), makes it perfectly clear that this comedy subgenre overlaps into horror territory, an encompassing that works as a reimagining of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", but played for laughs.

While alien dopplegangers exhibit the same contrastive behavior as people caught in the throes of demonic possession, the latter malady discomfits the notion of genre fluidity, because the tell-tale signs of somebody afflicted by the devil would be overtly self-evident(running the gamut from an altered voice to vomiting), thereby making easy ingratiation within the subtext too difficult.

On the other hand, if the person is being replaced by a pod replicant, it normally takes the skeptic a longer time to accept this absence of the self, as reported by loved ones who know that their mother, uncle, and love interest(from the 1956 original) are impostors.

In 1978, Phillip Kaufman remade the sci-fi classic, and picked up where Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter left off(in that cave of Dr. Bennett's discontent), by focusing, again, on a man and woman, but this time remaking the couple as husband and wife, because who better than a spouse to recognize the perceptible change in what has now become a quasi-sentinent being.

Soon after Elizabeth shares with Geoffrey her news about the strange plant she discovered in the Bay Area terra firma, the husband stops acting like his usual self. Now he's cold and secretive, Elizabeth confides to her friend Matthew, and most startling of all, Geoffrey, a basketball fan, had given away their tickets to a Warriors game.

That's definitely not her husband. She feels it in her bones. Although "The Body Snatcher" movies have a secure place in two film canons, perhaps sci-fi is the movie series' alpha genre, since in horror flicks, the characters, especially the female ones, are monumentally stupid.

Elizabeth is smart. She knows right away that "Geoffrey isn't Geoffrey anymore," whereas Jamie takes forever to detect the "po[t] person" inhabiting her typically dependable husband.

The mediated content belonging to horror and sci-fi productions are often amalgamable because within the diegesis of both simulacra worlds, the physical laws which govern their corporeal duplicate are broken in the same fantastical manner.

Whereas Elizabeth diagnoses the change in Geoffrey after a single post-transformation encounter, Jamie, even after being told about the "change-up", and having witnessed Dave's brusque way with Cara over dinner, Mann plays a variation of the dumb blond by not catching on to the switch.

Her surprising nudity, albeit common to the modern sex comedy, also has a longstanding alliance with the slasher flick . Despite being sexually active, Jamie survives, undermining a time-honored trope that only virgins are spared the wrath of patriarchy, but perhaps connubial sex is allowed to go unpunished.

While it's a fallacy to purport that Jaime could die in a comedy as broad as "The Change-Up", theoretically, her amulet(a wedding band), which makes sexual intercourse filmically permissible without any violent repercussions, could have potentially lost its special powers, if not for her exotic gastronomic predilections, which as luck would have it, works as a preventive measure against sex with Mitch, therefore averting the retributional hazards that comes with the territory of being "the bad girl", or in this case, the adulterer.

To the lothario, Jamie's loose bowel movements signifies the devil's work, since the film itself establishes fecal matter as owning a connotative value, when during a diaper change, Dave is on the receiving end of some projectile defecating, which recalls the green bile that ends up on the young priest's face in "The Exorcist".

The filmmaker thinks like Mitch: women and babies are devils. The anomalous conduct of the baby, albeit mounted as slapstick comedy, nevertheless encompasses a comportment that hews close to horror, especially in a later scene, where another baby throws a cleaver in Mitch's direction, as if with the intent to kill like one of those mutant infants in "It's Alive".

This womanizer is worse than Alfie, the mod playboy of swinging London in the 1966 film starring Michael Caine. He's like the dog-man(a human head affixed to a boxer's body) who makes Elizabeth scream in the Kaufman film.

Unlike Alfie, who eventually befriends the dog that brackets the movie(therefore separating himself from the canine metaphor of his dastardly way with women), Mitch appears to be the end-result of a merger between man and animal.

The paternal agony, upon seeing his son with another father redeems Alfie, who breaks the fourth wall with silence instead of his usual glib remarks. Mitch, on the other hand, doesn't respect Dave's family or job, and has no such redeemable moment.

His horror is a human one; he loves nobody, not even himself.