Film review: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

I thought I'd seen this version (the first remake of the excellent 50's Don Siegel movie) before but I must've just caught bits of it late night on Channel 4 or something, because most of the first half was new to me.  Donald Sutherland, in a horrible perm and disgusting porn mustache, is Matthew Bennell, a health inspector in San Francisco, first seen pulling a rat turd (his term, not mine) out of a pot of sauce at a fancy French restaurant (for which he gets his windscreen cracked, a nice effect that means everything looks distorted when he drives around the city, mimicking the slightly-off-ness of the population).  Meanwhile some kind of plant from outer space is forming "grexes" with plants all round the city, and Matthew's assistant Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) has collected one and put it in a jar of water on her husband's side of the bed.  Thus it is that he is the first character that we see transformed, as he is fully dressed before she wakes and she watches him carry something in a bin to a waiting garbage truck around back.  This is a running theme throughout the movie - we keep seeing grey fibrous matter being dumped into garbage trucks or sticking out of dumpsters, and it's only later that we learn the awful secret of what it is.  Elizabeth very quickly realizes that her husband is no longer her husband (even though he looks just like him and knows everything he would know) and on following him, her suspicions are heightened because he's not in his office (he's a dentist) but is instead out meeting with total strangers as they swap strange plants.  Matthew doesn't fully believe her, but his dry cleaner tells him the same thing about his wife.  He convinces Elizabeth to come with him and talk to his celebrity psychiatrist friend Dr. David Kibner (distractingly played by LEONARD NIMOY!) and while at the book signing party we also meet the self-styled poet Jack Bellicec (a young Jeff Goldblum, odd as always) who is also friends with Matthew.  A woman at the party is telling Kibner that her husband is not her husband, but he convinces her to go home with him anyway.  As he and Matthew and Elizabeth go off together to talk, he admits that he has had many patients that week say the same thing.
Things really ratchet up a gear when Jack goes back to the steam baths he runs with his wife and he falls asleep in the steam room, and his wife discovers a weird plant-like humanoid copy of him lying a couple of booths over.  Pretty soon it's Jack and his wife Nancy (Veronica Cartwright, who was the other woman besides Ripley in Alien the following year) and Matthew and Elizabeth against the world.  (At one point Matthew and Elizabeth are driving though San Francisco when a terrified man runs up to their car and shouts "they're after me!  You're next" and runs around the corner, chased by a crowd, and is killed in a car accident.  I thought I recognized his face, and only later did I discover it was the actor Kevin McCarthy, who starred as Bennell in the original Body Snatchers.  Nice touch.)  It was in the second half that I saw the scenes I was familiar with - "Kibner" injecting Matthew and Elizabeth to get them to go to sleep so that the pods will take them over, a scene where Matthew slices up 4 fully-formed replicas of our four protagonists with a spade (blood splatters) and most horrifically, a dog with a man's face, caused by damaging a pod next to a homeless man and his dog as they are absorbed.  The effects are very good - not Alien good, but definitely not cheesy.  And all in all this film is still very effective.  And very bleak - much more so than the original story and even more than the 50's film version.  And we get to see Elizabeth crumble into the grey husk material that we've been seeing sticking out of dumpsters throughout.  The last scene is iconic - and features an innovation that sets this version above the original in the creepiness department: when a pod person recognizes a human in their midst, they point at it and scream a hideous scream.  This remake is up there with The Thing and The Fly (where, of course, Jeff Goldblum is promoted to the lead).  It's not surprising that the film has been remade 4 times, because it's a perfect parable (originally either for McCarthyism or Communism, depending on your particular paranoia), although, as a reviewer pointed out, there really wasn't a particular threat in the late 70's (unless the director Philip Kaufman saw Reaganism coming).  I think it deserves a TV series now - you could chart the progress of the pod peoples' conquest of the world, a la The Walking Dead or the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy.  I just hope I get a cut when that inevitably happens.