Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

The effects were not all that good at the time but even today, it still holds. The story is played a bit easy to understand for us now. No real gap in the storyline. It was fun to watch again, a time capsule.

It's much more sinister than that. Dr. Miles Bennell is rushed back to his small, ordinarily blissful southern California town because something just isn't right. Some strange influence has gripped the town, and his patients are flooding his phone line before mysteriously cancelling their appointments. What is up with Santa Mira? What's even worse is that folks, both adults and children, are insisting that their family members just aren't the same people anymore, as if they have been possessed or corrupted by some very nefarious force.I love the best of 1950's science fiction, and this is surely among the best. During the very first viewing many years ago as a child, I was scared out of my wits, and after many, many subsequent viewings, I still share the horror that Miles feels when he realizes that his beloved Becky Driscoll just isn't the same person anymore. What's worse is that she will never, ever again wear that knockout, strapless dress in which she appears early in the film. Need I state in words that Dana Wynter was one beautiful woman?Aside from the uniqueness and intelligence of the original idea, the captivating cast, both leads and support, and the excellent script by Daniel Mainwaring ("The Hitch-Hiker", "Out of the Past", "Phenix City Story"), director Don Siegel very successfully establishes a perfectly paradoxical situation of a town, an area, and a way of life that appears to be serene and idyllic on the surface while a very powerful and extremely ominous force is quietly destroying it all from deep within, one house at a time.Of great interest to me is how some viewers interpreted the malevolent force as a symbol of mind-controlling Communism, or any form of totalitarianism, while others saw it as analogous to the McCarthy anti-Communism movement of the period. For me, the theme is so deep, significant, and universal that it can be perceived in many, different ways and on many, different levels. On a personal note, I lived in a small town for 28 years that gradually became "invaded" by a very specific political and social philosophy that seemed to program the minds of the inhabitants over a period of time until any member of the community who believed differently became ostracized, ridiculed, and widely condemned by an oppressive and very unhealthy "tyranny of the majority". To this day, I believe that the town's public education system was systematically programming the children in a specific way, and the children were then influencing their parents, who desperately wanted to be accepted by them as "hip" peers rather than as traditional parents who were supposed to guide their kids into adulthood, at least to some degree. It was a kind of role reversal in which the children of the town had taken control of the hearts and minds of the parents. This was not science fiction. This was actually happening in that very real town and continues to this day. As I endured the very disturbing transition of the town over time, I was constantly reminded of this brilliant and terrifying work of art, which so successfully depicts a very, very important message about our need to fight for our individual convictions and for our precious sense of humanity, regardless of the odds.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers its a great movie, not just for being a Science Fiction/Horror film from the 1950's but it also works really well if don't take the genre into account.Its incredibly effective, few movies have made me feel as paranoid as this one did, probably the 1978 remake of this film, Rosemary's Baby and The Hateful Eight. This one is now on that list of films that made me distrust everyone on screen.Politics aside, this film also has many philosophical thoughts about who we really are as individuals and what makes us human, as oppose to alien plants I guess.Overall, a classic that inspired several remakes and scared lots of people in its original run and even years later.

Being a teenager in the Fifties, we went to see movies with the most outlandish titles. Expecting the usual rubber monsters and hackneyed plots, you can imagine our near- speechless response at movie's end. (We were relieved by the upbeat ending.) Despite the film's breath-taking accomplishments, it soon faded into obscurity, undone no doubt by the catch-penny title and B-movie budget. Revived periodically on TV, it quickly attracted a cult following, finally emerging from the late night underground to become the widely recognized classic that it is. There are few movies that connect at a deeply subconscious level with the audience. This is one of them, and can now be seen as a parable, not only of the 50's Red menace (Scriptwriter Dan Mainwaring was briefly blacklisted), but of the many depersonalized encounters that fill the ordinary day. The movie's one flaw - the "pop-out" replicas that make a distinctly rubbery sound as they pop from the pods in the greenhouse scene, a technical defect that may have inspired the f-x'ed remake. Frankly, I'm concerned that contemporary teens may not find this a scary or affecting movie. Styles do change as does technology, but the underlying theme that Bodysnatchers renders so effectively is timeless. Perhaps the mind- snatching forces of commercialism are winning after all. Nevertheless, for this now 60- something, my teenage quarter was never better spent than on this film, nor will yours if you haven't seen it.