BODY SNATCHERS (1994)
"They get you when you sleep..."
Director: Abel Ferrara
Writers: Stuart Gordon & Dennis Paoli and Nicholas St. John, based on the novel by Jack Finney
Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli
Editor: Anthony Redman
Music: Joe Delia
Notable Cast: Gabrielle Anwar, Terry Kinney, Meg Tilly, Reilly Murphy, Billy Wirth, Christine Elise, R. Lee Ermey, Forest Whitaker, G. Elvis Phillips, Kathleen Doyle, Tonea Stewart
1994 found Ferrara making a bold return to his horror movie roots with the Warner Brothers produced remake of the Jack Finney classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, this time dropping the whole “invasion of the” and simply calling it, Body Snatchers.
What the fuck were the execs at Warners thinking? Who recommended Ferrara for this? How did this whole process play out? The notion of Ferrara working inside the studio system on a mid-budget horror remake is absolutely fucking fascinating to me.
Whatever crazy alchemy of drugs and hubris created this scenario, thank the Lord!
Ferrara had incredibly big shoes to fill, as the last filmic adaptation of the Finney novel was Philip Kaufman’s genius Invasion of the Body Snatchers, starring Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams. I fucking LOVE that movie, truly genius filmmaking, with a boffo 1ST 5 and an insane cast. One of those perfect films the majors seem incapable of producing these days, mainly for lack of talent, both behind and in front of the camera.
The current crop of “big” actors fucking suck. The execs lost their way and can’t identify talent anymore. I mean, when they’re pushing ugly non-entities like Glen Powell, you know we’re truly fucked.
Fortunately, the 90’s still had a ton of great actors, and Ferrara assembled a dynamite cast. Maybe not as good as the 1978 version, but close. And not for nothing, but I’ll take Gabby Anwar in her prime over Brooke Adams in her prime any day of the week, and twice on Sunday. The only negative about the ’78 version is Adams’ moustache. It’s highly distracting, and gives Sutherland’s ‘stache a run for its money.
And how great is it that Ferrara had his writing partner, Nicholas St. John, do a rewrite on this, while hiring his longtime composer, Joe Delia, and editor, Anthony Redman? I know I’m probably leaving out a ton more, but that’s the kind of guy Ferrara is. Even when the suits in Hollywood come calling, he brings all his friends up with him. Ferrara is nothing if not a class act.
As he would say, “you dig?”
But we’ve come to the time we inevitably do around here… to assess the 1ST 5 Minutes of Abel Ferrara’s last foray into the bowels of the Hollywood studio system.
How did he do?
1ST 5 MINUTES
Look, I’m a big Ferrara guy. HUGE Ferrara guy. Yeah, sure, his output after The Addiction fell off a cliff, coinciding with his newfound sobriety. But in the early 90’s, fuck, did I love the guy.
You must read this entire thing with that in mind, because for this writer, sitting down to a new Ferrara film and seeing the MOTHERFUCKING WARNER BROTHERS LOGO is mindblowing.
Mind. Blowing.
Complete fucking bonkers insanity.
What parallel universe have I found myself in?
Seems to be the one where a Ferrara flick starts with a credit sequence in OUTER SPACE!
A Ferrara film starts in outer space.
A sentence I never thought I’d ever write.
It’s thrilling. I remember me and my Buddy, Altos, freshmen at NYU, trudging through some February snowstorm to see this at the theatre on 3rd Avenue and 11th Street in NYC, and just looking at each other, gobsmacked, at this opening. For your average viewer, there’s nothing extraordinary here, far from it. But for a Ferrara fan, this shit is unheard of.
And what’s this on the soundtrack? My main man, Joe Delia, finally gets to do a proper main title theme that’s hummable as you leave the theater? Absolutely out of sight.
It’s a cool, inventive credits sequence also. As we fly through space, the letters in Body Snatchers are slowly covered by a shadow version of the letter, which replaces them entirely. Very nicely done.
Once the credits are over, we find ourselves in the middle of an aerial shot which settles on one car as the narration of our main character, Marti, played by Gabrielle Anwar, kicks in. Cut to inside the car and we see a mother and father with Anwar and a little boy in the backseat. Through some very economical narration, we find out a bit of the essential backstory here.
Seems Marti’s mother died and her father, Steve, played by the great Terry Kinney, has remarried Meg Tilly’s Carol and sired a son, Andy, played the truly talented child actor, Reilly Murphy (he plays Keitel’s kid in Dangerous Game). They’ve been on the road as part of Steve’s duties with the EPA, and are on the way to their last stop, a military base where Steve is tasked with moving some dangerous chemicals.
They stop at a country gas station for a refill, and Marty goes to use the bathroom, where’s she’s immediately accosted by a black dude in an MP’s uniform, who covers her mouth with his hand so she can’t scream.
And that’s the 5 minute mark. In the normal course of things, an utterly unremarkable opening. Nothing bad, far from it, but nothing great. No amazing shot, or line of dialogue.
But this is Abel Ferrara! Making a movie that starts in outer space about alien plant things that have come to take over the human race! With a 13 million dollar budget! FERRARA!??!
Truly fucking unbelievable.
There is no chance in hell I am taking this bad boy off.
The rest of the flick
The MP sees how freaked out Marti is, says “You’re scared. Good.” Then lowers his hand and warns her “they get you when you sleep,” and how they’re everywhere. She escapes his grip and runs in a panic to tell her father and the gas station attendants, but when they check, the bathroom is empty.
Creepy and effective. Especially when this MP character resurfaces later in a bar scene, completely blank and without emotion, clearly taken over by the pods at that point.
I’ve gotta say, setting a body snatchers flick at a military base is genius, as there is already a structure in place to make you conform and work as one collective, so the pods can go to work and not be detected for quite a while.
I love how this movie, much like Dangerous Game before it, starts in media res. The aliens are already here. They’ve already taken over a lot of people. And our main characters get dumped in the middle of this burgeoning chaos.
Love that shit.
At 87 minutes, this movie is lean and mean, wastes no time, and unlike The Substance, understands the genre its operating in and doesn’t punish the audience with an insanely long run time.
Ferrara knows what’s up.
The first half of the movie expertly sets up the bonkers second half. As the Malone family settles into their new house and life on the base, we witness how they adjust. Steve butts heads with the commander of the base, General Platt, played by the great R. Lee Ermey (RIP, brutha), who resents this EPA pencil neck meddling on his base. Ermey only has a couple of scenes, but he always brings it. Amazing actor.
Especially in his last scene, where he’s already a pod person, and he confronts Forrest Whitaker’s increasingly unhinged and paranoid, Major Collins (Whitaker is fucking phenomenal in this film. He only has two scenes, like Ermey, but they’re both highlights of the film, as he is the one who first alerts Steve to something nefarious happening on the base, with people scared to go to sleep, scared of their family members, etc. Good shit), and basically lays out the aliens’ ethos and philosophy around their conquest.
I know some people hate when things get spelled out like that, and sometimes they’re right, but not here. Ermey’s delivery is fantastic, and almost sells you on the peace he promises. But Whitaker, hopped up on caffeine pills, is having none of it, and blows his own brains out, with a final, “You’ll never take my soul.” Love it.
Also dig the use of shadows here, as well as the whole movie, as frequently we see the pod people’s shadows on a wall before we actually see them. Excellent visual cue of the way the pods operate.
Marti finds herself exploring the base, wandering around with her headphones on, and as she walks by a large fence, comes upon someone’s dentures laying on the ground. Love how random and bizarre that is.
Like Jeffrey Beaumont finding the severed ear in the field.
She’s confronted by some military dudes for being in a restricted area. Swooping in to save her is General Platt’s daughter, Jenn, played by TV star Christine Elise, who eagle eyed viewers will remember from the OG run of Beverly Hills 90210. Elise is quite good when cast properly, surprised she didn’t have more of a career.
Marti starts hanging out with Jenn and is introduced to two chopper pilots, played by the great Ferrara mainstay G. Elvis Phillips (great “dickhead” face) and The Lost Boys’ Billy Wirth (looking more handsome than ever!), the latter of whom develops a nascent romance with the 17 year old Marti.
Ferrara always pushing the boundaries, even in studio slop!
And then there’s young Andy who is shoved into daycare, and in my Favorite Scene in the whole movie is the first to notice that something is very, very wrong with the people around him. He’s in class and the teacher asks them all to hold them up the paintings they’ve been creating.
Joe Delia’s score works overtime here to connote the “sweet dread” of this scene, as we see child after child has painted the exact same abstract image with tubular structures splayed across it.
All the children except young Andy, who did the kind of painting you’d expect a 4 year old to create.
As he notices this extremely bizarre “coincidence,” he puts the painting down and stares at his desk, freaked the fuck out. Reilly Murphy does such a great job in this movie. Most kid actors suck, but not this one. Obviously, Ferrara saw something in the kid after utilizing him in Dangerous Game.
And then there’s Meg Tilly’s Carol. I love how her character is set up, as this very demonstrative, goofy person who roleplays with Steve in the bedroom and is all around a very vivacious chick. It stands in remarkable contrast to her later transformation, which poor Andy is the first to stumble upon, as he enters the bedroom looking for his Mommy and sees her dried out, rotting corpse collapse into dust right before his eyes, just as “Carol” exits the closet, naked, sporting a bush worthy of John Holmes.
What Andy goes through in this film is horrendous. In the course of this movie, he sees both his parents die in gruesome fashion, before himself being killed and turned into a pod person, and then being thrown from a helicopter in the finale.
Absolutely wild shit.
And speaking of wild, that shot of Andy falling from the chopper, fuck me, Warners couldn’t have ponied up some dough to do a good FX shot for one of the film’s most disturbing moments? I mean, they actually KILL the fucking kid, twice, once off screen and then here when he falls to his death. But the shittiness of the visual effects totally undercuts the drama, which is a fantastic and unexpected moment. Fucking suits, man. I bet that shot kills Ferrara. Kills him. Or maybe he doesn’t give a shit cause he got paid? He can be like that.
Once Carol is a pod person, the film really starts racing to the end game, as she attempts to turn the rest of the family. First, Marti, who falls asleep listening to music in the bathtub, and Steve, who Carol gives a super creepy massage to. The sequence of the tendrils making their way down from the ceiling to a sleeping Marti is incredibly effective.
I love when they cut to the pod and we see the person slowly growing inside. Hard to describe the feeling as an avowed Ferrara nut seeing an extended special effects shot in a film of his. And unlike the kid falling from the chopper, this shot is amazing, really organic, with fantastic sound effects and mixing.
Eventually the growing body proves too heavy for the weak ceiling and crashes down into Marti, who freaks the fuck out in a very realistic way. Anwar’s acting here is top notch. I mean, Jesus, can you imagine this shit happening in reality, some weird malformed version of you falling down naked into your naked body. OOF. Fucking nasty. Don’t know how someone could recover from that.
She runs into her father’s room to find him in the same position, with all these tendrils covering his body. She rips them off and a hand from under the bed grabs her ankle, it’s Steve’s pod person, but he’s all fucked up!
This whole sequence is great.
Capped by the end of the scene with Carol finally making her presence felt, as she confronts Steve who is in sheer panic for them to get the fuck out of there. Tilly is fantastic here, as she is throughout the film.
Really love how there’s a moment where she starts and stops her speech to him, feels so real. “Steve, this is important, go where? That’s right, go where? What happened in your room… are you listening? What happened in your room is not an isolated incident.” I love her performance once she’s changed.
The scene with her dumping her human remains into the garbage truck is a real highlight, as the camera work and score are super on point. But here, where she tries to calmly convince Steve there’s nothing to run from is SO GOOD! And that she almost convinces him is even better. Kinney does yeoman’s work in this role. Super believable, emotional performance.
This scene also has my Favorite Line, delivered calmly by Tilly, with a dope low angle shot of her face, “Where you gonna go, where you gonna run, where you gonna hide? Nowhere, ‘cause there’s no one like you left.” My God, can you imagine the woman you love turned into some alien automaton and delivering a threat like this? Fuck.
Marti convinces Steve they have to leave her, and when they do finally run out of the house, Tilly follows, opens her mouth wide and emits some wild high pitched mechanical scream sound as she points to where they ran (always gives me chills).
Pod people subsequently pour out of their houses to chase our main characters.
From here on out the movie is non fucking stop, and it’s glorious. Not known for action, Ferrara acquits himself admirably enough. It’s hard to know what was because of the low budget for a flick like this or his own limitations as a filmmaker, but it’s fine. The action moves and nothing ever doesn’t make sense.
Eventually, Steve is changed to a pod person, and at first he fools his kids (which is insane cause he is obviously not himself when he returns), but also drops the info how if you don’t show emotion you can go undetected. I like how the pod people have no special powers, save that scream. They can’t tell the difference between a human and pod person by scent or sight, they have no enhanced strength, and seem as easily killed as normal humans.
Marti ends up shooting Steve in the chest when Billy Wirth can’t bring himself to do it, and they see right away that he was a pod person, as his body kind of melts. They use the info about non-emotions and go about trying to get a chopper and also locate Andy while acting like emotionless robots.
As they walk the increasingly chaotic base, they come upon Jenn, who does her best human impersonation, but Marti and Tim don’t take the bait. Jenn then whispers something about seeing Andy, and Marti can’t help herself and turns to ask where she saw him. Jenn responds with a loud scream and points to Marti and Tim. It’s pretty dope.
Despite this, they get to the helicopter, save “Andy,” and take off into the sky. Andy not being Andy, he tries to take the chopper down, but he’s 4, so he’s easily dispatched by tossing him from the helicopter. As he falls, he screams and points at them. It’s fucking amazing, but terribly undercut by the aforementioned FX shot being total shit. Oh well…
They blow up the convoy of trucks we saw being loaded with pods for other military bases around the country (yup, aerial shots of battle helicopters and huge explosions in a Ferrara film), and finally go in to land at a base they think is unaffected. But as they land, they are guided in by a soldier in uniform, expressionless, emotionless, as he waves the orange landing sticks.
This is my Favorite Shot in the whole film, as the camera booms down to the soldier from up above and lands in a super low angle, the soldier backlit by the setting sun, as Carol’s line about having nowhere to run to kicks in on the soundtrack, only this time distorted, deepened, slowed down. Creepy as fuck. We end on the shot of the soldier, as the image slowly fades to black and Joe Delia’s main title theme kicks in.
LOVE!
The One Sheet
LOVE this poster image! Extremely well-done graphic design, perfectly captures the mood and tone of the film. I like “The Invasion Continues” as a way to tie it to the larger franchise, but the copy above is pretty bad. No one is living inside your body, you’re dead and your body is now made of some weird plant-like shit. But otherwise, great fucking one sheet.
And that does it for the 1ST 5 Minutes of Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers. Normally, this 1ST 5 would be whatever, and not indicative of the compact thrill ride to follow. But if you know Abel Ferrara…
Ferrara was a NYC street poet with a camera, an indie daredevil who lived and created on the edge. To see him tackle a film like this… to sit there in the theater as those 1ST 5 unfurled, fuck, it was nothing short of breathtaking.
Like you entered a parallel universe where the Ferraras of the world are the celebrated studio filmmakers.
Insane shit.
And because of that, this is one of the best 1ST 5 Minutes of any film we’ll ever look at here.
See you in two pods…