Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Rating:
Summary: Open your eyes!
Review: Scary science fiction movie around small town residents who are replaced by inert duplicates sown by alien pods. Tense dramatic and anguish from beginning to end . This movie may be well the best sci fi film in the fifties due its originality .
Directed by Don Siegel . The open ending is a classic and still menaces to you .
So let's do what Hamlet and let's kill the dream!, because remember in an insane world only the insane is normal.

Rating:
Summary: Still Good
Review: I just watched this film over the weekend, and I was impressed with how well it has stood up over time. The story has a great pace, and gets creepier by the minute. Some minor criticisms:

--Cheesy love story, but typical for the 50's ("My darling...")
--Some minor plot inconsistencies (without giving away any plot twists, it implies that "pods" must be nearby for people to be "snatched," but there is at least one "snatching" where no pod could possibly have been close by).

Overall, one of the best horror movies of the era. Great cinematography, good acting, and a well-paced story. Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Keep awake, keep awake!!!!.
Review: This is a remarkable movie in many ways. With a relatively small budget a very interesting Sci-Fi / horror film is made. No big visual effects, no Big Stars in the cast, black n' white photography and still a griping story. There are two remakes of this story, they can't stand against the original one, even if they were produced with a bigger budget and known actors.

This is the plot: Dr. Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) returns to his small home town ready to attend patients. Different consultants tell him of a paranoid syndrome: their relatives seem somehow changed. A couple of days after that, they return to his office and tell him "Everything is OK".
Dr. Bennell and her old times girl friend Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) soon realize the town is being subject to an alien invasion plot. Huge seed are "planted" in basements or garages and evolved in a duplicate of a person (a clone will be called today). As soon as the victim fells asleep is "transformed". The tension grows up as time pass and the characters need to sleep.

Some comments issued around the film pointed out that it may be taken as a parable of the Cold War raging at the time it was released (1956). I think that there are more films of that period, alluding the frightful issue of "They are like us but they are NOT us and they are dangerous", as in "The Thing from another World" (1951) or "I Married a Monster from Outer Space" (1958).

The actress Carolyn Jones (later best known by her impersonation of Morticia at the "Addams Family" TV serial) play a short, but very well enacted, role
A very enjoyable film to be seen.
Duration: 80 minutes.
Reviewed by Max Yofre.