Rating: 
Summary: A fun way to pass the night, but not exceptional.
Review: If books are generally the best editions of any given story, then the first movies adapted from them are usually the best."Body Snatchers", which is based on the book "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" by Jack Finney, is the third adaption of this story, via VHS. There is one black and white version from 1956 which I haven't yet seen (which is really a paraody of the 50s fear of communists, or so I hear) and then there is a 1970s version starring Donald Sutherland, Veronica Cartwright and Jeff Goldblum, which scared my hair gray. This movie is the americanized version of an alien tale. It is over-done to the point of glowing, it is so polished. Some people like perfection, but in horror movies, especially "hokey" horror movies, I like a few flaws. This movie has the sense of having been regurgitated through the ages. Nothing in it seems "new". Despite that, the youthful cast (practically all the main characters are "kids") do the best job possible, given the circumstances. I rate this movie a 6 out of a 10. It is a good thing to pick up if you're looking at the video store for a last-minute rental, and are stumped, but if you want a thriller for a birthday party or something, see the 70s version.
Rating: 
Summary: BODY SNATCHERS - MEG TILLY
Review: Many have felt that the ability for the pods to take over the whole town in the first movie was a good stretch. To take over LA in the second movie was just impossible. But in this third version of the story, the setting is just right. An EPA agent and his family are visiting an army base where there might be toxic waste leaking into the environment. Little do they know that chemicals are not the real threat. Strange pods have been found in the marsh. As you are probably aware, the pods grow into duplicates of people and then replace them. On an army base, once an officer has been taken, it is easy to trap the lower ranks. It also means that the pod people have access to weapons supplies. But the locale is not the only improvement in this version. We get plenty of key scenes where you never quite know who is still themselves and who can not be trusted. The conversion process has also been improved to explain how the pods can copy people and what happens to the bodies afterwards. There is quite a bit of nudity in this version, so it is not as accessible as the earlier versions, but is definitely worth it.
Rating: 
Summary: Best of the Body-Snatchers Movies
Review: Many have felt that the ability for the pods to take over the whole town in the first movie was a good stretch. To take over LA in the second movie was just impossible. But in this third version of the story, the setting is just right. An EPA agent and his family are visiting an army base where there might be toxic waste leaking into the environment. Little do they know that chemicals are not the real threat. Strange pods have been found in the marsh. As you are probably aware, the pods grow into duplicates of people and then replace them. On an army base, once an officer has been taken, it is easy to trap the lower ranks. It also means that the pod people have access to weapons supplies. But the locale is not the only improvement in this version. We get plenty of key scenes where you never quite know who is still themselves and who can not be trusted. The conversion process has also been improved to explain how the pods can copy people and what happens to the bodies afterwards. There is quite a bit of nudity in this version, so it is not as accessible as the earlier versions, but is definitely worth it.
Rating:
Summary: "My mommy's dead."
Review: Preschooler Andy sees his mother crumble into dust on her bed, and then sees her doppelganger come out of the closet and put on a robe to cover herself. We, and Andy, first see his mother's replacement from below the waist, and it's hard to tell if Andy's horror is caused by seeing his sleeping mother's body dissolve, the life sucked out of it by the tendrils of a body-snatching pod, or by the sight of her replacement's naked body. Which is more terrifying to the boy - - sex or death? "My mommy's dead" is also true for Marti, Andy's stepbrother. As far as Marti's concerned, her father has already replaced her mother with a pod, her stepmother. Body Snatchers is about family dissolution as much as organic decomposition. "Pod movies" are more terrifying than run-of-the-mill invasion stories (like Independence Day, The Day of the Triffids, The War of the Worlds) because the aliens don't want to just kill us or enslave us, they want to be us. In Body Snatchers, Major Collins tells the pod people before he blows his own brains out, "You won't take my soul!" Better dead than pod. Abel Ferrara (director of Ms. 45, Bad Lieutenant, and The Addiction) has done what Don Siegel did in 1955 and what Philip Kaufman did in 1978 - - given us a version of Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers that reveals its own era. Besides the Communist-McCarthyite argument everyone sees in it, Siegel's version set in 1950s "Santa Mira" was about rural America and its repression. Kaufman's film in 1970s San Francisco showed the emptiness and disconnection in urban life that couldn't help but lead to the Greedy Age of the 1990s. Kaufman even set it near Silicon Valley, the center from which the economic tidal wave washed over everything. Ferrara's version, besides being a story of families torn up, is about militarism and ecological catastrophe.
Marti and Andy are the children of civilian EPA scientist Steve Malone and his wife Carol. Steve is making a tour of military installations checking for hazardous wastes. We first see Marti reading in the family car, isolated from dad, stepmom, and brother. (Marti never makes the distinction that Andy is only her stepbrother; he's always her brother and she spends half the movie risking her own life to save him from the pods. In this movie the children have a better sense of what family should be than most adults.) At the next army post on Steve's list of possible polluters, Marti hooks up with Jenn, the punk daughter of the post commander. Jenn's mom is drunk, passed out on the couch as Jenn mocks social etiquette and formally introduces Marti to her. "Mom's an alcoholic. That means I'll probably be one too," Jenn says, finishing her mother's drink. You might escape the pods, but you can't escape your family. In Santa Mira in the fifties, we saw pods being distributed from the back of a truck on Main Street. In San Francisco in the seventies pods were kept in a greenhouse from which they were sent on to the rest of the country. But in the nineties soldiers take them out of a swamp (possibly polluted from all the toxic chemicals on the base) when they're ready to replace human beings. It's not just an unlucky coincidence that the water around the post is good for growing body snatchers. These chemicals were always meant for killing. ("You don't know a thing about chemical warfare, do you, Dr. Malone?" the commander asks the scientist.) Once the pods have taken over the post, the commander gives truck drivers their assignments - - transporting pods to other military bases from which the invasion will spread. The army itself is a family, like the race of pods. When the pods happened upon the army post, they found a family that already had an ethic of individuals subordinating their welfare to the goals of the group. Individual death means nothing. At the end of the movie, Marti and Tim (a young helicopter pilot Marti's become attracted to) take their (perhaps futile) revenge against the invaders for destroying their families.
Rating: 
Summary: Ill conceived from the start
Review: The 1956 version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is widely regarded as one of the true classics of film sci-fi. The 1978 remake proved to be surprisingly potent in its own right because it retained the horrific essence of the original. Its success apprently gave Hollywood the notion that another re-make was viable. Unfortunately, they neglected the horrific essence which made the others successful, dooming "Body Snatchers" from the start!
I will not rehash the plot in this review, as the plot is well known to all sci-fi fans. The 1978 version worked with the audience's foreknowledge by transplanting the invasion from a small town to San Francisco. "Body Snatchers," however, is set on a military base, a place where conformity and the emotionless execution of duty are expected. This represents the first blow to the original's horrific essence; how are we supposed to be disturbed by witnessing the loss of emotion and free will in an environment where these thiongs are expected?
Fans of "Body Snatchers" may jump in at this point and say that this plot point makes a social statement about the military lifestyle. This argument falls flat, however, considering that the movie doesn't really comdemn the military or the military lifestyle. More likely, the story was set on a military base as an excuse to have guns around.
What really ruins "Body Snatchers," however, is the fact that the main character is a new-comer to the invasion site. The original movie gave us the horror of the hero watching people he had known all his life being turned into something inhuman. In the 1978 version, the horror was much more subtle, as the heroine comments on having an intuitve sense that city she has lived in all her life was eerily changing around her. In "Body Snathcers" the hero (and thus the audience) has no emotional connection to the environment, which trivializes the events.
Yes this movie has more graphic transformation scenes than its predecessors, coupled with gratuitous nudity and violence. These elements do not enhance the movie at all. If anything they emphasize the director's cluelessness. The previous versions succeeded with sublte horror, not sensationalism.
Indeed the only real horror is "Body Snatchers" is that the director seemed to be trying to do what the invaders were doing; replacing what was lively and respectable with a soulless, dull copy.
Rating:
Summary: Evidence of cultural shift
Review: The 1956 version of the story (a five-star film) got us where we lived - or thought we lived: in small-town America, where everybody knows everybody, and the good ol' values prevail (under threat of Red Menace, of course). The 1978 version (a four-star film) wisely transported the story out of a setting in which we now knew we no longer lived, and made the tale a fable of urban paranoia. This latest draft may have some interesting creepiness in its barren military-base setting, and may have some good FX for the FX freaks, but it has become essentially a story about a grumpy teenager, just like 95% of the films that emerge from Hollywood. Whatever virtue it may have is sadly diluted by the obviousness of its producer's motives in seeking to empty the pockets of his neighbor's children.
Rating:
Summary: Two out of three ain't bad...
Review: The Least Successful of the Body Snatcher Movies..., for a reason, the movie was so slow that I fell sleep the first time I watched it! I'm a big fan of Jack Finney's book "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." (1954). The first two movies (1956 & 1978) were great because in their own way, each faithfully depicted the atmosphere of total dispair found in the book. This installment didn't adhere very well to the mood or the original plot, at the same time it didn't bring any innovation to the story line, the way that the 1978 version did. If you're a fan of "Invasion...", I don't recomend it. If you are watching it for the horror aspect, eigther of the first two is superior to this one. I also recomend, John Carpenter's: "The Thing"; and Robert Heilein's: "The Puppet Masters", staring Donald Southerland.
Rating:
Summary: Two out of three ain't bad...
Review: The Least Successful of the Body Snatcher Movies..., for a reason, the movie was so slow that I fell sleep the first time I watched it! I'm a big fan of Jack Finney's book "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." (1954). The first two movies (1956 & 1978) were great because in their own way, each faithfully depicted the atmosphere of total dispair found in the book. This installment didn't adhere very well to the mood or the original plot, at the same time it didn't bring any innovation to the story line, the way that the 1978 version did. If you're a fan of "Invasion...", I don't recomend it. If you are watching it for the horror aspect, eigther of the first two is superior to this one. I also recomend, John Carpenter's: "The Thing"; and Robert Heilein's: "The Puppet Masters", staring Donald Southerland.
Rating:
Summary: Once More, With Feeling
Review: The third screen version of Finney's novel is the least necessary, the former two versions succeeding brilliantly, each in different ways, in conveying the horror of undercover invasion and increasing paranoia. But that doesn't mean it isn't good. Quite good, in fact. As in the previous versions, the characters are real and credible, making the incredible situations more dramatic for the viewer. The special effects are as gruesome as in the '78 remake, but less horrific than in that version due to mere repetition. This time, the alien seed pods strike where the iron is hottest, in the military bases of the U.S. They have more direction, more purpose, and more feeling than before, though they are still plainly alien to our psychology. The pods are never on the defensive here, having already established dominion and merely defending their footholds. Meg Tilly has the best scene and line in the show, when she confronts fleeing family members with the stark reality, "Where ya gonna run? Where ya gonna hide? Nowhere. Because there's no one...like you...left." Last on the list of "body snatchers" movies, but still on the list.
Rating:
Summary: BODY SNATCHERS - MEG TILLY
Review: This is my favorite version of "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" I rememeber seeing the remake with Donald Sutherland in 1978 and thought it could not be topped. Even after seeing this version on TV a few years back... so recently I bought the 1978 remake to see it once again to compare... but after veiwing this version with Meg Tilly ... watching the 1978 remake once more, the 1978 remake was lacking something that "Body Snatchers" version has. If you have never seen any of these "Invation of the Body Snatcher" movies. Please watch them in order...The original from 1956 with Kevin McCarthy ..next the 1978 with Donald Sutherland , then this version "The Body Snatchers"with Meg Tilly ...to be able to enjoy them all
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