Body Snatchers

Abel Ferrara's take on Body Snatchers, the third big screen adaptation of Jack Finney's science fiction novel, is set on a military base in Alabama being investigated for polluting the surrounding swampland. Unbeknownst to Terry Kinney's Steve Malone, the Environmental Protection Agency worker dispatched to make the ecological assessment, the soldiers living on this camp have dredged up and disseminated alien seed pods capable of growing into perfect physical replicas of people. Up front, there's an obvious parallel to be drawn between the hive-minded extraterrestrials and the violent, right-wing conformists usually found in any nation's armed forces. Ferrara's film (with a screenplay credited to Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, and Nicholas St. John) probes deeper still, examining basic familial relationships from a mocking, alien perspective. Steve's daughter Marti, played by Gabrielle Anwar, is the Generation X teen suffering through all manner of minor and massive indignities. Before the occupation becomes violently obvious, this displeasure comes from feeling like the spare person in her father's new family. Marti is a young adult, on the cusp of college, forced to tag along when she'd rather spend her Summer spreading her wings. Marti's stepmother Carol, played by Meg Tilly, is the first person in the family to be assimilated; the unashamed, hirsute nakedness of Carol's newborn facsimile more horrifying to the family's snooping pre-schooler son than the bubbling, stinking mess his father eventually becomes. Carol's transformation upends the established power dynamics within the Malone household too. She's no longer the awed, younger woman. Carol is now the cold, reproachful mouthpiece of an unfeeling invasion.