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Scream Factory, the horror-thriller offshoot of independent film distributor Shout Factory, has announced that it will release on Blu-ray Philip Kaufman's film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Leonard Nimoy. The release will be available for purchase on August 2.
http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=18967
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If this has the excellent commentary they had in the DVD I'll buy it. One of my favourite films.
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I like the 1956 version, a classic, but I think the 1978 version with Sutherland is on par, it's very creepy, one of the best sci-fi thrillers of the decade.
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Yes, one of the few remakes which equals, or probably even surpasses, the classic original.
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Enjoyed BOTH versions & love DANA WYTNER in the '56 version!
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Posted: |
May 3, 2016 - 10:21 AM
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By: |
RoryR
(Member)
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I've read the original Jack Finney novel and it's very good. The '56 original adaptation, as good as it is, still isn't quite as good as the book.
The book's climax is pretty anti-climactic, as is the novel for JAWS. A whimper, not a bang.
It's actually been over thirty years since I read the book, so I don't recall how it ended except that it wasn't like the film, minus the framing device. I also don't mind the framing device in the '56 film version. It worked for me. I didn't see this movie until I was around 16, and then on late night TV. I was all alone in an empty house. The effect of the story and the film's emphatic score actually rattled me so I was afraid to turn out the lights and go to bed.
Of course, the movie has never played that way for me since, but my reaction after seeing the '70s remake in its original theatrical run was "Meh." Like I said, it just didn't do it for me.
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Posted: |
May 3, 2016 - 11:23 AM
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By: |
RoryR
(Member)
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The book ends like this: one of the aliens explains that because of the human resistance, they'll leave, and all the pods start floating up into space. And Becky was never replaced by a pod.
Interestingly, Finney said the book was a critique of (American) materialism, not communism.
Wow, I've completely forgotten that, which may in itself say how dissatisfying that ending is. However, I'm glad to read that Finney's intention was a critique of materialism -- because we certainly need such a critique. I'm continually dismayed by how few realize how empty the "American Dream" of material wealth is.
Anyway, this reminds me, the '56 version is, I think, a critique of the paranoia and harmful effects of the Red Scare, though I've read that its director saw it more as a warning that many people were already living as "Pod People," but what was the '70s version a critique of? The same thing? I'm not sure.
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I really like the first 3 Body Snatchers films, including Abel Ferrara's army base Body Snatchers (minus one terrible shot of a person falling from a helicopter).
I liked Kauffman's creative choices, which he explains in the commentary. and how the invasion has begun from the first shot you see of earth, with the dustcarts in the street. Each shot seems well thought out.
I used to wonder about the start and how the alien stuff drifts off its planet and then down into our atmosphere without burning up, but they find things attached to spaceshuttles and probes and such all the time.
It's a story i like a lot and i enjoy seeing different interpretations of.
One of my favourite short stories is Philip K Dick's The hanging stranger which is perfectly in line with this and has a great hook and ending.
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[
Why would you assume you're in the minority?
It seems to me that we live in a culture that prefers the new over the old.
Funny, I rather often think it's the opposite: whenever there is a remake of something, voices everywhere questioning why this or that should be remade at all.
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) 
