Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Director: Phillip Kauffman
Cast: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, Leonard Nimoy
Memorable Line(s): "There's nothing to be afraid of. They were right. It's painless. It's good."

Part remake and part sequel, this version of Jack Finney's sci-fi/horror novel is creepy and unsettling. Finney denied that his book was a metaphor for communism, but not being able to tell if the person next you "one of us" or not is truly frightening and this movie expertly exploits that fear.

Sutherland plays a bland city food inspector who stumbles upon strange happenings. As the story unfolds, he and his colleagues think that the humans in their city are being replaced, but by what they do not know. When the truth is finally discovered, the groups finds out that they may be too late to do anything as they are quickly becoming outnumbered.

Kauffman effectively fills the film with a claustrophobic atmoshere of paranoia and fear that infects the viewer. We feel the walls quickly closing in on our small group of heroes. There seems to be a tacit battle between surrender and the indomitable will of the human spirit, but the human spirit seems to have the odds stacked against it.

Finney's story is a popular one in that it has been made and re-made four times on the big screen with the original version in 1956, the Kauffman version, a spin-off tale by Abel Ferrara in 1997, and the latest incarnation, Invasion, in 2007 starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. Kauffman's version, in my opinion, is the most effective of all the efforts. If you're in the mood to be creeped out, it would be hard to do better than this movie.