After leaving his bachelor party, a man has an encounter with a horrific alien on the road home. The alien imprisons him, assumes the man’s form, and is subsequently married to the man’s fiancee the next day. The new wife almost immediately notices the difference in her husband, but isn’t sure at first what to make of it. A year later, the situation comes to a crisis when the woman starts to worry both about her inability to get pregnant and her husband’s apparent penchant for killing animals. Following him one night, she discovers that he is reporting to an alien spaceship hidden on the outskirts of town.
The woman tries to convince others that her husband has been taken over by an alien being. At first afraid that others will think she’s crazy, she soon begins to realize the real danger is that others in town may also be aliens themselves -- including the police. Desperate to escape, she finds that all communication has been cut off with the outside world. After begging her doctor to investigate the site where the spaceship is hidden, she returns home and -- at her wits’ end -- confronts her husband with her suspicions.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
Somebody could probably take this premise and make a truly fantastic movie about the ways that people discover strange new truths about the people they marry. This is not that movie -- but it’s nevertheless a very interesting thriller with some neat sci-fi excitement and spookiness. But what really makes the movie interesting is how much of it is underplayed. There’s a generous helping of aliens and spaceships and ray guns, but there are also plenty of scenes where the husband merely appears to be irritable and secretive, and the wife uncertain and confused. Except for a brief moment when the husband vents his frustration with inhuman strength, it would be easy to believe that this was simply an ordinary young couple who were starting to feel the strain of married life.
Much like EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956), the alien invaders here have a sympathetic story to tell -- their women were all killed in a planetary cataclysm, and they need to find a way of mating with another planet’s women or else their race will die out. But also like that other movie, these alien bodysnatchers display moments of intense and off-handed cruelty -- as when the husband strangles the family dog, or when a cop casually executes a human who has learnt too much about his alien nature. The contrast makes for a great tension, especially since the actor who plays the husband is a pretty physically terrifying guy. He often looks on the verge of snapping, and it’s easy to understand why his wife is so afraid. The aliens also react differently to finding themselves in human bodies -- some are disgusted, others simply resigned, and others actually enjoy the experience. It probably wouldn’t take much to find some subtext about human reactions to marriage in all of that.
The final confrontation between alien and wife also reveals that the aliens are slowly becoming more human the longer they stay in their bodies. Unable to love or feel happiness at first, they begin to experience emotions by the end of the movie. So even as the humans begin to close in on the hidden spaceship, there are more and more reasons to be sympathetic towards the invaders. After all, the alien version of the husband is the one that we’ve known for almost the entire length of the movie. If the “real” husband is brought back, then he would be more of a stranger than the alien (at least to the audience). All in all, this is a pretty terrific movie and one that I would definitely recommend. The plot is obviously pretty similar to that of many other bodysnatcher movies, but the movie is just so compelling and intense that the familiar situation doesn’t seem trite or worn at all.
This movie sounds fantastic.
ReplyDeleteI was pretty impressed by it!
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