What’s it about?
After being retired from command for several years, Admiral Kirk returns to take control of the bridge of the Enterprise, displacing young Captain Decker. The occasion of Kirk’s return is the appearance of a powerful alien ship heading straight for Earth and destroying everything in its path. But dealing with the threat means getting the old team back together -- especially Dr McCoy and Spock, both of whom have deactivated from Starfleet in the years since Kirk’s last tour.
Once the gang is all in place, the Enterprise approaches the alien ship and narrowly survives the first encounter by correctly identifying and replying to a hail. They then proceed inside the enormous cloud of accreted gas and laser-light shows that engulfs the alien ship, and slowly approach the center. When one of the Enterprise’s crewmen is kidnapped by the alien and then returned as an exact mechanical duplicate, they begin to learn some of the intentions of the alien. But even though the robot mouthpiece allows communication, the safety of Earth is not assured.
Is it any good?
I will admit that for many years I subscribed to the popular evens/odds theory of STAR TREK movies. Even-numbered movies were supposed to be good, while odd-numbered movies were supposed to be bad. As the first in the series, STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE was an odd-numbered movie, so the conventional wisdom held that it wasn’t all that good.
It’s been a long time since I really believed in that old theory though. The first crack was a sneaking suspicion that STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK might actually be better than STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME. Later, I found myself very much enjoying the ninth installment, STAR TREK: INSURRECTION, while being pretty disappointed with the tenth, STAR TREK: NEMESIS. It’s obviously a lot to ask that a silly rule apply across a movie series with eleven installments and counting -- but I still hear references to it to this day among fans of the movies.
In any event, I haven’t seen STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE since the days when I really did believe in that evens/odds theory. I’m sure the slowness of the movie helped vindicate it for me at the time. The plot doesn’t really get going until about an hour into the movie, and even then there are still a lot of deliberately paced interludes of impressive (but very lengthy) effects shots. It’s a slow movie -- there’s no doubt about it -- and the STAR TREK of this movie isn’t quite the same as either the original series that came before, or the other movies and television shows that came after.
Watching this movie again, I was struck by the number of things that were changed or improved or updated from the show. There was a new Enterprise, new uniforms, new music, new Klingons, new special effects for transporters and photon torpedoes, and a new Earth-centric approach to storylines. At the beginning of the movie, there’s even a new haircut for Spock. A lot of the slow pace of the early parts of the movie can probably be attributed to the need to introduce all this new stuff. It had been a decade since the original series went off the air, so I suppose the producers felt that the fans deserved a good long look at the Enterprise in spacedock. And then another. And another. And one last one just to make sure.
The tone of the movie is fairly serious as well. It has neither the cheesy unintentional camp of the original series, or the playful intentional camp of the later movies. Kirk is a pretty interesting character -- it’s clear that he’s muscled his way into the command of the Enterprise, and Captain Decker is none too pleased to find himself demoted. Even though the crew feel more comfortable with Kirk at the helm, it’s easy to agree with Decker’s assessment that Kirk is simply using the crisis as an excuse to get back in the captain’s chair of his old starship -- and it does seem quite likely that it won’t be so easy to get him back out again.
The story (once it kicks into gear) is pretty exciting too. The alien comes from a machine planet and is looking for its “creator” on Earth. It initially wants to establish contact with the Enterprise itself, believing the human crew is an infestation of destructive parasites. When it eventually kills a prominent crew member and replaces her with an android copy to serve as a communication interface with the humans, it’s a genuinely shocking moment. The android -- being an exact mechanical copy of the dead crew member -- retains memories of those onboard the Enterprise, which makes for some interesting relations and tensions.
The special effects are very good as well. Extremely good, in fact, considering that the movie was released in 1979. They aren't especially ground-breaking or even original in any way, but they are all very good. If FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966) and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) felt like movies ahead of their times, then STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE feels just about exactly right for its times. Science-fiction cinema at the end of the 1970s included such flicks as LOGAN’S RUN (1976), STAR WARS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), SUPERMAN and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (1978), and ALIEN and THE BLACK HOLE (1979). Outer space adventures and sci-fi spectacles were becoming fairly common, and STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE fits right in with all those other movies.
I ended up really enjoying this movie -- much more than I thought I would. The slow pace actually adds to the epic feel of it all. Any movie that’s almost two and a half hours long is something that is endured as much as it is enjoyed, so it can't help but feel important. It’s possibly not even going too far to say that STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE captures some of the grandeur of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic. (Well, maybe that is going too far. But it’s close anyway!) I think that grandeur is important here, since otherwise it might start to feel too much like an extended episode of the old series. After all, unlike the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA movie, this isn’t an origin story. Instead, it’s more of a late elegy for an old television show long past its heyday, and it could have very easily come off as irrelevant or unnecessary -- just another reunion show that’s good for a bit of amusement and not much else.
But everything in STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE works against that feeling. Everything is upgraded from the original series. The Klingons are barely even in the movie at all, for instance, but their make-up and spaceships are vastly improved from their 1960s incarnations. The seeds of the Klingon language were planted here as well, but they wouldn’t be fully developed until later movies. But attention has been paid to every detail and nothing is thoughtlessly retained the way it was simply because the fans would recognize it that way.
I like this intermediary iteration of STAR TREK a lot. It has epic scope and sweep and a high level of detail and polish, but it’s not saddled by decades of mythology. In fact, there’s a sense of exciting new possibilities watching this movie. There are tantalizing glimpses at Vulcan lore and Klingon culture, but nothing that locks down a single future direction for the series. It’s more like STAR TREK has been taken down from the art gallery where it hung for fifteen years, cleaned, restored, and fitted in a new frame -- and now we can see much more clearly some of the previously obscured details and corners. The movie doesn’t reinvent STAR TREK, but it clarifies and focuses it.
Before I go, I should certainly say a word about Robert Wise, the director. He got his start with Val Lewton’s horror unit at RKO in the 1940s, directing CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE and THE BODYSNATCHER -- two of the better movies in the bunch. He later went on to direct musical classics like WEST SIDE STORY and THE SOUND OF MUSIC, but he returned periodically to weirder fare. In addition to STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, he also directed THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951) and THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1971). Three sci-fi movies out of an entire career doesn’t make Robert Wise a “sci-fi director” (whatever that might mean), but it certainly seems he’s sympathetic to the genre.
Showing posts with label bodysnatcher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bodysnatcher. Show all posts
Monday, February 1, 2010
Thursday, August 6, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1972: HORROR EXPRESS
What’s it about?
Archaeologist Christopher Lee returns from an expedition to Manchuria via the Transsiberian Express, carrying back the frozen body of a prehistoric ape-man. Almost immediately, the crate containing the body raises an extraordinary amount of interest in just about everybody who comes across it: a thief, a mad monk, a rival scientist played by Peter Cushing, government officials, an inventor, a porter on the train, and probably many more I’m forgetting. When several of these people turn up dead with their eyes turned completely white, Lee and the authorities draw the logical conclusion that the two million year old corpse is supernaturally murdering people.
As Lee and Cushing try to track down the missing murderous fossilized ape-man, it slowly becomes apparent that the culprit is really something quite different. But by this time the authorities have called in blood-and-guts czarist army officer Telly Savalas to chew gum and break heads (and gum hasn’t been invented yet). Dimly lit fight scenes, glowing red eyes, and a big explosion soon follow.
Is it any good?
I’m not actually going to talk about this movie much at all. It’s a low budget sci-fi horror flick that has a couple of neat ideas but is full of a lot of stupidity as well. Peter Cushing has a lighter role, which is kind of interesting, but the charms of Christopher Lee continue to elude me, and I have absolutely no idea what Telly Savalas thought he was doing. The plot is cluttered with way too many characters, the special effects are only decent, and the music is pretty good. In short, it’s just like any other middling 1970's sci-fi movie. If Tom wants to mount a passionate defense of its merits, I’ll let him take care of that part since I don’t think it’s really anything special.
But what I do want to write about are public domain movies. I’ve seen more than my share of these and I’ve already even written about a couple -- namely THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). HORROR EXPRESS is another public domain movie, which means that practically anybody can make and sell unauthorized copies of it. (Exactly what “public domain” means in this context can be pretty complicated, since movies have all kinds of rights that can be bought and sold. It’s possible, for instance, for broadcast television rights to lapse while home video rights remain in effect. And movies that are derivative works of books or plays are protected in special ways that don’t apply to original works. I don’t pretend to understand all or even most of this, but suffice to say that sometimes movies fall into a definition of “public domain” that allows them to be sold on tape or DVD without clearing copyright.)
There seem to be several different reasons why movies end up in the public domain. Sometimes it’s a clerical error or oversight in transferring ownership. Sometimes a legal issue prevents the copyright from being renewed. In the case of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it happened because the movie was erroneously distributed without a copyright notice in its first theatrical run. (I don’t think that would be a problem anymore since the reforms of the Berne Convention.) And in the case of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, the film makers didn’t believe the movie would be worth anything after its initial run so they never bothered to file for a copyright in the first place.
Most movies in the public domain are quick-and-cheap jobs, so I suspect that the last reason is (or at least was) a pretty common one. But in addition to a handful that have gained cult fame over the years -- like the two mentioned above, the horror curiosity CARNIVAL OF SOULS, and Ed Wood’s so-bad-they’re-good flicks -- there are others that must have always had commercial value and I am sure weren’t intentionally abandoned. There’s the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope vehicle THE ROAD TO BALI, Fritz Lang’s noir SCARLET STREET, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL, cartoon classics like GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, John Wayne’s MCCLINTOCK!, Spencer Tracy’s FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND, and (perhaps the most famous of all) the screwball classic HIS GIRL FRIDAY.
A lot of folks would probably agree that the term of copyright protection is unnecessarily lengthy. After all, there are warehouses full of books, movies, and sound recordings from the 1930s and 1940s that have been out of print for decades but that it’s still technically a crime to copy. The demand for these materials isn’t high enough for the copyright owners to justify releasing them and nobody else is allowed to publish them, so lots of potentially fascinating things go on languishing in vaults. Huge chunks of genres -- like, say, early musicals or westerns or slapstick comedies -- are inaccessible because they don’t have famous names that generate interest today.
It’s easy to imagine a world where copyright protection lasts only for 25 or 50 years, so that all this material could be distributed by others who don’t need to justify high profit margins. There already exist bargain bin distributors who package public domain movies into cheap DVD packs -- sometimes selling as many as 50 movies for the price of a single “official” release. (I’ve bought four such discount packs myself, racking up 200 movies at an average cost of fifty cents each.) And with online delivery improving all the time, movies will only become cheaper to distribute.
On the other hand, these existing public domain movies are a pretty good warning of why losing copyright protection might not be such a good thing. There have been dozens of home releases of famous public domain movies. I’ve seen two different versions each of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and HORROR EXPRESS, and all of them were awful in terms of quality. Since anybody can sell cheap transfers from salvaged film stock or old videotapes, unscrupulous distributors tend to flood the market with inferior product. There are presumably good versions of these movies out there somewhere, but a quick search on Amazon revealed a lot of confusing options for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and a lot of disappointment and contradictions in the comments. (There was even one “special edition” two-disc release that apparently consisted of nothing more than the movie needlessly cut in half on two different discs.) Rent-by-mail services like Netflix don’t usually discriminate between different releases of a movie either, so it can even sometimes be impossible to get a good version even if you know what to look for.
It’s no big deal when HORROR EXPRESS looks and sounds terrible -- though I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if any care at all had been taken with the presentation. A bad version of something like CARNIVAL OF SOULS is more annoying, but there’s a certain feeling of resignation that comes with watching cult classics, as though digging around in the trash to find them is part of the experience. But imagine now a world where the average consumer is likely to be duped into buying an edited, washed-out, badly synched DVD of CASABLANCA or CITIZEN KANE that was lifted off a television broadcast or a worn-out VHS cassette. Or a world where a glut of bargain bin offerings of RIO BRAVO or THE FLY or A SHOT IN THE DARK convinces a studio executive that it’s not worthwhile to spend money on restoration and an official release. Why invest all those resources if the final product is just going to be undercut by a lot of inferior versions anyway?
I don’t really think I know enough to say exactly how I think things should work. There are clearly pitfalls in either direction. I do think, however, that copyright should be handled differently for movies and sound recordings than it is for books. If you buy a cheap version of a classic novel, that just means the pages will turn yellow and the binding will fall apart in a few years. But the experience of reading the story itself and whatever your imagination conjures up won’t really be changed by that (unless you are a very easily distracted reader). Typos in the text or mistakes in layout are a bigger problem, but it’s still comparatively easy and cheap to get the text of a book in a presentable state.
Recordings, on the other hand, fall prey to all kinds of problems that take real time and money to fix. If you rip a page in the book you’re copying from, that doesn’t mean that the copy will have a tear in it as well. But if you rip or wrinkle a piece of film or tape, then any copies you make thereafter are going to be compromised. In other words, there seems to be a compelling public interest to provide financial incentives for folks who take good care of movies. In a world of short term copyrights, I’m sure that some organization would be formed to do just that -- there are enough cinephiles to support a quality distributor even if cheap alternatives are also available. But it’s hard for me to decide if this would allow for improvements over what we have right now, or if things would be far, far worse.
Archaeologist Christopher Lee returns from an expedition to Manchuria via the Transsiberian Express, carrying back the frozen body of a prehistoric ape-man. Almost immediately, the crate containing the body raises an extraordinary amount of interest in just about everybody who comes across it: a thief, a mad monk, a rival scientist played by Peter Cushing, government officials, an inventor, a porter on the train, and probably many more I’m forgetting. When several of these people turn up dead with their eyes turned completely white, Lee and the authorities draw the logical conclusion that the two million year old corpse is supernaturally murdering people.
As Lee and Cushing try to track down the missing murderous fossilized ape-man, it slowly becomes apparent that the culprit is really something quite different. But by this time the authorities have called in blood-and-guts czarist army officer Telly Savalas to chew gum and break heads (and gum hasn’t been invented yet). Dimly lit fight scenes, glowing red eyes, and a big explosion soon follow.
Is it any good?
I’m not actually going to talk about this movie much at all. It’s a low budget sci-fi horror flick that has a couple of neat ideas but is full of a lot of stupidity as well. Peter Cushing has a lighter role, which is kind of interesting, but the charms of Christopher Lee continue to elude me, and I have absolutely no idea what Telly Savalas thought he was doing. The plot is cluttered with way too many characters, the special effects are only decent, and the music is pretty good. In short, it’s just like any other middling 1970's sci-fi movie. If Tom wants to mount a passionate defense of its merits, I’ll let him take care of that part since I don’t think it’s really anything special.
But what I do want to write about are public domain movies. I’ve seen more than my share of these and I’ve already even written about a couple -- namely THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). HORROR EXPRESS is another public domain movie, which means that practically anybody can make and sell unauthorized copies of it. (Exactly what “public domain” means in this context can be pretty complicated, since movies have all kinds of rights that can be bought and sold. It’s possible, for instance, for broadcast television rights to lapse while home video rights remain in effect. And movies that are derivative works of books or plays are protected in special ways that don’t apply to original works. I don’t pretend to understand all or even most of this, but suffice to say that sometimes movies fall into a definition of “public domain” that allows them to be sold on tape or DVD without clearing copyright.)
There seem to be several different reasons why movies end up in the public domain. Sometimes it’s a clerical error or oversight in transferring ownership. Sometimes a legal issue prevents the copyright from being renewed. In the case of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it happened because the movie was erroneously distributed without a copyright notice in its first theatrical run. (I don’t think that would be a problem anymore since the reforms of the Berne Convention.) And in the case of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, the film makers didn’t believe the movie would be worth anything after its initial run so they never bothered to file for a copyright in the first place.
Most movies in the public domain are quick-and-cheap jobs, so I suspect that the last reason is (or at least was) a pretty common one. But in addition to a handful that have gained cult fame over the years -- like the two mentioned above, the horror curiosity CARNIVAL OF SOULS, and Ed Wood’s so-bad-they’re-good flicks -- there are others that must have always had commercial value and I am sure weren’t intentionally abandoned. There’s the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope vehicle THE ROAD TO BALI, Fritz Lang’s noir SCARLET STREET, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL, cartoon classics like GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, John Wayne’s MCCLINTOCK!, Spencer Tracy’s FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND, and (perhaps the most famous of all) the screwball classic HIS GIRL FRIDAY.
A lot of folks would probably agree that the term of copyright protection is unnecessarily lengthy. After all, there are warehouses full of books, movies, and sound recordings from the 1930s and 1940s that have been out of print for decades but that it’s still technically a crime to copy. The demand for these materials isn’t high enough for the copyright owners to justify releasing them and nobody else is allowed to publish them, so lots of potentially fascinating things go on languishing in vaults. Huge chunks of genres -- like, say, early musicals or westerns or slapstick comedies -- are inaccessible because they don’t have famous names that generate interest today.
It’s easy to imagine a world where copyright protection lasts only for 25 or 50 years, so that all this material could be distributed by others who don’t need to justify high profit margins. There already exist bargain bin distributors who package public domain movies into cheap DVD packs -- sometimes selling as many as 50 movies for the price of a single “official” release. (I’ve bought four such discount packs myself, racking up 200 movies at an average cost of fifty cents each.) And with online delivery improving all the time, movies will only become cheaper to distribute.
On the other hand, these existing public domain movies are a pretty good warning of why losing copyright protection might not be such a good thing. There have been dozens of home releases of famous public domain movies. I’ve seen two different versions each of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and HORROR EXPRESS, and all of them were awful in terms of quality. Since anybody can sell cheap transfers from salvaged film stock or old videotapes, unscrupulous distributors tend to flood the market with inferior product. There are presumably good versions of these movies out there somewhere, but a quick search on Amazon revealed a lot of confusing options for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and a lot of disappointment and contradictions in the comments. (There was even one “special edition” two-disc release that apparently consisted of nothing more than the movie needlessly cut in half on two different discs.) Rent-by-mail services like Netflix don’t usually discriminate between different releases of a movie either, so it can even sometimes be impossible to get a good version even if you know what to look for.
It’s no big deal when HORROR EXPRESS looks and sounds terrible -- though I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if any care at all had been taken with the presentation. A bad version of something like CARNIVAL OF SOULS is more annoying, but there’s a certain feeling of resignation that comes with watching cult classics, as though digging around in the trash to find them is part of the experience. But imagine now a world where the average consumer is likely to be duped into buying an edited, washed-out, badly synched DVD of CASABLANCA or CITIZEN KANE that was lifted off a television broadcast or a worn-out VHS cassette. Or a world where a glut of bargain bin offerings of RIO BRAVO or THE FLY or A SHOT IN THE DARK convinces a studio executive that it’s not worthwhile to spend money on restoration and an official release. Why invest all those resources if the final product is just going to be undercut by a lot of inferior versions anyway?
I don’t really think I know enough to say exactly how I think things should work. There are clearly pitfalls in either direction. I do think, however, that copyright should be handled differently for movies and sound recordings than it is for books. If you buy a cheap version of a classic novel, that just means the pages will turn yellow and the binding will fall apart in a few years. But the experience of reading the story itself and whatever your imagination conjures up won’t really be changed by that (unless you are a very easily distracted reader). Typos in the text or mistakes in layout are a bigger problem, but it’s still comparatively easy and cheap to get the text of a book in a presentable state.
Recordings, on the other hand, fall prey to all kinds of problems that take real time and money to fix. If you rip a page in the book you’re copying from, that doesn’t mean that the copy will have a tear in it as well. But if you rip or wrinkle a piece of film or tape, then any copies you make thereafter are going to be compromised. In other words, there seems to be a compelling public interest to provide financial incentives for folks who take good care of movies. In a world of short term copyrights, I’m sure that some organization would be formed to do just that -- there are enough cinephiles to support a quality distributor even if cheap alternatives are also available. But it’s hard for me to decide if this would allow for improvements over what we have right now, or if things would be far, far worse.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1958: I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE
What’s it about?
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.
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.
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