Meg Tilly, Gabrielle Anwar, Forest Whitaker

A teenage girl and her father discover alien clones are replacing humans on a remote U.S. military base in Alabama.

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37% liked it

10,543 ratings

Critics

68% liked it

25 critics

R, 87 min.

Directed by: Abel Ferrara

Release Date: January 1, 1993

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DVD Release Date: August 21, 2001

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Stats: 315 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (315)


  • September 30, 2009
    I liked it. It?s not as good as the 2 before it but Abel Ferrara still does well! The little kid getting kicked out the chopper is always fun!
  • July 5, 2009
    I threw this on expecting shitty, disposable horror, something to serve as background noise while I thought about my life or whatever. To my surprise I actually found myself very involved - this is a sleek, beautifully filmed thriller that obviously earned a poor reputation follo...( read more)wing in the footsteps of its (overrated) predecessor. By no means is it perfect, especially when Abel Ferrara found himself confronted by a low budget and chose not to work around his problems, but through him. This leads to some laughably bad special effects issues, especially one spoilerrific occasion toward the very end of the film. A potentially horrifying final note instead becomes risible. He mostly knows how to work with his shortcomings but there are times when less could well have been more.

    The performances are a mixed bag. Meg Tilly, in a minimal role, manages to be surprisingly effective, though I wonder about that final monologue of hers. Her delivery is interesting; I don't know if it was an instance of the actress trying to sound haunting and profound and failing, or a confused pseudo-human trying to do the same. No way to tell, I guess. Gabrielle Anwar is functional and it's amusing to see her so young, before the Sci-Fi channel kidnapped her and forced her to do 80 TV movies about fish demons. Her character is a bit sullen but it's easy to forget that every 17 year old, including yourself, once was. The dad and boyfriend are both lousy, and the six-year-old pretty much gives a six-year-old performance. Forest Whitaker, in a two-scene cameo, is amusingly overdone. I couldn't imagine someone this hammy going on to win an Oscar fifteen years later (for a similarly overdone performance). Good news for Ben Foster, I suppose.

    Where Body Snatchers regains lost ground is some surprisingly effective visual work. Abel Ferrara, given a project that doubtlessly amounted to little more than cheap popcorn fare, instead opted to turn it into something cinematographically striking. His command of lighting and mise-en-scene lend a certain menace to every scene, even the peaceful ones; characters are often framed off-center and night is hued with an offputting white light. Just as this environment feels alien to young Marti, so too does it look alien to a viewer. Shots that may have been throwaways for other directors - Meg Tilly throwing a suspicious garbage bag away, a kid's game in the woods, a network of tendrils crawling through the vent - suddenly become vivid and memorable. It's clear that Ferrara has a lot of respect for and knowledge of his craft.

    Anyway, this seems to be largely dismissed as trash horror, and that's a shame. It's not a gem of unparalleled quality or anything, but it dances with some interesting themes like ostracization and the feeling of being "transplanted," both in a human and supernatural sense. In only 87 minutes, Ferrara presents a complete (if not thin) narrative and a thematic structure, tied neatly together with some great aesthetic work and inventive scares. If you're looking for underseen 90s horror, or feel like compulsively watching all the Body Snatchers remakes, this is a great stop.
  • December 3, 2008
    Not as creepy as Kaufman's remake, but not as bad as some would tell you. Most men would probably fail the naked Gabrielle Anwar test.
  • December 19, 2007
    This remake is a lively update but fails to be anything more than an early, less intense version of 28 Days Later.
  • June 1, 2007
    Interesting remake/take on the "invasion of the Body Snatchers" theme. It seems Hollywood is required to remake this film every 10 to 15 years or so. Meg Tilly gives an outstanding performance. The rest of the cast is fun to watch.
  • October 30, 2009
    A brilliant horror film that is still frightening today. One of the best sci-fi horrors I've seen. It has some amazingly creepy scenes, and an underlying sense of dread throughout.
  • October 26, 2009
    I thought a Movie with Gabrielle Anwar and Forest Whitaker, nothing would go wrong. WELL I was WRONG!
  • October 20, 2009
    Abel Ferrara's sci-fi/horror update is an engrossing, creepy and refreshing take on somewhat hackneyed material - a remake of a remake of an adaptation of a novel. Setting an unsettling mood during the opening credits and never letting go, the film stars Gabrielle Anwar as Marti ...( read more)Malone, a typical teenage girl whose father (Terry Kinney) and stepmother (Meg Tilly) move her and her little stepbrother Andy (Reilly Murphy) out to a Southern military base; her dad works for the EPA and wants to investigate the water on the base. They're barely in the vicinity when things get weird: an army officer confronts Marti with a knife in a gas station bathroom and suggests that nobody is who they appear to be. Though General Platt (R. Lee Ermey) thinks nothing's wrong and just wants the EPA investigation done with, the medical doctor (Forest Whitaker) has...concerns. On base, Marti befriends the General's daughter (Christine Elise from TV's "ER") and falls for Tim (Billy Wirth), a handsome chopper pilot. Soon, it appears that, yes - alien pods are gradually changing people in order to create exact replicants. Can they be stopped? The novel by Jack Finney was originally adapted in 1954 by Don Siegel and again in 1978 by Philip Kaufman. Abel Ferrara is the reigning bad boy of independent cinema, the master of true grit ("King of New York," "Bad Lieutenant"). Working with what I imagine has to be his biggest budget yet, he's crafted a surprisingly intelligent and gripping thriller that looks great and doesn't insult the audience. Anwar does a respectable job as the heroine, Tilly is creepily effective as the stepmother (who was creepy even before she became "one of them"). The somewhat ingenious thing about this version is that by setting it on a military base, you can never be too sure who is an alien and who is merely conforming to a code of conduct - which is, I suspect, what Ferrara and his screenwriters (5 including Larry Cohen, Stuart Gordon and Nicholas St. John) had in mind. If we wish the resolution were a bit more clever - that it had just a few more brain cells and a few less explosions - the overall results are still way more effective than we could've anticipated.
  • September 16, 2009
    The worst of the remakes. Tried to settle a convinving armageddon and failed. Boring at times also. Whitaker, get out of the film!

    39/100
  • August 30, 2009
    Rewatched this last night, hence the re-review. Sadly it's not as good as my fragile mind remembers, it's a slow burner before we get any pod people action and then..... well that's about it really. Some good tense scenes to start off with but not much else really, it's worth a w...( read more)atch if you've seen either the original or Kidman's 'Invasion' but otherwise nothing exciting.

Critic Reviews


May 8, 2006
Nick Schager, Lessons of Darkness

Offers a few stunning moments of paranoia-laced terror. full review

View more Body Snatchers reviews at RottenTomatoes.com

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Body Snatchers Trivia


  • 2007's "The Invasion", starring Nicole Kidman, is yet another remake of the 1956 film "Invasion of The Body Snatchers". With the release of this film, how many total remakes are there?  Answer »
  • Nicole Kidman's latest film, "The Invasion," is a re-make of the classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Including the latest incarnation, how many times has this film been RE-MADE?  Answer »
  • Nicole Kidman's latest movie "The Invasion" is an up-to-date remake of which 1950s horror flick.  Answer »
  • What do the directors Don Siegel, Philip Kaufman, Abel Ferrara and Oliver Hirschbiegel have in common?  Answer »

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