Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) is worried. Her dentist boyfriend may look exactly the same as he did the day before, but he's now acting like a different person. And he's associating with new people who are acting just like him.
The notion that some strange force is changing the personalities of people around us is the kind of paranoid fantasy that can take root in almost any era. And for over half a century, it's been the premise of movies in which the culprits are alien beings who have arrived on Earth to take over the bodies of humans.
Four movies to date have been based on the 1940s novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney: Don Siegel's original film, ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers,'' in 1956, starring Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter; Philip Kaufman's 1978 movie with the same title, starring Donald Sutherland and Adams; Abel Ferrara's ''Body Snatchers'' from 1993, starring Gabrielle Anwar and Terry Kinney; and ''The Invasion,'' starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, which opened Friday in theaters.
Siegel's film, which came out in the midst of the Cold War, was allegorically rich. For 50 years, film fans have been debating whether the movie about ordinary people turning into emotionless automatons symbolized communism or McCarthyism, a form of extreme anti-communism.
Kaufman's ''Invasion,'' despite retaining the lurid, somewhat cheesy title of the original, is a superior sci-fi thriller that makes even raindrops, plants and electrical cords take on sinister life. It's out now in a Collector's Edition DVD (two discs, MGM Home Entertainment, $19.98, rated PG).
Viewed by Kaufman as a ''reimagining'' of Siegel's film rather than a remake, the director uses low-budget but inspired special effects to show how spores float from their doomed planet to another planet - Earth - and one particular city on it - San Francisco - and then take root on plants. From these plants grow pods that have the ability to clone humans, who then dispose of the original bodies.
While Kaufman provides the ''scientific'' basis of the alien invasion, his film also captures the feeling of change and displacement then taking place in San Francisco, a city that was seeing its vestiges of 1960s social, cultural and political experimentation replaced, or at least challenged, by a ''Me Decade'' ethos.
And as an essay included with the DVD also points out, the film's depiction of paranoia and conspiracy proved even more prescient when two horrifying events took place just before the movie was released: first the assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, then the mass suicide in Guyana of 900 former San Franciscans who were members of the Peoples Temple.
In Kaufman's film, Adams' Elizabeth Driscoll and Sutherland's Matthew Bennell are city Department of Health staffers who begin to suspect that something is wrong and attempt to discover the truth about what's going on.
As good as the acting is, it's Kaufman's chillingly effective use of sights and sounds that gives this ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers'' such eeriness. The dark interiors and street scenes, graphic depictions of pods bursting and blooming and new bodies forming, Denny Zeitlin's ominous score and special sound effects by Ben Burtt (who had just finished working on the original ''Star Wars'') make this one scary movie.
Kaufman's audio commentary on the DVD, as well as short documentaries examining the movie's special effects, sound effects and cinematography, provide fascinating information on the creation of the film.
There's also an excellent documentary titled ''Re-Visitors From Outer Space, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Pod'' that's filled with reminiscences and insights from Kaufman, Sutherland, Cartwright, screenwriter W.D. Richter, cinematographer Michael Chapman and producer Robert H. Solo.
