MODERN HORROR DVDS
THE INVASION
Warner Home Video
Movie: 3.0; Disc: 3.5Amazingly, Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers has now been filmed four times ( Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956]; Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1978]; The Body Snatchers [1993] and The Invasion [2007]), with the Don Siegel original being the true classic of the bunch. More critics trashed the latest doctored version, directed by newcomer Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose version was considered too tame for wide spread commercial appeal. The film sat on the shelf for two years.
Rumors persist that the Wachowski brothers (of Matrix fame) reshot and recut the film's ending, making it more explosive. If they did reshoot, the film is worse off because of it, with Dr. Bennell (Nicole Kidman) driving her speeding car, covered head-to-tail with "snatchers," down the highway to shake off the alien hive. Shortly thereafter her car is engulfed in flames, yet Bennell still drives her car into a parking garage to race to the elevator to meet a rescuing helicopter on the landing pad on top of the building. Very dramatic and explosive, flames shooting everywhere, yet very pedestrian by-the-numbers action adventure cinema 101. I would love to see Hirshbiegel's original cut and can almost guarantee, while it might be less commercial, that it would be more artistic and satisfying.
The basic premise of all four movies revolves around invasion from space via an alien hive race that plans to take over the human race by turning human beings into aliens, creatures who look the same but no longer feel any emotion. Alien survival no longer involves the good of the individual but the good of the hive society. And the change from human to alien always occurs when people fall asleep. The first three movie versions involved alien pods that mimicked their human counterparts, the human shell destroyed once the alien copy was complete. In The Invasion pods are forgotten, as the infected humans vomit the alien virus into the mouths of intended victims, the virus ultimately replacing the human identity with the alien one during sleep.
Each movie version becomes a metaphor of fear for its time. The original Don Siegel version, occurring in Utopian Santa Mira, small town America, involves the aliens as metaphor for Communism, the so-called Red Threat, where human emotion is erased and the prospering community means more than the will of the individual. By 1978 director Philip Kaufman brought the alien invasion to the big city, San Francisco, where individual human identity was hard to maintain, among such urban sprawl. Kaufman exposed countercultures and New Age cults as one means of maintaining a unique human identity and his film captured perfectly the terror of remaining human in such an impersonal world. The Body Snatchers , director Abe Ferrara's attempt to rethink the story on an American military base, focused on the paranoia of the military, with its own hive personality taking over and eliminating the will of the individual. Now, in 2007, we confront the worldwide fear of pandemic viral invasion--Avian (Bird) Flu, SARS, AIDS, drug resistant viruses, etc. A space shuttle crashes to Earth carrying a virus from space that transforms human beings, during sleep, into this collective alien consciousness. The virus is spread via the exchange of bodily fluids from one infected human to an uninfected one, via spitting and vomiting into their mouths. A few humans are immune from the infection and the aliens see such people as the greatest threat of all. Truly, Jack Finney's story can be interpreted by each subsequent generation and becomes the dominant metaphor of fear for each new generation of viewers.
Inferior to the Siegel and Kaufman version, The Invasion becomes too similar to the finest moments of the original two cinematic interpretations, but features inferior characterizations. Nicole Kidman as the psychiatrist Dr. Bennell is not cleverly drawn and her sidekick Ben Driscoll (a pre-Bond Daniel Craig at his most bland) almost becomes invisible. Veronica Cartwright, the only holdover from the 1978 version, becomes one of the more interesting characters who contacts Dr. Bennell to complain that her husband is not her husband, and she literally has the task of convincing her doctor that some sort of invasion is at hand. Bennell's "ex" takes her son away for the weekend, and of course the ex-husband is infected and attempts to infect the son (who is immune, even though the viewer watches as his skin becomes scaly as he sleeps, the obvious precursor to the transformation). However when he awakens he remains human. When mother comes to fetch her child she is attacked by the alien hive and infected when her own husband holds her down and spits into her throat, prompting Bennell to invade drug stores for any type of medication that will keep her awake. Walking among the aliens, she must remain emotionless and wide-eyed as she attempts to pass unnoticed among the infected ones. Perhaps the film's best sequences occurs on a train where Bennell comes across other humans who are also pretending to be aliens, but while Bennell escapes by running down the underground caverns to safety, the aliens overrun the others (one woman can't fake it any longer and screams) and they projectile vomit all over the train car to infect the defenseless humans. The sequence becomes horrifying and visually arresting.
Another sequence shines as well. In all these versions we have the sequence where Bennell is confronted by a group of aliens who make their pitch that life without worry and emotion would be so much better. Why fight it, give in and join us in a better life. However, as the virus spreads, wars are ended, peace accords signed and the hostilities of humanity seem to lessen and almost disappear. When the now alien Driscoll and his cronies make the pitch to Bennell to join them, for once the aliens have made their case well, that human beings are violent, war-mongering savages and the alien virus produces a superior species. However, when Bennell asks about her immune son, the tribe turns things around stating, matter of factly, that such immune individuals pose the largest threat to the alien consciousness and must be eliminated. It is only this final coda that turns the tide forcing the audience to see the aliens as monstrous, with their speech about eliminating an innocent little boy a horrible thought. But such sloppy script manipulation only attests to the film's flaws. Were it to continue with making its case that the alien society would be superior to our own, that would have produced a thought provoking and very cerebral movie. But The Invasion instead opts for car chases, explosions, shooting out kneecaps and a happy ending that seems too quick, too easy and too pat.
Unfortunately, while well photographed (in actual Washington and Baltimore locations... along with the LA studio lot) with good action sequences and major star power, The Invasion becomes only a shadow of the first two versions of Jack Finney's source novel. The alien thesis of theirs being the better world is too quickly truncated, and the almost-too-quick defeating of the virus seems almost as hokey as the ending of The War of the Worlds . At least God does not save us here! In spite of these flaws, The Invasion is a movie best judged by specific sequences and not by the movie as a whole. Sometimes even the most mediocre movie features a glimmer of insight and promise.NEAR DARK
Anchor Bay Entertainment
Movie: 3.0; Disc: 4.0After Hammer and Universal created the legendary cinematic vampire mythos, it took the influence of Euro Horror in the 1960s through the 1980s to subvert and reinvent such mythology by injecting a healthy diet of perverted sexuality, deemphasizing the religious significance and once again making vampirism a disease, both of the body and of the spirit. By the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood was ready to revisit vampirism, not by exploring the past, but by forging ahead.
Kathryn Bigelow's low-budget 1987 release, Near Dark , can justly lay claim for being the most innovative vampire movie of the modern era, a movie that is dependent upon its outstanding ensemble cast of fine actors, three of which appeared together in Aliens (Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein) a year earlier. If cinehistory were just, Lance Henriksen would have become the iconic horror actor of his generation, pushing aside franchise stunt men (all those who put on the hockey mask to play Jason or Robert Englund's kiss-your-ass-you're-so-lucky take on Freddy Krueger), and his performance as the Southern Confederate soldier surviving into modern times demonstrates exactly why. With his sharp aquiline facial features, his resounding deep bass voice and his intensity of performance getting under the skin of every character he undertakes, Henriksen had the talent, the passion and the dedication to become the modern-era Karloff, Lugosi, Cushing, Lee or Price. A shame that never worked out. Bill Paxton, playing the mean-spirited but good-looking cowboy, the man who knows how to use his spurs in a good bar fight, has the best lines to deliver, of course, all done in the modern era comic sense of "It's finger-licking good" after he feasts on human flesh and blood. Even pretty vampire Jenny Wright and hero Adrian Pasdar rise to the occasion by committing performances worthy of attention in any film genre.
Bigelow casts her entire film in nighttime sequences, or at most lights her environment in fading twilight or the cracking of dawn's early light. Her vampires are a blood cult family who kill for food but who seem to enjoy the kill as demonstration of their strength, their element of surprise and the true pleasure of bloodlust. Pasdar's Caleb, smitten with slutty, blonde beer-swilling Jenny Wright's Mae character, allows her to nibble on his neck, rendering him a member of the undead almost immediately. Vampirism as cast by Bigelow is akin to drug addiction, but the twist is the urge to kill, to feed, must overcome any previously learned system of morals. Caleb is given one week to make a kill, and for all that time all he can bring himself do is drain Mae's vein in her arm after she kills her victim. She warns him as he slurps up her lifeforce not to drink too much, or the loss of blood would kill her. Even when his life is on the line, he cannot kill and never does. He buys time by saving the cult from sudden death, but he ultimately takes the cure via blood transfusion, something Mae also does at the end after the cult has been destroyed (in perhaps a too splashy special effects sequence that cheapens the subtlety of the overall production).
This two disc THX mastered set (talk about gorgeous print with a wonderful surround soundtrack) features a second disc of extras, including currently filmed documentaries with the majority of the cast and crew, one deleted scene, trailers, storyboards, poster and art gallery, behind-the-scenes stills, talent bio, etc. Near Dark never looked nor sounded this good, and the extras alone make purchasing this DVD set essential. Near Dark is one of the true modern horror film classics, and while it remains flawed and is limited by its low budget, its world-weary script and outstanding performances make it one of the more interesting horror movies produced within the past 30 years.