Mar 5, 2020
Sean and Cody’s tickets back from San Francisco somehow don’t get punched and they’re forced to settle down for another tour of the city by the bay as they discuss and review the 1978 science fiction horror thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the first (and probably best) remake of the classic 1956 film. Directed by Philip Kaufman, the film features Donald Sutherland as a dauntless health inspector, Brooke Adams as his beautiful but badly-matched moll, Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright as husband and wife mud bath entrepreneurs, and Leonard Nimoy as a self-absorbed pop psychologist and possible alien pod person. After a bunch of strange flowers appear all over the city, San Franciscans start freaking out thinking their neighbors have been replaced with clones. Depending on your point of view, the film could be read as an allegory for Communism, climate change, invasive species, lead pollution, or possibly all of them.
How would the human race react to an invasion by alien plants? How do they reproduce? What does it mean that both L.A. and San Francisco have been destroyed so often by environmental disasters in fiction? How do you keep your house clean if you run a mud bath parlor as your business? Why did San Francisco become such a gay mecca? What does rat poo really look like? Can any real human being less wealthy than Mark Zuckerberg actually afford to live in San Francisco? What’s that weird thing on Nimoy’s hand? These questions and many more will be answered in this pod-tastic episode of Green Screen.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077745/
Invasion of the Body Snatchers on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-1978/
Next Movie: How Green Was My Valley (1941)