The whole alien-spawned doppelganger motif has been done a number of times. Robert Heinlein’s brilliant novel “The Puppet Masters” was made into a decent movie, and Jack Finney’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” has been cinematically interpreted at least times officially that I’m aware of: There is the original from the 50s, full of its McCarthy paranoia; the turn-your-blood-to-ice 70s rendition with Donald Sutherland and Leonard Nimoy; Abel Ferrara’s interesting interpretation in the 90s, dubbed simply “Body Snatchers”; and most recently as “Invasion”, a confused muddle that even Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman were unable to salvage. It wasn’t complete ass, but it was pretty bad. Anyway, while INVASION OF THE POD PEOPLE doesn’t achieve the blood-curdling cold boil of the 70s version nor horrorific intensity of Ferrara’s vision, but it nonetheless stands as one of the more entertaining variants of this kind of story. Among all the films listed, Finney adaptations and Heinlein-gone-silver-screen, as well, INVASION OF THE POD PEOPLE lands in the top three, I think. It develops an edge of paranoia – I can’t compare it to the paranoiac original, that being the one Finney adaptation I’ve not seen – and actually delivers some characters one can give a shit about. And, as I’ve mentioned before, The Asylum likes to add its own tweak to the ideas it uses, and the plant thing – you’ll see what I mean – employed in POD PEOPLE is pretty weird and therefore welcome, since this is sci-fi/horror.
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