The only manga I’ve ever read was an adaptation of the 2004 sci-fi novel All You Need Is Kill, and that’s because it was a gift. A family member who lives his life much deeper in the anime trenches bought it for me as a Christmas present after the novel was also adapted into the 2014 Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow (and famously retitled a second time under its tagline “Live, Die, Repeat” once it hit DVD). When I heard that there’s a new, Japanese adaptation of the same source text, then, my assumption was that someone had set out to illustrate a more faithful version of either the manga or the original semi-illustrated novel, undoing all of Hollywood’s work to center an action hero that Tom Cruise could credibly play instead of the novel’s heroine (sidelined as a supporting role in the live-action version, played by Emily Blunt). That’s not the case at all. The new version of All You Need is Kill doesn’t simply set the comic book illustrations of its source novel in motion; it redesigns them, introduces an overwhelming wealth of color to a world that was once entirely black & white, and once again makes major changes to the two main characters’ personae & dynamics. It’s less of a manga-faithful rebuke of Edge of Tomorrow than it is a fellow attempt at rogue reinterpretation, this time marketed to the cloistered nerds who actually read manga instead of the wider world of people who’ve heard of Tom Cruise.
That’s not to say that the new anime version of All You Need Is Kill is entirely novel in its reinterpretation. Edge of Tomorrow is not the only pre-existing work it evokes. It plays with the oil-slick color palette of Annihilation, echoes the YA mech-suit therapy sessions of Neon Genesis Evangelion, recalls the vintage sketchbook psychedelia of Mind Game, and touches on some parallel thinking with last year’s sci-fi adaptation Mickey 17. What I mean to say is that it pulls from so many varied sources that it eventually becomes its own thing, a stylish genre remix of its own unique flavor — however mild. For every inspired choice it makes (like redesigning its time-looping monster spawn to look like killer houseplants instead of meatballs with teeth), it also defaults to disappointingly basic choices elsewhere. It’s especially disappointing that the film ages down its two leads from near-future adult supersoldiers to near-future awkward teens. I don’t personally watch too much anime, but most of what I do see ends up being about shy teens who don’t know how to express their feelings to each other, which I suppose is a case of modern movie studios knowing their audience. There’s something absurd about shoehorning that shy-teen dynamic into this story about mech-suited futuresoldiers hunting alien beasts, but that choice does at least give it a different perspective than Tom Cruise’s action-hero-in-training role in the Hollywood version.
If I’m avoiding my plot recap duties here, it’s because talking about time-loop movies feels like its own kind of endless loop at this point. All You Need Is Kill‘s addition to the time-loop canon is that it’s set during a future space alien invasion, where the loop is started by infection with monster blood. The two infected soldiers stuck in this endless loop wake up every time they’re killed by the alien beasts, as if they discovered a video game cheat code for unlimited lives. In this version of the story, one of the characters even finds himself waking up to a video game prompt asking him if he wishes to continue playing, presumably having fallen asleep with a controller in hand. So, what you have is a militaristic sci-fi premise borrowed from an older text like Starship Troopers or The Forever War and made bizarrely existential through the recursive plot structure of Groundhog Day. If you regularly watch movies, you’ve seen more than a few variations of this story in recent titles like Palm Springs, Happy Death Day, Timecrimes, Triangle, Looper, Edge of Tomorrow (duh), and so on. So, all that’ll be new to you here is the visual splendor of its psychedelic animation style, which is very much worth the price of admission. And if you haven’t seen any of those movies before, I’m going to assume that you’re a teenager just getting into the medium, in which case the shy, nerdy leads of this version have something to offer you too: a mirror.
Just a few short weeks back, Brandon and I covered the 2003 Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! on the podcast, mostly because of our interest in the then-upcoming remake directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia. At the conclusion of our discussion, I remarked that I was curious to see what Lanthimos would change for his version, and whether he would keep the film’s epilogue twist as it was in the earlier film, forgo it altogether, or tweak it in some small way. Ultimately, if you have seen Save the Green Planet!, then you’re not going to be surprised by the roads that Bugonia takes, but if you’re like me, you’re still going to enjoy the ride quite a bit.
Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is a high profile female pharmaceutical executive that we first meet as she introduces “a new era” at work, one in which an “incident” (which remains unelaborated upon but about which we can make certain assumptions) has led to a “friendlier” face for the company. What this boils down to, mostly, is that she wants it made explicit to the workers in the office that they should take it for granted that they are allowed to go home at the end of their work day … as long as quotas are met, and people should obviously stay at the office if they have work to do. It’s typical corporate double speak, where a corporation wants to harvest the positive associations that come with a “kinder, gentler” approach to work-life balance in the wake of a public relations backlash, but still expects business to proceed as usual with no real change. It’s not a particularly flattering portrait, but it’s a familiar one. Outside of work, she has an extensive (and expensive) “reverse aging” routine that includes supplements, red-light masks, and extensive martial arts self defense training.
Teddy (Jesse Plemmons) works for Michelle’s company, Auxolith, packing boxes. He’s so far down the ladder that his team—which includes a woman who’s continuing to work despite injuring her hand and is clearly too aware of how easy it is to get rid of a squeaky wheel who might file a comp claim—doesn’t warrant even the most perfunctory of pep talks about quotas and staying late. Following a diagnosis that has rendered his mother (Alicia Silverstone) comatose, he has fallen down a rabbit hole of online conspiracy theories that have led him to one conclusion: aliens from Andromeda have infiltrated human organizations with the intent of enslaving the human race, and his boss is one of them. To this end, he enlists the help of his intellectually-disabled cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) in abducting Michelle when she arrives home from work one day. From there, he locks her in the basement, shaves her head so that she can’t use her hair to contact her mothership, and proceeds to demand that she prepare a message to tell her fellow Andromedans to expect Teddy’s arrival as advocate for the human race against their invasion. Michelle, naturally, has no idea what he’s talking about. Or does she?
If you’ve seen Save the Green Planet!, or even just saw the trailer, most of this is familiar to you. Teddy and his Korean counterpart, Lee Byeong-gu, even share the same backstory that their characters’ mothers are both hospitalized long term, and they share beekeeping as a hobby, with colony collapse disorder forming an integral part of both men’s alien-invasion hypotheses. The differences are pretty minor. Byeong-gu’s girlfriend in Planet! is replaced here by Teddy’s cousin; the plot point in which the captive CEO convinces the former to leave Byeong-gu by claiming that he doesn’t truly love her is replaced by a scene in which Michelle tells Don that the imminent arrival of the police puts him in serious danger. The biggest narrative change is probably the total excision of Planet!‘s subplot about two police officers, one an experienced but disgraced renegade and the other a young fast-tracked hot shot who circumvents his chain of command to consult the outsider. Although there is a police officer in this film, he’s unlike either of the two detectives, as he’s instead a socially awkward local police officer who is implied to have molested Teddy when he was the younger man’s teenage babysitter. If you’ve seen Planet!, you’ll likely recall that the two detectives therein had little bearing on the narrative and seemed to simply exist in order to give the film somewhere else to check in every once in a while and break up the monotony of spending the entire film solely in Byeong-gu’s basement. Here, those opportunities to give the audience a break come largely in the form of Teddy’s flashbacks to the time when his mother’s illness first began to affect her and his time having to still go into work while having his missing boss locked up in the basement, covered in antihistamine lotion (to numb her—or rather “its”—psychic powers). It’s a small difference, but by always keeping us in the same room as one of the two opposing forces at the movie’s core Lanthimos manages to ensure that the tension is always rising.
Of course, the most interesting and notable difference here is that the kidnapped executive in Planet! was a man named Kang Man-shik, while Bugonia has Stone playing a girlboss CEO, and that one small change has a big impact. Because of the difference in the optics and the gendered dynamics alone, watching Byeong-gu and his short girlfriend abduct Kang is a very different experience from watching two burly men attack Emma Stone, one of America’s Sweethearts. The fact that we see her practicing for just such a possibility as one of her first defining character traits reminds us of the bleak truth that there’s no amount of power, wealth, or status that a woman can amass to guarantee her protection from a very determined crazy man, and even as a member of the executive class she’s still prepared for the possibility that she’ll have to fight for her life just like more conventionally vulnerable women. Stone plays Michelle with a quiet strength and dignity that she only allows to slip when she’s alone, and it’s a performance that’s so potent and visceral that it’s easy to forget that—regardless of the seemingly batshit nonsense Teddy picked up on the internet—she is nonetheless a banal force of evil, a stakeholder in the enforcement of a power structure that Teddy (and we) have every right to resent and pray for the downfall of. There’s no need to go overcomplicating it with aliens (or any other brain-rotted conspiracies); Auxolith made Teddy’s mother sick and faced no consequences, and that’s enough to make him hate Michelle, with all the rest of it being a hat on a hat. Still, in seeing a woman chained to a mattress in the basement of a man with demonstrable tendency to fly into a rage, we can’t help but sympathize with her, more than we ever did with Kang.
There are a lot of little ideas and concepts to find within this text and pick over. I find it fascinating that Teddy ultimately does the same thing that Auxolith does with regards to reckless human testing, as he chemically castrated himself prior to the movie’s events and gives his unfortunate cousin the same injection prior to their taking of Michelle. Later in the film, Don tries to explain to Teddy that he’s having side effects from the drug, possibly even a sudden onset of chemical depression, which ultimately has tragic consequences. His kidnapping of Michelle in and of itself is an abduction of the kind that he believes aliens are guilty of. Like a lot of people who fall into these traps of conspiracies that engineer a more comprehensible world out of unconnected events, Teddy is a hypocrite, and that makes him and Michelle the same. And then, of course, there’s that ending. As one would probably expect from a remake helmed by Lanthimos, this is not merely a reheated dish, but a fresh take, even if you already know what all of the ingredients are.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the erotic alien-invasion horror Species (1995), starring Natasha Henstridge.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the alien-invasion conspiracy comedy Save the Green Planet! (2003), recently remade by Yorgos Lanthimos.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Paul Verhoeven’s satirical adaptation of the Robert A. Heinlein sci-fi military novel Starship Troopers.
Most genre movie freaks may have moved on to shiny new boutique Blu-rays and moldy old VHS tapes, but I still collect most of my movies at the tried-and-true distribution hub of the thrift store DVD rack. You don’t always find rare gems at the thrift store, but you often find movies cheaper than they cost to rent on streaming, with the added bonus of a Special Features menu that most streamers don’t bother to upload. My recent pickup of the 1960s sci-fi lucha libre classic Santo vs. The Martian Invasion felt like a blessing by both metrics; it’s rare enough that it’s not currently available to stream at home with English subtitles, and the disc includes several Bonus Features, including full-length commentaries and a 30-minute interview with Santo’s heir, Son of Santo. It felt like even more of a blessing when those subtitles turned out to be a variation of Comic Sans, which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen outside of an ironic lyrics-only music video on YouTube. I don’t know that reporting on these details is useful to anyone who didn’t happen to be shopping at the Thrift City USA on the West Bank last weekend, but I still want to advertise that the dream is still alive in the thrift store DVD racks of New Orleans in general. I suppose I also want to report that the home distribution label Kit Parker Films is surprisingly generous with their bargain-bin DVDs’ bonus content, so look out for those discs in particular while you’re digging through the stacks.
Billed on its title card as Santo the Silver Mask vs The Invasion of the Martians, this specific bargain-bin discovery is a fairly typical Atomic Age sci-fi cheapie about an alien invasion of planet Earth; its hero just happens to be the masked luchador Santo, protector of “the weak and the defenseless.” The alien-invasion plot is a little confused, with the Martians announcing their presence to the citizens of Mexico via multiple television broadcasts and having their evil deeds widely reported in local newspapers, then later being treated as a conspiratorial government secret hidden from the public. Instead of getting that story straight, the movie intensely focuses on the physical abilities & vulnerabilities of the Martians. Much attention is paid to the fact that they frequently take “oxygen pills” to be able to withstand Earth’s atmosphere, among other needless explanations of their uncanny ability to speak Spanish. There’s also an intense fixation on their cube-shaped helmets’ Astral Eye, a glowing eyeball that allows them to either hypnotize or disintegrate nearby Earthlings, depending on the demands of the day. They can also wrestle fairly well, which makes them the perfect opponent for Santo, the greatest & bravest wrestler who ever lived. Santo repeatedly grapples with the blonde-wigged beefcake models from planet Mars, eternally flustered by their ability to teleport back to the safety of their spaceship every time the impromptu matches don’t go their way. He eventually wins by stealing one of their teleportation devices to infiltrate and explode that ship himself, like a wrestler claiming a championship belt (literally; the device is belt-shaped).
The Martian Invasion loses a little steam once these intergalactic lucha libre matches return to a proper wrestling ring instead of being staged in exterior locations on the streets of Mexico, but most of its vintage sci-fi hijinks remain adorable & fun. Instead of brooding in the bootleg Gothic atmosphere of horror pictures like Santo vs The Vampire Women or Santo and the Blue Demon vs Dracula and the Wolf Man, a lot of the runtime is filled with insane, rapid-fire dialogue about the peculiarities of the Martian species. There’s also some fun 60s kitsch to the cheesecake Martian women in particular, who hypnotize & seduce the major players of Mexican patriarchy with the laziest futuristic go-go dancing you’ve ever seen. Between that half-hearted eroticism and the absurd over-reliance on stock footage to pad out the budget, I was often reminded of some of my favorite Atomic Age sci-fi novelties: Nude on the Moon, Cat-Women of the Moon, Queen of Blood, The Astounding She-Monster, etc. None of those comparison points feature extensive wrestling matches, though, which gives this an extra layer of novelty the same way the Santo horror films feel novel compared to their classic Universal Horror equivalents.
Something I don’t have context for is how much of an anomaly The Martian Invasion is within the larger Santo canon. It felt a little zippier & goofier than the couple horror films I’ve seen starring the masked luchador, which rely heavily on classic haunted-house mood & dread. I don’t have enough evidence to say how typical that is to Santo’s filmography, though, because I’ve only seen three of what Wikipedia lists as “at least 54” titles in his catalog. Given the pace at which I’m finding notable Santo movies on used discs or streaming, it’s likely I’ll never get the complete picture of his big-screen work before I run out of time and die. Honestly, I still can’t even pin down the exact list of titles that make up that catalog. Wikipedia, IMDb, and Letterboxd all have conflicting lists of what count as an official Santo film, and the “Filmografia” Special Feature on my Martian Invasion disc only includes 52 of his “at least 54” titles. To help illustrate the immensity & inconsistency of that catalog, I have transcribed the entire “Filmografia” feature of the Kit Parker DVD below. It’s the kind of list that has made me accept that I will only see whichever films I happen to pick up at local thrift stores, completionism be damned. May they all be as fun & loaded with bonus features as Santo vs The Martian Invasion.
Filmografia
1958
SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DEL MAL aka El Cerebro del Mal Santo vs The Evil Brain
SANTO CONTRA LOS HOMBRES INFERNALES Santo vs The Infernal Men aka White Cargo
1961
SANTO CONTRA LOS ZOMBIES Santo vs The Zombies Released in the U.S. as Invasion of the Zombies
SANTO CONTRA EL RED DEL CRIMEN Santo vs The King of Crime
SANTO EN EL HOTEL DE LA MUERTE Santo in The Hotel of Death
SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DIABOLICO Santo vs The Diabolical Brain
1962
SANTO CONTRA LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS Santo vs The Vampire Women Released in the U.S. as Samson vs The Vampire Women
1963
SANTO EN EL MUSEO DE CERA Santo in The Wax Museum Released in the U.S. as Samson in the Wax Museum
SANTO CONTRA EL ESTRANGULADOR Santo vs The Strangler
SANTO CONTRA EL ESPECTRO DEL ESTRANGULADOR Santo vs The Ghost of the Strangler
1964
SANTO EN ATACAN LAS BRUJAS aka Santo En La Casa De Las Brujas Santo in The Witches Attack
BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL PODER SATANICO Blue Demon vs The Satanic Power Cameo appearance
SANTO CONTRA EL HACHA DIABOLICA Santo vs The Diabolical Ax
1965
SANTO EN LOS PROFANADORES DE TUMBAS aka Los Traficantes De La Muerte Santo in The Grave Robbers
SANTO EN EL BARON BRAKOLA Santo in Baron Brakola
1966
SANTO CONTRA LA INVASION DE LOS MARCIANOS Santo vs The Martian Invasion
SANTO CONTRA LOS VILLANOS DEL RING Santo vs The Villains of The Ring
SANTO EN OPERACION 67 Santo in Operation 67
1967
SANTO EN EL TESORO DE MOCTEZUMA Santo in The Treasure of Moctezuma
1968
SANTO EN EL TESORO DE DRACULA Santo in Dracula’s Treasure aka EL Vampiro y El Sexo
SANTO CONTRA CAPULINA Santo vs Capulina
1969
SANTO CONTRA BLUE DEMON EN LA ATLANTIDA Santo vs Blue Demon in Atlantis
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA LOS MONSTRUOS Santo & Blue Demon vs The Monsters
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON EN EL MUNDO DE LOS MUERTOS Santo & Blue Demon in The World of the Dead
SANTO CONTRA LOS CAZADORES DE CABEZAS Santo vs The Headhunters
SANTO FRENTE A LA MUERTE Santo Faces Death aka Santo vs The Mafia Killers
1970
SANTO CONTRA LOS JINETES DEL TERROR Santo vs The Terror Riders aka The Lepers and Sex
SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS Santo in The Revenge of the Vampire Women
SANTO CONTRA LA MAFIA DEL VICIO Santo vs The Mafia of Vice aka Mission Sabotage
SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA MOMIA Santo in The Revenge of the Mummy
LAS MOMIAS DE GUANAJUATO The Mummies of Guanajuato Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras
1971
SANTO CONTRA LA HIJA DE FRANKENSTEIN Santo vs Frankenstein’s Daughter
SANTO CONTRA LOS ASESINOS DE OTROS MUNDOS Santo vs The Killers from Other Worlds aka Santo vs The Living Atom
SANTO Y EL AGUILA REAL Santo and The Royal Eagle aka Santo and The Tigress in The Royal Eagle
SANTO EN MISION SUICIDA Santo in Suicide Mission
SANTO EN EL MISTERIO DE LA PERLA NEGRA Santo in The Mystery of The Black Pearl aka Santo in The Caribbean Connection Released in Spain in 1971 and in Mexico in 1974
1972
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA DRACULA Y EL HOMBRE LOBO Santo & Blue Demon vs Dracula & The Wolfman
SANTO CONTRA LOS SECUESTRADORES Santo vs The Kidnappers
SANTO CONTRA LA MAGIA NEGRA Santo vs Black Magic
SANTO & BLUE DEMON EN LAS BESTIAS DEL TERROR Santo & Blue Demon in The Beasts of Terror
SANTO EN LAS LOBAS Santo in The She-Wolves
SANTO EN ANONIMO MORTAL Santo in Anonymous Death Threat
1973
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL DR. FRANKENSTEIN Santo & Blue Demon vs Dr. Frankenstein
SANTO CONTRA EL DR. MURERTE Santo vs Dr. Death aka Santo Strikes Again
1974
SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA LLORONA Santo in The Revenge of The Crying Woman
1975
SANTO EN ORO NEGRO aka La Noche De San Juan Santo in Black Gold
1977
MISTERIO EN LAS BERMUDAS Mystery in Bermuda Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras
1979
SANTO EN LA FRONTERA DEL TERROR Santo at the Border of Terror aka Santo vs The White Shadow
1981
SANTO CONTRA EL ASESINO DE LA TELEVISION Santo vs The Television Killer
CHANOC Y EL HIJO DEL SANTO VS LOS VAMPIROS ASESINOS Chanoc & The Son of Santo vs The Killer Vampires Cameo appearance
1982
SANTO EN EL PUNO DE LA MUERTE Santo in The Fist of Death
SANTO EN LA FURIA DE LOS KARATECAS Santo in The Fury of the Karate Experts
After checking out recent release No One Will Save You, my appetite for extraterrestrial abduction content was whet, and the streaming service formerly known as HBOMax was there with a cleanup hitter in the form of 1993’s Fire in the Sky. The movie is based upon a book written by an Arizona logger named Travis Walton that purports to recount his encounter with aliens in 1975. Walton’s is one of the more noteworthy cases in that his alleged abduction was witnessed by five other men who were with him when they all saw the same strange phenomena, the standard light/energy/noise “emanations” that are common for UFO witnesses. Walton himself remained missing despite a few search parties before reemerging from the wilderness some five days later — starved, dehydrated, and seemingly traumatized to near-catatonia.
The film plays with committing to the reality of Walton’s claims from the outset and does so rather cleverly, as it opens with the other five men arriving at the local watering hole disheveled and rattled and talking amongst themselves about the importance of getting their stories straight and other pieces of dialogue that maintain ambiguity about their relative guilt/innocence. From there, an out-of-town lawman named Watters (James Garner) arrives at the scene to assist in what’s being treated as a missing persons case. The foreman of the crew, Mike Rogers (Robert Patrick), recounts the events of the day, up to and including his future brother-in-law Travis (D. B. Sweeney) getting out of the truck to investigate an inexplicable light show and being struck by something invisible. The other loggers in the truck insist on fleeing whatever is out there, but Mike eventually insists that they go back for Travis; when they return to the spot where he collapsed, there’s no sign of him.
For most of Act II, the film plays out more like a small town drama about people’s lives collapsing under the collective weight of the presumption of guilt heaped upon them by their community, with some investigative procedural elements thrown in for good measure. Watters believes that Travis was killed by one of the other loggers, Dallis (Craig Sheffer), a “drifter” who didn’t get along with Travis, and that the rest of the crew were helping to cover it up. Desperate to prove his innocence, Mike commits himself and his crew to polygraph tests, all of which seem to indicate that the men are telling the truth with the possible exception of Dallis, whose test is inconclusive. Suddenly,Travis reappears, and from this point, the film no longer plays coy with whether or not the abduction story is true within the film. Even as Watters adjusts his hypothesis to include the men pulling a publicity stunt that wasted time and resources, Travis is tormented by the remembrance of the events of his abduction as they slowly resurface.
This is one of those movies that got significant airplay on Sci-Fi Channel in my youth, although I had never actually seen it; the commercials advertising its upcoming airings always included the iconic image of Travis Walton cling-wrapped to an alien operating table, which frankly scared the shit out of me. It was one of those childhood terrors that remained tantalizingly unresolved until this first viewing, and as such I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Unfortunately, the opening credits spoil some of the ambiguity pretty early on, given that there’s a huge wall of text declaring that the film is “Based on the book The Walton Experience by Travis Walton,” dulling the impact of the question of whether Walton was murdered by his co-workers. Still, a lot of pathos is wrung out of the disappearance, and that’s something that you don’t normally see in this kind of media, so it was a pleasant surprise. If alien abductions are your personal horror preference, this one might not exactly live up to every expectation, given that there’s less of that in the finished product than what trailers and clips might imply, but what is present is harrowing and memorable. Give it a shot.
Brynn Adams is alone. She doesn’t seem to be all that troubled by it, at least most of the time. She wiles away the hours in the sumptuous country home that she occupies by herself like a woman unstuck in time: she learns decades-old dance steps from numbered diagrams while listening to Ruby Murray’s “Knock On Any Door” from 1956; she designs and creates her own dresses; she’s even recreated the entire town of Mill River in miniature in her living room. When she ventures into the real town, she ducks to avoid certain people, and when she attempts to interact with others, all she gets in return are sneers and frigid shoulders. The closest thing she seems to have to human contact is a mailman who intentionally damages her packages. Brynn’s been alone for a long time, but she’s about to have … visitors.
Kaitlyn Dever, who I really liked in last year’s Rosaline, both stars in and executive produces for No One Will Save You, the sophomore directorial effort from Brian Duffield, who is perhaps best known around these parts for writing The Babysitter. I first became aware of the movie after a screenshot of Stephen King calling the film “Brilliant, daring, involving, [and] scary” as well as “Truly unique,” and I went into it blind, which allowed for me to be pleasantly surprised not only by all of the film’s tiny reveals but also its big one; namely, No One is almost entirely dialogue free. Dever is the only performer who ever gets to speak, and it’s telling that her single impactful line is spoken to no one, or at least to no one who can hear her. That’s not to say that she’s not well developed; in fact, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this becomes one of those films that achieves cult status through its use as a teaching tool via its masterful adherence to the timeless axion of “Show, don’t tell.” Everything important about Brynn is captured by the filmic eye: the regretful letters she composes to her childhood best friend Maud, her awkward attempts to practice waving and greeting others, her abject terror at the prospect of interacting with a middle-aged couple we later learn are Maud’s parents. The story moves clearly and cleanly without the need for dialogue, as the film cuts seamlessly and smartly between Brynn encountering a situation and her resolution of the same. For instance, in one simple sequence, we watch as Brynn rides her bike into town for help after being unable to start her car, experiencing an extremely unpleasant but nonetheless wordless encounter with Maud’s mother and father (the latter of whom is the chief of police) that reminds her that—as the title tells us—no one will help her, and then immediately cuts to her at a bus station, ticket in hand. There’s no spoon-feeding and there’s no need for it, either.
We eventually learn what happened between Brynn and Maud that left Brynn a pariah in Mill River, and it’s devastating. Outside of the flashbacks that fill this in, however, the film takes place over a brief time frame of only three days and two nights. The first of these nights sees Brynn (sort of) fend off a home invader, who just so happens to be an extraterrestrial. When she finds herself unable to gather assistance or successfully escape town the following day, she prepares to defend herself for a second night, only for the film to perform a little sleight of hand with its genre, transitioning from the home-invasion-with-an-outer-space-twist narrative to a more introspective form of psychological horror, as the aliens attempt to assimilate Brynn into a pod-people collective. Their means to do so involve tempting her to give up her mind and body through visions of a reality where she is no longer bound by the tragedy of her past and no longer missing the things which have been lost to her. When that doesn’t work, the snare she’s in just gets tighter.
This movie lives and/or dies on Kaitlyn Dever’s performance, and it’s a testament to her ability that it soars. The camerawork here is likewise deft in the way that the language of pans and zooms keeps us in Brynn’s headspace so effectively; the touch is so lightweight as to make its capture of all the moving parts appear almost effortless. The visual effects work is also top notch; the aliens feel appropriately otherworldly even if the CGI seams are unavoidable, while the film wisely chooses clever takes on familiar ways of visualizing standard abduction phenomena, borrowing heavily from The X-Files and its use of blinding beams of white light (the abductions of Duane Barry in the second season and Max Fenig in season four come to mind), although it also includes occasional pervasive red lighting that calls to mind the opening of Fire in the Sky. The film moves in novel and exciting ways, and it’s well worth checking out.
It turns out not every movie adaptation of the 1958 novel The Body Snatchers is Great; some are just Okay. The 1956 and the 1978 adaptations—both titled The Invasion of the Body Snatchers—are reputable sci-fi horror classics, but that streak apparently ended when the material was imported into the 1990s. Body Snatchers ’93 had ample talent behind it to match the reputation of its looming predecessors, including the same producer as Invasion ’78 (Robert H. Solo) and creative contributions from genre film legends Abel Ferrara (director), Stuart Gordon (co-writer), and Larry Cohen (story). Unfortunately, that deep talent pool doesn’t amount to much onscreen. This particular Body Snatchers is serviceable but forgettable, something that might be easier to overlook if there weren’t so many superior realizations of the same material to compare it to.
Whereas the first two Body Snatchers adaptations explored themes of Conservatism, conformity, and paranoia in American cities & suburbs, this 90s Kids™ update moves its action to a military base. A moody teen brat who’d rather listen to her Walkman than her parents is horrified when her family moves to the rigid, regimented confinement of a military base to accommodate her dad’s career. That horror over militarized conformity only worsens when alien pod people start replacing the humans among the macho brutes in her midst, eventually including the few burnout friends she’s made on the base and members of her own immediate family. The manifestations of that horror are familiar: alien tendrils invading sleeping victims’ orifices and already-converted pod people snitching on still-human holdouts with hideous shrieks. They’re just updated with a new backdrop location & updated 90s era effects.
Weirdly, the film that most makes Body Snatchers ’93 feel obsolete is not any of the preceding direct adaptations of its source material but rather a loosely-inspired work that arrived to theaters five years later. Between the film’s 90s grunge sensibilities and its moody teen girl POV, it recalls a lot of what Robert Rodriguez later achieved to greater success in The Faculty. Body Snatchers is dourer & less fun than Rodriguez’s film, though, which I suppose is the Abel Ferrara touch. As a result, it’s difficult to find much in this film worth recommending that hasn’t been bested elsewhere, except maybe in a few standalone scares: a deflated goo-filled skull here, an alien-infested bathtub there, etc. Still, it’s a moderately serviceable sci-fi horror that sneaks in a few effective chills & practical gore showcases in a tight 87min window – even if they aren’t in service of something spectacularly unique.
Swampflix 