If you’ve heard about the term “pod people” but have never watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers, well, now you know where it comes from. I didn’t know this myself until I watched this film and I’ve even watched the 2007 remake starring Nicole Kidman and simply titled Invasion. That version admittedly isn’t very good and doesn’t have pod people at all. I also didn’t realize until after the film was over that this 1978 version is also a remake of the original that was made in 1956. It always seemed to me that this version is more well known, especially since the iconic final shot of Donald Sutherland is a popular image on the Internet.

Elizabeth Driscoll is one of the first people who note a change in the behavior of her live-in boyfriend, Geoffrey. She confides in her boss at the San Francisco Health Department Matthew Bennell that out of curiosity she followed Geoffrey as he went about town, meeting all sorts of strange people and passing mysterious packages to each other. He refers her to a friend, noted psychiatrist David Kibner, who tries to assure her that she is just looking for an excuse to get out of her relationship with Geoffrey. However it soon becomes evident at Kibner’s book party that Driscoll is far from the only one who believes that her partner has changed. Another couple who are also friends with Matthew, Jack and Nancy Bellicec, own a bathhouse and discover a strange, deformed body that seems to be slowly resolving itself to resemble Jack. When they call Matthew for help, he becomes alarmed and breaks in to Elizabeth’s house to find that she is asleep and indeed another body that looks like her is growing nearby. The four friends try to convince the authorities that something is wrong to no avail and soon find themselves on the run as almost everyone else has already been turned.

Anyone who watches this film will be doing so in full knowledge that the threat is very real but the characters take a surprisingly long time to realize that something unusual is going on. This slow boil is enjoyable in some ways but annoying in others. On the one hand, there’s a delicious sense of mounting paranoia as the conspiracy goes deeper and deeper as the characters wonder who has been turned. The mounting sense of horror as they realize that they can never fall asleep safely ever again and that they will be hunted wherever they is fantastic as well. On the other hand, their reluctance to admit how deep the shit they are in and their continued faith that government authorities will resolve the crisis makes you feel like smacking them. It’s the same kind of genre blindness and lack of common sense that you see so often in horror movies, but I guess I shouldn’t expect this to be a rationalist work. I’m especially annoyed that it keeps using the character of Elizabeth as the weak link by either having to be rescued or so prone to panic that she gives away the group when they’re trying to blend in.

I’m similarly of two minds about the film as a whole. The individual scenes are great and it’s easy to see why this is such a classic of the genre. I also got a kick out of seeing Leonard Nimoy and a very young Jeff Goldblum together in a science-fiction film. Unfortunately, I don’t think it gels together well enough into a believable whole. The behavior of the pod-people is wildly inconsistent: some behave so oddly and so coldly that they are barely human, others can be so sympathetic that they are indistinguishable from their original selves. I also don’t quite understand why they can’t safely fall asleep in a safe location in which they are sure no pods are nearby. Nothing about their life-cycle makes sense. Why do they still bother to keep a human shape and mimic human day to day routines if they already outnumber the humans?

That’s why though I quite enjoyed this film, and especially appreciated that it has an uncompromisingly bleak ending, this still isn’t good enough to match up to the great science-fiction horror films like The Thing and The Fly.