We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956)
One of the greatest sci-fi horror movies ever made, Invasion of the Body Snatchers has a running time of just 80 minutes – and it only achieves that number with an opening title sequence that lasts over a minute and tacked-on wrap-around scenes that weren’t really necessary, but are kind of fun. Directed by Don Siegel from a screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring (based on the story The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney), this was made back in the good old days of economical storytelling – and it’s a masterful example of that approach.
The first scene (added in post-production) shows us that Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy), a physician in the small California town of Santa Mira, has experienced something that has driven him to the brink of madness. He’s ranting and raving in a Los Angeles hospital, and when a psychiatrist is called in to talk with him, he tells the story of the film to his fellow doctor – so we got not only a framing device, but also a narration.
Bennell was attending a medical convention when he was called home by his nurse due to a substantial increase in appointments... but when Bennell returns to his office, everyone who made an appointment cancels on him. There only seems to be one issue troubling residents of the town: several of them have come to believe that their relatives have been replaced with identical-looking imposters. People claim their uncle isn’t their uncle, their mother isn’t their mother, their father isn’t their father, their sister isn’t their sister, etc. These people may look like their relatives, have their memories, use the same words and gestures, even have the same tone of voice, but there’s no feeling there, no emotion. It’s like they’re just an empty facade. Speaking with psychiatrist Dan Kauffman (Larry Gates), Bennell learns that this belief is a mass hysteria that has spread over the town during the last two weeks – at least, that’s Kauffman’s explanation for it. What actually happened is, “Something evil had taken possession of the town.”
As Bennell makes his way around this town-gone-mad, he’s accompanied by his ex-girlfriend Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), who, like himself, has recently settled a divorce. They’re trying to restart their relationship when Bennell is called to the home of Jack and Teddy Belicec (King Donovan and Carolyn Jones), where the couple has discovered a strange body in their basement. At first, it has no features or fingerprints... but then it starts to develop features that match Jack’s. Another of these duplicate bodies is found in the basement of the Driscoll home – and it looks like Becky!
Unfortunately, those bodies vanish, so Kauffman and local authorities are briefly able to convince Bennell and Jack that they’ve fallen for the same mass hysteria that has gripped so many of their neighbors... But Bennell is suspicious when he sees people who were terrified of their imposter relatives suddenly act like nothing’s bothering them anymore. And when more duplicates (including one of himself) are found in his greenhouse, emerging from large seedpods, it confirms that he and his friends are in serious trouble – and if they can’t solve this issue in Santa Mira, the entire world could be in trouble.
Santa Mira residents have been replaced by emotionless alien imposters, and they want to replace everyone with duplicates that grow from pods while the people sleep. There will be no more emotions, no more individuality.
"Your new bodies are growing in there, taking you over cell by cell, atom for atom. There’s no pain. Suddenly while you’re asleep, they’ll absorb your minds, your memories, and you’re reborn into an untroubled world." Where everyone's the same.
Truckloads of seedpods are being sent out across the land. Bennell and Becky have to run for their lives, and it’s not clear who they can trust, if anyone.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers has one of the best, all-time creepiest horror movie set-ups, and Siegel’s film is a masterpiece of building dread and paranoia, all delivered in charming, black & white, 1950s style. The 1978 film is the one you’ll hear referenced most often when people talk about Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and that does rank up there as one of the best remakes ever made, but I much prefer the charm and atmosphere of the original – and there’s really something to be said about that 80 minute running time. This older version moves along at a much better pace than the 115 minute ‘70s film. I'm still very glad that the '78 film exists, because why settle for one amazing version of a story when you can have two?
More and more as years go by, I associate the look and vibe of the classic Universal Monsters movies and '50s sci-fi horror films with October and the Halloween season, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers has the perfect Halloween spook show vibes that I love to experience in the build-up to my favorite holiday.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977)
Whereas E.T. is a beloved Steven Spielberg film that I remember watching and enjoying as a child but have had troubled getting into when revisiting it in later years, his 1977 hit Close Encounters of the Third Kind is Spielberg film that I have never really clicked with at all. It’s not a movie that I ever rented or caught on cable when I was a kid, it was one that I tried to watch decades later... and it never drew me in.
Scripted by Spielberg (with uncredited contributions from the likes of Paul Schrader, John Hill, David Giler, Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, and Jerry Belson), Close Encounters does have that same tone and set-up that many of the director’s best, most popular work has. That epic feeling, the fun people-next-door vibe of the characters, the idea of ordinary people dealing with extraordinary events. My problem is, it’s really long (ranging from 132 to 137 minutes, depending on which cut you watch), and it moves through its long running time at a slow pace, with not a whole lot happening.
You get a slow build of United States Navy aircraft that vanished over the Bermuda Triangle in 1945 appearing in the Mexican desert in 1977. A missing ship showing up in the Gobi Desert. Air traffic controllers witnessing a near-miss with a UFO on their radar monitors. More interesting, a little boy’s toys in Muncie, Indiana start moving on their own. There are power outages in the area and electric utility lineman Roy Neary (Spielberg’s Jaws cast member Richard Dreyfuss, who talked Spielberg into giving him the part after a long list of A-listers turned it down) is sent to find out why. On the road in the middle of the night, Roy sees a UFO, a close encounter that leaves him with a sunburn on half of his face. It takes almost twenty minutes to get to that point.
More people, including young mother Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) and her toddler son – and an eccentric old man played by Roberts Blossom – witness UFOs as they fly around the area... and the people who see them become obsessed with them. Especially Roy, who is compelled to start drawing pictures of a mountain and moulding the image of the mountain, freaking out his kids and scaring his wife in the process. When he decides to build a mini-mountain out of dirt and bricks inside his house, that’s when his wife and kids bail on him.
There’s a long stretch of the movie where the government is figuring out that the aliens in the UFOs communicate through musical tones and Roy is obsessing over the mountain, and the only interesting thing to happen in that stretch is a sequence where aliens arrive at Jillian’s house and abduct her child. It’s cool, but it’s short.
Eventually, everyone is able to deduce that the mountain is Devils Tower near Moorcroft, Wyoming. The area is evacuated, but Roy, Jillian, and other UFO obsessives converge on the area for the climactic encounter with the aliens. And what happens in that climax? They play some music at each other, the UFO lets out some of its abducted passenger (including the little kid, of course), a scientist played by François Truffaut gets to wave at an alien, and Roy proves to be such a jackass that he’s willing to abandon his family so he can take a ride on a UFO. Spielberg has said that he wouldn’t have had Roy make that choice if he had made the movie later in life. He made this one before he had a family of his own.
With the special effects of the UFO and the “aliens exist, confirmed” story, I can see how the movie could have captured imaginations in 1977 better than it might have in later decades... but still, it’s been slow and uneventful from the start, so it’s kind of surprising that it caught on just as much as it did. This was the third highest-grossing movie of ‘77, following the first Star Wars and Smokey and the Bandit, and there’s a significant drop in entertainment value from the first two movies on that list to the third.
I have given Close Encounters of the Third Kind multiple chances over the years, and it seems that it’s just not ever going to click with me. Even if it weren’t so uneventful, even if I could really get into the story during the first two hours, I would still be put off by Roy choosing aliens over his family - and kissing Jillian before he catches his ride. Our lead character is a douchebag; it's no wonder nobody wanted the role.
SUNDOWN: THE VAMPIRE IN RETREAT (1989)
For centuries, vampires have had to feed on human blood to survive... but now they’re planning to update their methods. The powerful and righteous Count Mardulak (David Carradine) has led the last remaining vampires to the isolated desert town of Purgatory, where he’s working on getting a fake blood synthesizing plant up and running. The vampires will no longer have to feed on humans; they’ll be able to live in harmony with them. They just need the human designer of the plant, David Harrison (Jim Metzler), to check on the place, then they’ll be good to go.
Not realizing that he’ll be working with vampires, David brings his wife Sarah (Morgan Brittany) and their two young daughters to Purgatory with him... and there, they run into trouble. One of the vampires is Maxwell Caulfield as Shane Dennis. David, Sarah, and Shane were already in a love triangle before Shane became a bloodsucker, but now that he’s a supernaturally-enhanced creature, the competition gets even more intense.
While all of this is going on, some of the other vampires are dealing with the fact that one of their number, the bad-tempered Mort Bisby (M. Emmet Walsh) has decapitated a human visitor in front of some human witnesses. Also, vampire hunter Robert Van Helsing (Bruce Campbell, playing the role in an adorably goofy and dorky way) has come to town and gotten mixed up with vampire Sandy White (Deborah Foreman).
And vampire Ethan Jefferson (John Ireland) has gathered a group of followers, including Shane, who are ready to resort to violence to make sure that the idea of existing on synthesized blood doesn’t go through. They’re going to stand up for their right to feed on humans.
Directed by Anthony Hickox from a screenplay he wrote with John Burgess, Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat is a fun horror comedy that has a quirky tone and shows vampires living in the desert under the protection of hats, sunblock, and UV-protected glass. There are some really goofy scenes throughout – and a whole lot of action. Armed with guns that fire wooden bullets, Jefferson and his followers kick off a revolution around the hour mark, and the action takes up the final forty minutes of the movie.
I had read about Sundown in the pages of Fangoria magazine when it was being released in 1989, but none of the video stores in my town ever got it on VHS... so I never saw it. When I would see imagery from the movie, it looked like it might be too silly for my taste, so even when I did have the chance to get around to watching it, I didn’t. It took me 37 years to finally decide to sit through Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat, and when I did, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s not as silly as I feared it would be. It’s actually pretty cool, and has a great cast. Bruce Campbell and Deborah Foreman are two of my favorite actors, so I really should have watched this a long time ago.
It will not take me another 37 years to have a second viewing of this one.
BALLERINA (2025)
Back in 2017, Lionsgate bought an action thriller spec script called Ballerina, which was written by Shay Hatten and ranked on The Black List as one of the best unproduced screenplays of that year. The idea was to have Hatten rewrite the script to take place within the world of Lionsgate’s John Wick franchise – and Hatten was also hired to co-write John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, which included a set-up for the Ballerina concept of ballerina assassins. Hatten did his rewrite, Len Wiseman was hired to direct the film, Ana de Armas was cast as the title character... and while there was a lot of chatter about Chad Stahelski, director of the John Wick movies, having to come in and oversee reshoots to get the movie closer to Wick level, it did turn out to be a fairly entertaining spin-off.
Ana de Armas plays Eve Macarro, whose mother was part of a cult of assassins. Her father took Eve away from the Cult when she was a child... and got murdered by the Cult’s Chancellor, played by Gabriel Byrne, for his troubles. New York Continental manager Winston Scott (Ian McShane as his character from the John Wick movies) was able to get Eve into the Ruska Roma, a group of assassins overseen by the Director (Anjelica Huston) and operating under the cover of being a dance studio.
For twelve years, Eve was trained as both a ballerina and an assassin – and then she was sent out on missions of murder. This occupation causes her to cross paths with Cultists and inspires her to go rouge, seeking revenge against the Cult and the Chancellor. And that, in true John Wick fashion, leads to a series of hard-hitting action sequence that see bullets flying all over the place.
To give the film a boost, Keanu Reeves even reprises the role of John Wick in here, showing up for some action scenes. He’s sent to stop Eve and bring her rampage of revenge to an end, but he cuts her some slack and helps her out a little bit.
I’m an Ana de Armas fan, so I thought she was a good choice to head up a spin-off in this universe. She does well in the role of Eve Macarro, handling the emotional scenes and making sure the action scenes are fun to watch. Including some standout moments involving a flamethrower.
Like the John Wick sequels, Ballerina is a bit overstuffed and goes on for a bit too long (the running time is 125 minutes, but it feels longer), but it’s a fine addition to the franchise and worth checking out when you want to see some action.
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