Movie Mahal

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Revisiting Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers in a pristine 4K transfer reaffirms its status as a paragon of the horror-science fiction hybrid, a genre blend rarely executed with such finesse. Very few filmmakers have been able to pull it off – Carpenter with The Thing (1982) is one of the exceptions. Kaufman’s adaptation hits all the right notes but it is a work that is probably less SF/Horror and more paranoid societal thriller that really feeds of the elevations of political disillusionment that had been festering away through the tumultuous seventies. San Fran is visualised as an otherworldly landscape; the emptiness and desolation of the city is certainly one of the queasiest in this particular sub-genre and more. With the failure of the counter culture, the metaphor of the body snatching pod people emerges as a treatise on the rise of consumerism, which threatened to enslave and transform us into brain dead zombies worshipping at the altar of capitalism, all of which became a reality in Reaganite America of the 1980s. The cast is superb, so are the visual effects and Ben Burtt’s soundscape is cosmic.