"Body Snatchers"
This is however, untrue. It should come as no surprise to anyone that remakes of "Dawn of the Dead" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" are not going to go over well with me, as there is no logical reason that an artist would feel the need to remake perfection. If you have reverence for a certain film, then why would you use its name to ruin it? And if you didn't like the original, then I have no respect for the angle that you are going to approach your material. There is just no way around it.
The "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" series is one of those rare exceptions, as I have appreciated each remake more than the previous. Philip Kaufman's version was one of the most stylistically dark films I have ever seen, and it contained a fair amount of yuppie satire to compliment the suspense that can build out of feeding on an audience's paranoia. I liked it better than Don Siegel's original, and I like Abel Ferrara's version better than both of them.
While previous incarnations seemed to go for classier, deeper horror, Ferrara wants his audience to have fun with his movie. Sure there is some comment on the breakdown of the American family, but that is not the director's focus. He preys on the idea of cinematic paranoia better than Kaufman and Siegel did, and perhaps even better than Richard Rush achieved with his "The Stunt Man". The entire film is set on a military compound which inherently breeds a sense of unease, and the main character (played by one of my favorites, Gabriel Anwar) is the unwilling teenage victim of her parents divorce, and her father's remarriage to a woman that she doesn't like. The situation that Marty (Anwar) is thrust into makes her understandably distrustful of the people around her before anything truly frightening even happens.
While a lot of the credit must go to the co-writing team of Denis Paoli and Stuart Gordon, I feel as though no director would have been able to pull off the pizzazz as well as Ferrara . There are scenes that cinematic convention will allow you to believe are going in a certain direction, but the director's timing throws the viewer off beautifully and creates some very good scares. When a film can throw me off, even though I may be extremely jaded toward conventional horror startles, it must be doing something right.
If, in the future, I decide to write reviews of the other two films, "Body Snatchers" may not end up with the highest rating, even though it may be my favorite of the series. That the other films wished to become horror classics, while this one merely wanted to go slightly deeper than entertainment hurts its overall rating. In common circles, however, Ferrara's "Body Snatchers" is rarely mentioned in line with the other two; it is forgotten among fans. This is wholly undeserved. Ferrara's version deserves to be remembered for the unique and wonderful take on the material, and for creating more and better scares than the other two pictures.
