So a few weeks ago for my Sunday Night Movie I watched Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. In my comments I mentioned that there had been three remakes of the classic SF film, one in 1979, one in the 90s and the most recent in 2007, this film The Invasion with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. I remember when this film was released in the theaters and having heard it was yet another remake I skipped seeing it. (While I liked the 1979 version,  1993s The Body Snatchers was so awful I had no desire to see this material abused once again.)

However, having watched the original I became curious about this remake and with Netflix to aid me, I had a blu-ray sent to my home. Now, I am sorry I missed this fin film in the theaters.

This is most certainly a remake, no doubt about that. It is not a whole cloth reinvention, nor it is not a cookie-cutter slap-dash copy of the original, and because of that it succeeds. Part of the nature of these alien invaders has been changed, no longer are there large seed-pods from which perfect copies emerge, but what has replaced that is a much more credible premise, infection. Alien spores that invade your body, and activated by R.E.M. sleep, transform you into the classical pod person. (Now you just let them have the whole alien life form infecting a species from an entirely different evolutionary path, but once you do the rest follows logically and credibly. There is a fungus I think that infects acts and changes their behavior into something beneficial for the fungus and fatal for the ants.)

The original film took place in a small California town, something easily containable, the 1979 remake was set in San Francisco, and this one the infection breaks out across a swath stretching from Dallas to Washington D.C. a vast infected area. This film also go further along and gives us a peek as what happens one the pod-people no longer need to maintain their masquerade. At this juncture it felt almost like a zombie film, but for me much more frightening.

The actors all turn in wonderful performance, including one child actor who goes far beyond creepy.

The only downside to this movie, was a critical mis-step in my opinion by the filmmakers in the opening. The film starts with a shuttle breaking up while reentering the atmosphere. That alone in 2007 would be enough to make some people uncomfortable, just 4 years after the Columbia tragedy. Including actual footage of Columbia breaking up for entertainment purposes is simply wrong, cheap, and tawdry.

That aside I really enjoyed the film and look forward to one day adding it to my collection.

It is kind of surprising, to me at least, that I have never seen this particular giant bug movie. I think I have seen nearly all the others, but somehow this one kept slipping past me. With this screening I can now call my science-fiction double feature viewing complete. That is I have seen ever film referenced in the song Science-Fiction Double Feature at least once. (Of course I have seen some of them many times.)

Tarantula naturally is about a giant spider ravaging the desert countryside killing cattle, ranchers, and hobos, before turning toward the small defenseless town full of ever so tasty civilians.

The film was directed by Jack Arnold who, just a  year earlier, had directed the classic film Creature From The Black Lagoon, (one of my favorite monster movies.) Tarantula is not up to Creature standards in budget, special effects, (Though these are credible) or scripting.  However the film does have some charm to it particularly in the fact that most of the film is not about the giant spider. Mostly the movies focuses on Dr Deemer and why the townspeople who had accept this stranger man now suspects he is up to no good. It doesn’t help that Deemer associate turns up dead in the desert of a deformity  that takes years to develop when he seemed quite healthy and normal just weeks earlier.

Dr. Deemer has been working with radio nucleotides in an attempt to make an artificial food to feed the coming billions in the world population. In other scripts he would have at this point become obsessed with his formula and injected his partner, forcibly, to prove it worked, but no in this movie. The partner and a lab assistance injected themselves without consulting Dr. Deemer certainly that they had liked the problem. Since they both end up dead and deformed clearly they had not, but the assistant, driven mad by his deformity over powers Dr. Deemer and injects him, but in the fight the lab is trashed and a Tarantula, already nearly the size of a man, escapes and continues to grow.

This was a fun little film, but not one I can heartily recommend. (Though if you watch and listen closely you can spot Clint Eastwood in an early role.)