Body Snatchers

As sheer moviemaking, it is skilled and knowing, and deserves the highest praaise you can give a horror film: It works. Read full review

Ferrara, a visual expressionist at heart, creates some really unsettling moments, though maybe the most impressive thing about the movie is that it manages to make what’s basically a happy ending seem soul-crushingly bleak. Read full review

Ferrera successfully breathes life into an old franchise, with only a slight small change in the narrative but making the aliens significantly more frightening. Anwar is equally intuitive and sassy enough to make her a likeable and believable heroine and although the effects aren't up to much, there are still plenty of scary moments. Read full review

Ferrara hasn't merely remade Body Snatchers; he has reimagined and reinvigorated it, using the best of special-effects talent and cool directorial skill to turn out a splendidly creepy and unsettling piece of genre filmmaking that knows how to scare you and isn't afraid to try. [04 Feb 1994, p.F1]

With a startlingly climactic finale, Body Snatchers only underscores the ultimate illogic of placing your trust in your kin. Read full review

Although Ferrara's Body Snatchers might not be the preferred among the three versions, it is nevertheless a clever reading of the story. The decision to start the pod plot within the military is a great one, and there's a disconcerting lack of privacy for the Anwar character. Read full review

Body Snatchers is inky and somber, with some of the creeping bad-dream naturalism of George Romero’s Living Dead films. Read full review

It's doubtful that any variation on Finney's story could be called definitive. There's an inexhaustible supply of targets; we could have a new one every year or so. But this one certainly has its creepy moments. [18 Feb 1994, p.D3]

With its sketchy characters, slick production values, frequent backlighting, smart pacing and effective half-light, this Body Snatchers is good if not great scare stuff. It's almost too efficient, too technological-looking to generate the kind of primal fears it wants. Still, those pods are nothing to sneeze at. They remain one of insomnia's greatest hits. [25 Feb 1994, p.48]

An exciting thriller that compares favorably with Don Siegel's classic 1956 original. Read full review

For my money, this version doesn't match the Siegel film, though it's a lot scarier and more memorable than Kaufman's low-key, New Agey version. Read full review

A rather anemic effort that runs low on suspense but high on some wonderfully campy moments that will probably leave you howling. [01 Feb 1994]

Faces, torsos and other parts of the human anatomy go into gory meltdown in Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers. But his remake of of a sci-fi classic that already has been brilliantly remade leaves you wondering why he wasn't willing to go out on a limb. [18 Feb 1994, p.04]

With Body Snatchers you get a middling, respectable horror movie, one without any frightening unconscious echoes and with too much of a pedigree to try to scare you with something cheap, like gore. [18 Feb 1994, p.C3]

Anwar is reasonably spunky, but she's not given much. The script fatally fumbles the exposition, serving up characters of zero rooting-interest. [09 Feb 1994, p.8D]

The movie takes paranoia to a far edge. And some audiences will admire it simply because it doesn't waste time on the normality it's going to end up subverting-because it's more fixated on its pods than its people. [25 Feb 1994, p.C]

A soulless replica of Don Seigel's 1956 model and Philip Kaufman's 1978 update. Read full review

The new Body Snatchers is the most graphic of all, featuring more overt violence and decomposing flesh than the other two films combined. But it sorely lacks the focus and resonance of its predecessors. Read full review

With its homogenized flavor, this Body Snatchers seems like a movie made BY pod people, FOR pod people. Read full review

What they've created is a movie that, lacking any resonance, is a soulless clone of a more vibrant original. [04 Feb 1994]

Although Body Snatchers is a competent genre piece with Freudian fillips, there's little there to justify another go-round for what is by now very familiar material. Read full review

Ferrara displays a surprising lack of imagination throughout, sticking to the original film's predictable Who'll be next? progression. [21 Feb 1994, p.C6]