Written by Evan Purcell, June 14, 2016, at 5:59 p.m.
Every Tuesday, we’ll take a look at another mockbuster from the company that brought you Almighty Thor, Izzie’s Way Home, and Alien vs. Hunter. This week, we’ve been taken over by the Invasion of the Pod People.
Invasion of the Pod People Mockbuster Review
Transmorphers, Snakes on a Plane, and Invasion of the Pod People each have something special in common: lesbians. They took the big Hollywood films of the time, shamelessly copied their content, and made things a little bit more inclusive. And topless. So… points for diversity, no matter how exploitative.
Unfortunately, that is perhaps the only positive thing I can say about this movie. Otherwise, it is a bargain bin sci-fi drama—filmed in the ugliest parts of Southern California—that takes a classic story and strips away all subtext and intelligence and replaces it with blank-faced non-acting and grade school CGI. In other words, it’s the pod people equivalent of a real movie. It may look like a movie, and act like one, but there’s nothing underneath.
Before we get into that, here’s a quick history of pod people, which should explain why this movie is such a letdown. Jack Finney’s original novel—The Body Snatchers—is the 1950s in book form. Small town America is under attack, and there’s no one we can trust, least of all our neighbors. It’s a Cold War allegory, brought masterfully to the screen in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. While the movie ending is different (and campier), the film mainly stays true to the novel, taking some very of-the-moment anxieties and turning them into blank-faced monsters. It’s dated, but in all the right ways.
When the movie was remade in 1978 (starring Leonard Nimoy and Jeff Goldblum!), it retained the same basic story, added some gnarly special effects, and shifted focus to New Age spirituality and hippie-dippy psychology. To really drive home the themes, it moved the story from small town America to San Francisco and added a more obvious (and obviously physical) romance between two of its leads. In other words, it was very-70s.
The 1993 remake (my personal favorite, though I’m in the definite minority there) is set in an army base, where everyone is trained to suppress emotions and act like robots. This makes things much harder for our teenage heroine (the girl from Burn Notice) to distinguish between the aliens and the humans. It’s a definite product of the peaceful 1990s, showing a macho culture twiddling its thumbs and waiting for a war that never comes. It also has some interesting things to say about late-20th century family dynamics and parenthood.
The most recent remake, 2007’s Nicole Kidman thriller The Invasion, beefs things up for a post-9/11 world. The setting is now Washington D.C., which means the stakes are bigger. Absolutely no one—least of all our leaders and elected officials—are trustworthy. It’s a definite product of its time, and even if its message is slightly more muddled than the other three movies, it still has a lot to say about the early twenty-first century.
That same year, The Asylum released Pod People as a riff on The Invasion. Because of the release schedule, the filmmakers didn’t have the chance to watch the sister film, but they had three other versions (as well as the original novel) to borrow ideas from. Like the other versions, all they had to do was identify something in the current zeitgeist (like the original did with Cold War paranoia) and then use alien-controlled people as the metaphor.
Think about what was happening in 2007. There were so many targets to choose from:
- The artificiality of “reality” television.
- Apple launching the iPhone
- The mindless diva worship of Beyonce
- A weird rash of celebrity deaths
- Gridlock in Congress
There were so many crazy things happening, so many things that could easily be represented by a pod people story. I mean, have you ever seen people line up outside an Apple store during one of its product launches? That is the definition of unthinking, unfeeling mind-controlled zombie horror. The movie writes itself.
Did Asylum’s Pod People choose any of these options? Did they put any thought into how their film could reflect the current generation? Nope. They did not. And that is a crying shame. These mockbusters are in the unique position to do whatever the heck they want. They operate outside the studio system. They don’t have large budgets, but they certainly have enough to make something professional. Most importantly, they have the name recognition (however borrowed) that ensures a certain number of people will be interested enough to plunk down a few bucks for a video rental. Ideally, they’d be able to do some really interesting stuff.
What’s so disappointing about this film is not that they made the wrong choice (I mean, my third suggestion above, the one about Beyonce, is an objectively bad idea). It’s that they made no choice at all. The writers basically stopped at “pod people” and wrote the bare minimum of a movie. That does a disservice to the Body Snatcher franchise, but it also does a disservice to mockbusters everywhere. This is the studio that turned boy band members into zombie-hunting cowboys. This is the studio that made Thor punch lava into the shape of a hammer so he could stop Richard Grieco from destroying a magic tree. The Asylum has made some awful, awful stuff before, but it was never this blank. I guess that’s fitting for a movie about pod people.
But hey, at least they added lesbians.
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Evan Purcell is the headmaster of a tiny private school in Zanzibar. In addition to writing mildly condescending reviews of bad films, he also writes everything from romance novels to horror stories. Check out his blog and Amazon author page. And in the meantime, don’t trust anyone!