Live Life Team
Genre: Sci-fi Fantasy
Director: Don Siegel
Starring Cast: Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan
Local doctor Miles Bennell returns to his hometown of Santa Mira to find numerous patients claiming their relatives have been replaced by imposters. His suspicions aroused, it’s not long before he discovers the horrible truth.
Shot in 19 days for just $300,000, Don Siegel’s potent Cold War classic is one of the era’s defining movies. Irrelevant to the way in which the ambiguous suggestions are interpreted, it remains a highly effective exercise in paranoia. The film’s great success lies primarily in its observations of everyday life. The simple act of a man mowing the lawn becomes highly sinister when it’s nothing more than a charade.
An invader mimicking normal human activity in order to go unnoticed, but with an indefinable uniformity to its mannerisms, is just enough to chill the spine, making for more uneasy viewing than any number of monsters in flying saucers attacking American landmarks.
It’s notable too, that unlike most other 1950’s paranoia movies, it’s never established whether the Invaders attack Earth specifically. Seeds floating through space land in fields and then grow pods, so adding another potential suggestion to the list – the spreading of disease by outsiders.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is a good old B-movie with an unusually potent concoction of classic genre suggestions and social commentary.
