Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), directed by Don Siegel, BFI remaster, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including original theatrical stereo, four commentary tracks, and English SDH subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049366/

Video encoded in two-pass 9 000 kbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image.

English SDH subtitles OCRed, proofed and corrected.

Note : Perhaps the very best of the wave of 50s alien invastion sci-fi horror movies, and of course remade several times, Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a nice little piece of McCarthy era paranoia. While it's always been slippery to define what, if anything, the non-feeling alien duplicate pod people are a metaphor for, exactly, the film definitely has a few things to say, and says them with noirish style and a creeping sense of impending doom. The framing story and semi-happy ending were by some accounts added at the insistence of the studio, and I'm kind of happy about it, because without them, it's almost insufferably bleak.

Dr. Bennell returns to his home town of Santa Mira, California, after a congress, and finds his day is fully booked with patients urgently wanting to see him, but not wanting to say why. However, almost all of them cancel, claiming they feel fine now. Then, two parallel cases of locals claiming one of their family members has been replaced by an identical double makes Bennell think something strange might be going on, and that's before a friend of his, Jack Belicec, and his wife discover what they first think is a dead body in their house. The "dead body" has no fingerprints or discerning features, but after a while takes on the likeness of Jack, and then disappears...

This BFI transfer looks like a telecine, and is decent, but not great. The cinematography is contrasty and well-defined, though, which makes the visual expression of the film pretty resistant even to a mediocre remaster. Stereo track sounds fine, and the four commentary tracks are all interesting, although for entertainment value, I'd recommend the first one, featuring Joe Dante.

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