Body Snatchers

Young Marty Malone (Gabrielle Anwar) is suffering from teenage angst. With new stepmother Carol (Meg Tilly) and stepbrother Andy (Reilly Murphy), she's been uprooted from her Washington, D.C. home so that her widowed father, EPA scientist Steve (Terry Kinney), can test for toxic waste on a godforsaken Marine base in the Deep South. Expecting the worst, Marty instead makes a new friend, Jen (Christine Elise), and flirts with cute helicopter pilot Tim (Billy Wirth). Then all hell breaks loose. Andy flees his day care because the kids all draw the same peculiar picture in class. Seeking comfort from Carol, he finds her withered corpse in bed and a stranger who resembles his mother emerging from the closet. Marty and Steve think he's been having nightmares until strange seed pods, gathered by the Marines from a nearby polluted swamp, try to take over their bodies as they sleep. When the ersatz Carol sics the pod Marines on the family, Steve hides his kids and seeks help from the camp doctor (Forest Whitaker). But he locates the doctor just in time to watch him commit suicide rather than lose his soul to the pods.

Steve returns to Marty and Andy and they steal a jeep, but Marty realizes Steve has become a pod and uses Tim's gun to kill him. While Tim steals a helicopter for their escape, the Marines capture Marty and Andy. Tim saves Marty as she's about to be taken over, but a mutated Jen fingers them before they can find Andy. As Marty and Tim are escaping in the helicopter, Andy breaks away and climbs aboard. But Andy, too, is revealed as a pod person, and Marty is forced to throw him overboard. Using rockets aboard the helicopter, Tim destroys the base and trucks full of pods departing to points around the country. As morning breaks and the chopper lands in Atlanta, Marty is haunted by Carol's last words to her: "Where are you going to go? You're all alone. No one like you is left."

BODY SNATCHERS is a solid, unsurprising thriller occasionally enlivened by its psychosexual subtext. Whereas Siegel and Kaufman constructed political and social allegories, Ferrara invites a Freudian reading by telling the story from the viewpoint of a troubled teenager. The result is a variation on what Freud called the "family romance"--a common adolescent fantasy of adoption or abduction, in which a child reimagines his/her parents as hostile or uncaring usurpers. Once the premise is in place, Ferrara keeps the story moving at a frantic pace, completely at night, intending to convey Marty's physical, psychological, and existential disorientation. Indeed, the narrative is so thoroughly grounded in Marty's besieged psyche that doubt remains until the last possible second whether the killing of her father is truly an act of self-preservation or a deliberate parricide motivated by hostility and sexual ambivalence. But apart from its self-conscious Freudianism--which will be of little interest to most viewers, anyway--this is a diverting but largely conventional picture, lacking even the visual modishness that had been Ferrara's trademark. (Violence, adult situations, nudity, profanity.)