On her way home, Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) stops and picks what she things is a pretty plant. She takes it home and puts it in water and tries to discover what kind of plant it is. Her boyfriend, Geoffrey (Art Hindle), has no interest in the plant. Matthew (Donald Sutherland) works for the Department of Health and Elizabeth works for him. On the night that she brings home the mysterious plant, he calls and asks her to be at work early in the morning. She goes to sleep with the plant on her bedside table and thinks nothing is wrong. When she gets up the next morning though, Geoffrey is acting very strangely. When she gets home, she finds that Geoffrey is even odder than normal. He gave away the tickets to the basketball game that they were waiting on. He leaves the house late at night for a mysterious "meeting" that he won't tell her anything about. Elizabeth thinks that it's just her, that she did something wrong. She goes to see Matthew and tells him all about it.
The next day, Matthew starts to hear of odd things as well. His dry cleaner tells him that his wife is no longer his wife. Elizabeth spies on Geoffrey all day and finds that he's meeting with all sorts of strange people and exchanging strange things. Together, she and Matthew try to figure out what's going on with the strange behaviors of people all over the city. They go to see a friend of Matthew's, Dr. David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), at his book signing. While there, they run into another friend, Jack Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum). Jack seems like a bit of a conspiracy nut and Kibner refuses to listen to Elizabeth. He tells her that she's just afraid of commitment and that's why her live-in boyfriend seems like a different person. Once Jack finds one of the duplicate bodies and calls Matthew, they start to try and figure things out a bit. The more they discover about the scary truth, the worse things get! This unlikely group is going to have to solve the mystery of the duplicates and see if they can save the city before it's too late! Of course, in a city where you can't trust anyone because it's quite possible that everyone has been taken over, who do you really trust?
There are so many creepy moments in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but I think the scene where the bodies are wriggling out of the pods while everyone is sleeping was one of the creepiest to me. Just the thought that as you sleep, these plants could be forming full replicas of you that are ready to take over your life really terrified me as a kid and is still scary today!
This collection includes both the Blu-ray and the DVD version of the movie. The more noticeable difference between the two is the improved quality of the picture on the Blu-ray over the DVD. The DVD version appears so much grainier at times and there are the spots on the screen like you see in many old movies where dust or some kind of grit was on the original film. You don't see any of that in the Blu-ray version. The sound quality is less noticeable as the DVD is in Surround Sound, but not HD.
There are quite a few special features available on the Blu-ray disc that have some very interesting information in them. The DVD only has the commentary from the director Philip Kaufman, however. You'll spend quite a bit of time watching all the Blu-ray features. Most of them are pretty self-explanatory as to what they're about. There's one for sound, special effects, cinematography, and one called "Re-Visitors from Outer Space, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Pod." The last one there isn't really obvious what it's about, but I found that it was quite interesting. It's a look at how the movie was made, how it was adapted from the book, and a lot about the nuances and the paranoia that they purposefully added into the movie. I recommend that you watch all the special features as they're really very interesting.
When I was a kid, Invasion of the Body Snatchers scared me pretty badly. I think I slept with the light on for a week or so. The concept that anyone could be an alien and you couldn't tell by looking at them is really quite creepy, even as an adult. If you've never seen it, I recommend you go pick up Invasion of the Body Snatchers today. It's a true horror classic!
