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From outer space to San Francisco over the opening credits, the great invasion of the great conspiracy decade. Gags come thick and fast: Alien spores land on mildewy plants and sprout arachnoid tendrils, one of the posies is plucked by the heroine (Brooke Adams) in a playground, dissonant squeaks turn out to be Robert Duvall in a cassock on a swing (a four-second POV shot makes the screen seesaw). At home she voices the ultimate terror of disconnection as hubby (Art Hindle) sudenly loses interest in sports, "this isn't like you." Her Health Department colleague (Donald Sutherland), who's used to peeking into cauldrons, hears her plight and turns to the Dr. Feelgood with a knack for "psychological band-aids," played by Leonard Nimoy in a rich exacerbation of W.D. Richter's New Age satire. Not "some kind of hallucination flu" but a full-scale raid on Bay Area kooks, expressionless replicas take the streets while the originals crumble into dust. Going against Siegel's starkness, Philip Kaufman's jangly update prefers baroque erudition, thus the original's tell-tale pooch becomes here a barking apparition bearing its owner's visage. Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision figures in the discovery of the unformed body in the mud spa ran by the poet (Jeff Goldblum) and the masseuse (Veronica Cartwright), the extraterrestrial metamorphosis in the greenhouse registers Keats' "Ode to Indolence" ("My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass") along with the climactic flowering in Corman's Little Shop of Horrors. "The CIA? FBI? They're all pods already!" Shattered by vengeful restauranteurs, the hero's windshield becomes a compositional element in the nocturnal chiaroscuro of Michael Chapman's cinematography, all at the service of Kaufman's portrait of the brief lull between the hippie experiment and the yuppie epoch. The darkling stinger gazes back at Polanski's The Tenant. With Lelia Goldoni, Tom Luddy, and Kevin McCarthy.
--- Fernando F. Croce |