‘You’re evolving into a new life form.’
Parasitic plant spores make their way to earth to seed and grow into sweet little pink flowers.
Elizabeth (Brooke Adams), a laboratory scientist at the San Francisco Health Department, brings one of the flowers home, and shows it to her boyfriend, Geoffrey. The next morning Geoffrey seems...different. Worried, Elizabeth confides in her health inspector colleague, Matthew (Donald Sutherland).
Elizabeth sounds a tad paranoid - she’s convinced that Geoffrey, who’s off doing weird things with weird people, has been replaced with someone that looks just like him - so Matthew suggests that she speaks to his psychiatrist friend, Dr. Kibner (Leonard Nimoy).
They meet Kibner at the launch party of his latest book, who just says that men be menning and that Geoffrey’s issue is that he’s commitment phobic.
At the same party we meeting aspiring writer and spa owner Jack (Jeff Goldblum) and later his wife Nancy (Veronica Cartwright). Elizabeth, Matthew, Jack and Nancy form our Final Girl Four (spoiler...there’s only one final girl…) who work out what’s really going on and try and stop it.
Though this is a remake of the 1956 adaptation of Jack Finney’s 1954 science-fiction novel The Body Snatchers, and there have been subsequent versions, it remains the most iconic and enduring iteration.
The ending is one of the most famous in horror cinema and you’ll certainly have seen it, even if you don’t know where it’s from.
It’s in turns dystopian, depressing, bleak and very, very icky.
Content warning: goo, plant fannies.
Final Verdict: don't stop to smell the flowers.
