Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

The second film adaptation of Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers (after the first in 1956) is this terrifically creepy and frequently startling 1978 version with Donald Sutherland,  Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Brooke Adams playing Public Health inspectors and friends who investigate when, seemingly overnight, San Francisco (its mud bath bathhouses, its bookshops, its restaurants, workplaces and streets) become overrun with people who, according to their loved ones, aren't really them at all!

★★★★☆

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The Faculty (1998)

When one student says suspiciously of another, "We don't know what she is - gay, lesbian, or alien," and when problems at school are solved by snorting a home-laboratory-manufactured drug and waving a gun around, you start getting nervous about the messages in director Robert Rodriguez's sci-fi horror set in a high school and apparently based on Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers, but a surprisingly star-studded cast (Usher, Jon Stewart, Selma Hayek, and others) distracts from this irksomeness and lets other aspects of the movie pay effective tribute to the B-grade horror scifi movies of the 50s.

★★☆☆☆

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