Body Snatchers

Aliens are invading Earth - again. This time they're bent on wiping out humanity, raping the globe of its natural resources and then, like high-tech locusts, swarming onto the next planetary victim. That's the plot of "Independence Day," the latest in a long line of alien-invasion films that have fascinated audiences for decades. These movies aren't just about thrills and chills. On another level, they reflect some of society's most basic anxieties - about disease, ecological disaster or a simple fear of anything that is different from us. While this paranoia may not be strictly an American phenomenon, it does have its roots in U.S. history.

It looks like we're awash in pod people again. This time it's courtesy of Oliver Hirschbiegel's explosive - albeit unsuccessful - new thriller, The Invasion, which opened Friday, the latest adaptation of Jack Finney's sci-fi novel The Body Snatchers. That would be pod people as in, "Dude, the school's been taken over by the pod people!" the standard epithet that misfits have regularly, if vainly, hurled at the popular kids for decades. Pod people! It's a term to fall in love with.

The recent alleged trade in human heads from Philadelphia has overtones of a grisly 18th- and early 19th-century practice: body snatching. In those days, the only legal source of human cadavers for medical-school instruction in human anatomy was executed criminals. And, although capital punishment was applied more liberally than it is today, there just were not enough corpses to fill the need. Body snatchers, or "resurrectionists" as they called themselves, furthered medical science by supplying fresh corpses for anatomical study - for a fee, of course.

It's too obvious, perhaps, but I think director Oliver Hirschbiegel missed his chance in The Invasion, a feverish remake, starring Nicole Kidman, of the oft-remade 1950s sci-fi horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. As alien spore, brought to Earth via a crashed Space Shuttle, works its viral way through the populace, people become indifferent, emotionless - walking down the street oblivious to the poverty, homelessness and crime all around them. It's like they've been enveloped in their own little worlds, as if they are . . . yes, plugged into iPods.

If you're in high school - or in your dotage and still having nightmares about the experience - the proposition that teachers are from another planet will hardly seem like a ludicrous Hollywood fantasy. It would be more an affirmation of your long-held suspicions. Of course, it should be immediately added that if you're a teacher, the idea that the student body is composed entirely of hostile aliens amounts to the only logical explanation for their attire, attention span and attitude.

Don Siegel was a no-nonsense, unsung director of fist-flying action movies that appealed equally to the cineaste and to Joe Sixpack. Despite Oscars for a pair of 1945 film shorts, Siegel was unaccustomed to tributes. All the more reason that he deserves ours. It's a safe bet that the Chicago-born Siegel, who died of cancer April 20 at the age of 78, was the only B-movie director to graduate from Cambridge University. Best known as the guy who made Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

According to gangsta rappers Public Enemy, 911 is "a joke. " According to the occasionally descriptive language of the 1987 Philadelphia Police Study Task Force, 911 is a "tyrannical burden. " Either way you look at it, 911 - the police emergency telephone line - has become the subject of ridicule since its inception in the mid-1960s. The emergency system was proposed by a presidential commission on law enforcement in 1967 as a "universal signal for help. " It was installed in Philadelphia in March 1974.

It should tell you something right off the bat that the titles of "The Blob" include credits for Blob Effects Designer and Creator, Blob Effects Design, Blob Movement Design, Blob Shop Foremen (two people), Blob Effects Coordinators (three) and Blob Wranglers (five). Yes, we're in the land of Gross Special Effects, sports fans. I'm not especially a student of the genre (I swore it off somewhere around the time the alien broke through John Hurt's stomach), but "The Blob" struck me as pretty good of its kind.

A touching drama about an odd literary couple and a winning comedy about Generation X top this week's list of new movies on video. SHADOWLANDS 1/2 (1993) (HBO) 133 minutes. Anthony Hopkins, Debra Winger. Deeply affecting film loosely based on the unlikely real-life romance between medievalist and novelist C. S. Lewis (Hopkins), a repressed Brit who lived in his head, and poet Joy Gresham (Winger), an expressive American who lived in her heart. Both performances are a marvel in this film that shows that those who don't risk the pain of love can never experience its passion.

It's a scenario worthy of any zombie movie: A virus infects a gypsy moth caterpillar and takes over its brain, putting it on a suicide mission. First, it's compelled to climb up high in the trees, where it dies in the midday sun. Then its body liquefies, and virus particles are spread downward with the first rain. The behavior benefits the virus at the expense of the caterpillar. Horror films borrowed the zombie concept from Haitian and African culture, where the term refers to a reanimated body that can be forced to do the bidding of a sorcerer.

It looks like we're awash in pod people again. This time it's courtesy of Oliver Hirschbiegel's explosive - albeit unsuccessful - new thriller, The Invasion, which opened Friday, the latest adaptation of Jack Finney's sci-fi novel The Body Snatchers. That would be pod people as in, "Dude, the school's been taken over by the pod people!" the standard epithet that misfits have regularly, if vainly, hurled at the popular kids for decades. Pod people! It's a term to fall in love with.

It's too obvious, perhaps, but I think director Oliver Hirschbiegel missed his chance in The Invasion, a feverish remake, starring Nicole Kidman, of the oft-remade 1950s sci-fi horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. As alien spore, brought to Earth via a crashed Space Shuttle, works its viral way through the populace, people become indifferent, emotionless - walking down the street oblivious to the poverty, homelessness and crime all around them. It's like they've been enveloped in their own little worlds, as if they are . . . yes, plugged into iPods.

Who knows how long the scheme might have gone on, if the package containing five human heads hadn't sprung a leak. The package, addressed to a Colorado medical research center, had been sent by Philadelphia doctor Martin Spector. After United Parcel Service workers in Kentucky opened the leaking package and made the gruesome discovery in July 1986, authorities began investigating whose heads they were. Two years later, Spector pleaded no contest to - in effect - being a body snatcher.

Crop circles. Spooky. Happenin' on Hess' farm. In Signs, M. Night Shyamalan's latest foray into X-Files-ish realms of the supernatural, swaths of Planet Earth are being turned into aerial billboards: super-sized hieroglyphics that mean who-knows-what, and come from who-knows-where. Back here in Bucks County - a kind of Mayberry RFD version of the Philadelphia suburbs, replete with a countrified constable (Cherry Jones) who knows everybody's business - Graham Hess (Mel Gibson)

If you're in high school - or in your dotage and still having nightmares about the experience - the proposition that teachers are from another planet will hardly seem like a ludicrous Hollywood fantasy. It would be more an affirmation of your long-held suspicions. Of course, it should be immediately added that if you're a teacher, the idea that the student body is composed entirely of hostile aliens amounts to the only logical explanation for their attire, attention span and attitude.

Aliens are invading Earth - again. This time they're bent on wiping out humanity, raping the globe of its natural resources and then, like high-tech locusts, swarming onto the next planetary victim. That's the plot of "Independence Day," the latest in a long line of alien-invasion films that have fascinated audiences for decades. These movies aren't just about thrills and chills. On another level, they reflect some of society's most basic anxieties - about disease, ecological disaster or a simple fear of anything that is different from us. While this paranoia may not be strictly an American phenomenon, it does have its roots in U.S. history.

The origin of Species can manifestly be traced to the 1950s and the heyday of screen science fiction, but the state-of-the-art effects that animate the gruesome creature features are strictly '90s. Where cherished classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers used aliens as thinly disguised symbols of communism and the epidemic paranoia it induced during the McCarthy era, Species offers a chilling update. Roger Donaldson's film is slick sci-fi for the age of AIDS. The invasion of the body is as deadly as ever, but the path is sexual.

The explanation is that the rules were different then and the Cold War overrode niceties about experimenting on unwitting humans and taking liberties that would be both unthinkable and illegal today. The latest revelations, concerning a 1950s bout of "body snatching" for studies of the effects of nuclear fallout, will surely be defended as understandable in its context. Certainly, some allowance must be made for the evolution of humanistic safeguards in the conduct of research, creeping though it has been.