It’s rare for a remake of a genre film to be better than the original, but a second remake that goes toe-to-toe with both its predecessors is rarer still. Abel Ferrara, the New York exploitation auteur behind The Driller Killer and Ms. 45, expanded his career to more ambitious and experimental extremes in the 1990s, and that included Body Snatchers, Ferrara’s first sci-fi, his first for a major studio, and the third overall adaptation of Jack Finney’s sci-fi novel The Body Snatchers.
An accomplished depictor of unease and violation, Ferrara matches the lean pacing of the B-movie original but also brings a colder and unnerving edge to the body-and-identity horror. Thanks to a new 4K restoration courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome, this underloved sci-fi remake can finally sing—or scream.
