Rish Outfield's reviews
This film is truly terrifying. And I hate it. It is also one of the best horror films I have ever seen.
As a impressionable boy, this film scared the bejeezus out of me, causing me to have nightmares and beg my parents to sleep with them. All these years later, I saw it again, and the first thing I thought as I went to bed was, "Man, I wish I wasn't alone tonight." Wow, it's so amazingly scary, even all these years later. And it's so much better written than the majority of the last twenty years horror films. Donald Sutherland's performance is wonderful. The entire cast is fantastic. Brooke Adams can still do that thing with her eyes. Is Jeff Goldblum a Scream King yet? Leonard Nimoy is great in his best non-Spock role ever (just how long was he one of them anyway?). The dog/man. The cameo by Kevin McCarthy. The nut-shriveling screech the pod people make. The creepy feeling of paranoia even before the invasion begins. The ending is among the most chilling I have ever seen.
The original 1956 film is really good, but this is one of those rare sequels/remakes that surpasses its predecessor. I seems like Horror is a genre where that tends to happen more often than others.
But I said I hated it, didn't I? The reason I hate this film is because it so scares me, disturbs me, and gets in my already-paranoid head. Is there any hope for us? The thought of not being you anymore, or those you care about not being themselves--it scares everyone. I find the loss of individuality completely terrifying. It's used with the Borg in the "Star Trek" series, in The Stepford Wives, in John Carpenter's Thing, in the mediocre 1995 remake Body Snatchers, to a certain extent with some vampire and zombie movies, and in the recent The Faculty. But I've never seen it used so effectively as it is in this 1978 film (that still feels fresh and topical). I guess I don't really HATE this movie, but I am unnerved by it, it pained me, and I found myself close to agonizing tears more than once in watching it. Does that make sense?
Does anything?
Best Scare: The last two seconds of the flick. But almost from the beginning, there's a dark cloud of apprehension and dread that hangs over everything, that chills me . . . and should you as well.
I'd Recommend It To: Oh, see it, rush out and see it. Someday, everyone will have seen it. And those that haven't will be found out. And replaced.

The tyranist's thoughts
In one of my favorite science-fiction genres, these movies have been the core for a long time. I say these, because because this one is the one people are familiar with even though the '56 version is what made it possible for this one to exist. Okay, maybe not everyone only knows this one, but a lot do. In fact, I will admit right here that I have never seen the '56 version (as bad as I want to). It seems overlooked now.
Either way it doesn't really matter. This movie is a masterpiece of horror that was ahead of its time but also endures well. So many horror movies (short of slashers) from the seventies don't endure well because they rely on a social conscience that no longer exists. This also relies on that social conscience, but it transcends it in a way that lets all of us even more than twenty years later identify with the characters. Jeff Goldblum, Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, and Veronica Cartwright pull us into a nightmare that is possibly only matched in Romero's Night of the Living Dead series. We are being replaced and there aren't many of us left. That makes even closest friends suspicious (of course, not suspicious enough as we find out). And the ending. It is haunting. Let's just say "Amazing Grace" has never had so many meanings in so short a time. See this one. It would be fun to marathon them, but often it is impossibled to find all three available. I had to settle for the two most recent when I tried it.