No one is immune to low-budget turkeys, of course, not even in the distinguished United Kingdom, and one of the most lackluster examples of the 1960s, or of sci-fi in general, is 1969’s The Body Stealers. Not The Body Snatchers but The Body Stealers. It’s an important distinction, and unfortunately that’s where the distinctiveness ends because the movie ends up falling undeniably flat.
It all opens at an air base, where a routine paratrooper run is taking place. Everything is extremely normal, and to be honest, the footage of the skydivers is pretty impressive, but then the paratroopers start glowing and after that they disappear. The top brass are horrified, so they bring in a ringer, Bob (Patrick Allen) to find out what’s going on.
Bob is a player, and he’s fine with leaving his very blonde pilot girlfriend to come to the base, where he makes contact with Dr. Matthews (Maurice Evans) and lab tech Julie Slade (Hilary Heath), who are also on the case. They’ve found one of the victims, and Julie’s able to determine that the tissue samples taken from the body have been changed by whatever zapped him. How have they changed? We don’t know, because the movie doesn’t tell us or show us anything.
This is all pretty troubling, but Bob is more concerned with Lorna (Pamela Conway), a beautiful woman who he met on the beach. Bob being Bob, he works fast, and he and Lorna meet on the beach many times and in many different ways. Yeah, they sleep together, mostly off-camera. She seems innocent and nice but also extremely mysterious. Like Dracula of yore, she doesn’t show up in photographs, either. Hmmmm.
It all culminates in the finding of a secret underground lair. As in, Julie finds it first, not Bob. In fact, Julie’s more invested in the mystery than Bob is, and she makes some pretty interesting discoveries. She also finds out that certain of her colleagues aren’t who they seem to be and that those other disappeared pilots aren’t as far off as they all thought.
Oh, and Lorna’s there, too. She’s an alien. Her planet is dying because their population is dying off. Yeah, those are all spoilers but I really don’t care. Anyone can see this new “twist” coming from a mile away, mostly because there’s not much else happening. Bob shows up to be the hero, although he’s been completely ineffectual the entire time, at least as an investigator. Why the Royal Air Force called him in is a mystery, because he does absolutely nothing but check in with Julie and Dr. Matthews in between trysts with Lorna.
The premise of this movie is clever. The execution, not so much. I know people complain about Body Stealers’ low budget, but as Poverty Row has taught us, a low budget, even a non-existent one, doesn’t necessarily doom a film to failure in terms of plot and the final product. It might just up the creativity factor. Body Stealers doesn’t do this, though–its plot comes to a screeching halt about two-thirds of the way through.
It’s so easily avoided, too. Like, it wouldn’t have taken much to get Lorna out among regular people instead of just down on the beach. It’s no mystery that she’s an alien, but fish-out-of-water scenarios are always fun, even if Lorna just goes to the local pub or something. Or walks down the village high street. Get people looking and wondering who she is and everything gets much more interesting.
But no, we only see her at the beach. And in her lair at the end of the movie. There’s nothing wrong with the beach, of course, but the rest gets very expected and ho-hum, capped off by a flaccid ending that I won’t spoil. All I’ll say is that it’s so boring that the credits are almost a relief.
The public and the critics seemed to agree, and the prevailing attitude both in 1969 and today seems to be the less said about The Body Stealers, the better. There’s very little information to be found about the movie online because, well, there’s not much to say or care about. The movie doesn’t have a cult following like some bad movies do. TCM doesn’t even have anything about it. TimeOut calls the film “threadbare, vapid, and feeble.”
As if in echo, an archived edition of Cinefantastique summed up The Body Stealers thusly:
Patrick Allen is a stolid hero, though his performance is routine. Miss Wetherell is adequate and George Sanders does a cameo. Neil Connery (brother of Sean) is surprisingly able as Allen’s friend and Lorna Wilde (in her first screen role) is a fetching alien. Unfortunately, Mr. Allen is curiously un¬ concerned at the unorthodox behavior of Miss Wilde, including her abrupt appearances and disappearances, and the fact that she fails to appear in photographs…Sequences alluding to the mid-air adbuctions and some of the special effects are interesting, but in general INVASION OF THE BODY STEALERS is adequate but undistinguished science fiction.
I have nothing to add. Seriously. I am very glad to leave The Body Stealers behind and forget I ever saw it.
No blogathons next month because it happens sometimes, but give us another month or two in the blogging world and things will be hopping again. That said, another post is coming up on Tuesday. Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you then…
The Body Stealers is free to stream on Tubi.
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Here in the US, it was routine in the 70’s for low budget “schlock” to be released over and over – the same movie with a different name – a sucker born every minute it seems!
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