Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers was famously adapted into a 1956 film by director Don Siegel. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a wonderful exercise in Cold War paranoia, and remains rightfully considered a science fiction classic. The novel was adapted a second time in 1978 by Philip Kaufman, which has over time developed a well-earned reputation for updating the story to a more contemporary era. The third time Finney’s novel was adapted, the results were less successful. We still watch and praise the 1956 and 1978 versions, but nobody ever talks about Abel Ferrara’s 1993 science fiction thriller Body Snatchers.

Teenager Marti (Gabrille Anwar) moves with her father (Terry Kenney) and stepmother (Meg Tilly) to an American army base in Alabama, while he conducts environmental tests on dangerous chemicals that have been stored there. Strange happenings are afoot, starting with a panicked MP confronting Marti in a restroom and growing into a unsettling transformation of the base’s personnel and families. By the the nature of the changes becomes clear, it may already be too late.

Body Snatchers is a sort of reverse ‘third-time’s-the-charm’. While the two earlier Body Snatchers find clever methods to use the material to reflect American society, Ferrara works from a deeply flawed concept and fails to deliver anything of quality. The director has spoken in interviews of his fascination comparing the emotionless state of the invading aliens with the bottled-up reservations of military culture, and as a result transposed the action from small town and city life to an army base. It is a shift that struggles to work, since there is little to no contrast in a community that controls its emotion being overtaken by invaders that do not have emotions at all.

It is also a far less resonant setting. Any viewer can relate to becoming suspicious of their neighbours. Nowhere near as many can speak to experience of doubting their military chain of command. The end result in this case is a film that simply is not that interesting: whatever it is that makes The Body Snatchers endure has been removed entirely. The film also wants desperately for nuance: the ‘body snatchers’ are presented as actively malevolent, rather than the more uncertain and ambiguous identity they have had in the past.

Meg Tilly does some sensational work during the film’s middle act, and has the backing of some great screenwriting to help. Sadly other characters do not receive the same benefit. Gabrielle Anwar feels awfully bland in the lead role, and the shift of protagonist from respected physician to pouting teenager does the story few favours. Terry Kenney is oddly ordinary as Marti’s father. Love interest Tim (The Lost Boys‘ Billy Wirth as an attack helicopter pilot) comes across as a statutory rape prosecution in the making. R. Lee Ermey (Full Metal Jacket) plays R. Lee Ermey.

Ferrara has demonstrated an excellent gift for developing interesting, often off-kilter films before and since Body Snatchers. Perhaps that is why, in this case, it feels so dreadfully like work-for-hire. Nothing really stands out here. Nothing is memorable. It does not just feature emotionless aliens on the screen; it feels like they made the movie too.