Favorite Classic Sci-fi Movies

The 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers ranks #9 on the American Film Institutes list of the top 10 Sci-Fi movies. The movie is referenced in more than 100 movies and TV shows. It is the one of the movies from that decade that kept children (and I suspect adults) awake at night.

Imagine a featureless sleeping body taking the shape of your friend as you watch. You see mothers carrying large plant-like pods into the houses and placing them next to sleeping children. Your friends are behaving strangely. There is nowhere to run and no one to trust. Do not fall asleep.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - 1978

The 1978 remake stands on its own. It is almost word for word of the original movie although the special effects were better and scarier. The difference is the ending where there was no redemption for humanity. Kevin McCarthy's cameo appearance shows him running down the street still screaming about aliens. Leonard Nimoy and Donald Sutherland were assimilated, so at the end, everyone knew there was no hope for Jeff Goldblum.

Robert Duvall has a cameo appearance as the priest on the swing and Deadheads will appreciate that the banjo player on the soundtrack was Jerry Garcia.

The Crawling Eye - 1958

The fog and the tendrils snake out towards their victims. The eyeball at the door of the Swiss mountain resort ogles the little girl until Alan Brooks, played by a very young Forest Tucker, snatch her from death's door. The fog freezes the cable lines and you hold your breath until they reach the shelter at the top of the mountain. This was on the edge of your seat entertainment. How many children who saw the movie in 1958 are still looking for the eye, even today, as they drive through fog? It did capture the imagination of Steven King who included the crawling eye in his novel "It". The children run into the eye in the sewer.

Waking up from a sound sleep, the child jumps out of bed and rushes to the window. The sound is strange and he sees something crash into the sand dunes. He runs to wake up his parents. Dad goes out to check and the child watches as he drops into something on the other side of the dune. When Dad comes back, he is just not the same.

He soon discovers that others are also different. Fortunately, the army comes in and defeats the aliens. The family goes home and the kid, safe and secure that the monsters are gone, goes to bed. He wakes up to a strange sound and sees something crash into the sand dunes.

For younger children this is the easiest explanation of déjà vu. It is also scary to think that this child's world is now in an unending loop. Was the world ever saved from the Martians? Apparently the question is still unanswered as bigger children still think about the movie. It was mentioned in the October 12, 2005 episode of NCIS.

This is an incredible story with a powerful ending, aided by the narration of Orson Wells. Children may not understand why the character, Scott Carey, is shrinking (a bad combination of radiation and insecticide) but his struggle to survive, as he gets smaller will capture their attention. It is a message movie for the adults but kids watch the battle with the spider, using a straight pin as a sword, with awe. In the Monk episode, "Mr. Monk's other brother", that aired in 2009, they were watching this movie.