Sleepless and Skedaddle

By RICHARD CORLISS

Marti Malone (Gabrielle Anwar) stops at a gas station near the Army base where her family is to spend the next month. In the restroom she is surprised by a large man who stifles her cries and whispers the warning "They get you when you sleep!" His words are like a bedtime story's ultimate threat: Keep listening to this tale, my child. If you nod off before the end, you could die.

Sleep is supposed to be the kingdom of our own monsters -- that nightscape where the id, unshackled by scruple, runs wild and plays out every dreamer's scenarios of fear fulfillment. But in his 1954 science-fiction novel The Body Snatchers, Jack Finney had an even spookier idea: that sleep is when the sentry of common sense nods off and allows our enemies, not ourselves, to invade and conquer. Pod seeds fall from outer space and rob sleeping humans of their emotions, their very selves. It was Us vs. Them, cold-war style -- and in this cunning parable of persecution, Them could be communism or McCarthyism. It could be any ism bent on robbing the U.S. (Us) of its ragged individualism.

Finney's fable has passed the time test (40 years is forever in pop culture), having been filmed twice as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by Don Siegel in 1956 and Philip Kaufman in 1978. The first movie, punctuating California's small-town sunniness with the thunder of deadpan mobocracy, became a cult classic. Both pictures met the horror-movie challenge: they kept moviegoers up all night, ashiver with apprehension.

And now, just when you thought it was safe to take a nap, comes a third version. Body Snatchers, as the story is called this time, is smart and spooky. It cleverly twists the plot so the lonely hero battling the pods is now a plucky, skeptical teenage girl. And it expands on the theme of emotional isolation until it embraces, and then nearly annihilates, the whole postnuclear family.

Long before the pods start wrapping their tendrils around sleeping bodies, Marti and her family are plenty estranged. The girl is annoyed with her father (Terry Kinney), resentful of her stepmother (Meg Tilly) and jealous of the woman's attentions to her own small son (Reilly Murphy). Why, Marti might almost believe -- as so many teens do of their own families -- that her broody brood is a pack of soulless zombies from another planet. But paranoia is merely another word for self-preservation; and Marti, who never hides her raw feelings, is just the person to detect the wholesale poddifying of her family. By the end, and for the noblest cause -- saving the earth -- she will need to see them all killed.

This handsomely crafted studio production, unaccountably left to languish for a year in the Warner Bros. vault, comes from an unlikely auteur: poverty- row director Abel Ferrara, whose earlier work, from Ms. 45 to Bad Lieutenant, is a gallery of Grunge Guignol. Somehow, flanked by five scripters (including his regular collaborator Nicholas St. John), he managed to stoke his tale with the eerie subtlety of the best old B movies.

He also coaxed top performances from his cast, especially the lead actresses. Tilly, with her otherworldly glamour, is a New Age evil stepmother; in her sleepytime voice, pod threats have the thrill of seduction. And Anwar (Al Pacino's dance partner in Scent of a Woman) plays Marti as honest, balky, easily bruised; already she has the edgy assurance of a pro slated for stardom. Her soft lashes and wary eyes, which make her look as if she has just been prodded awake into a nightmare, key this haunting film's message: that life has to be faced with eyes wide open. Otherwise . . . to sleep, perchance to scream.