Enter the Asylum: Invasion of the Pod People
A slight change to our programming as Netflix, for some reason, stopped streaming Alien vs Hunter, The Asylum’s take on Alien vs Predator. Instead, the next available movie was Invasion of the Pod People, which came out in 2007 to rip off the Nicole Kidman/Daniel Craig re-imagining of the classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Still no slumming actual actors? Yup, that’s definitely one of the most surprising things I’ve discovered on this journey is that I thought there was always at least one washed up B or C level actor in the mix for each Asylum movie but instead, the majority of them feature the same sort of rogues gallery of terrible actors. Pod People is kind of special because it brings in pretty much every actress featured in past Asylum movies because the aliens seem to target horrible, bitchy models.
What’s the plot of thing? A meteor shower hits, and seemingly only effects, a few blocks of downtown Los Angeles and the agents and clients of a modeling agency start to seemingly change into different people, with their personalities changing drastically overnight. Melissa, our main heroine, starts to notice the change but doesn’t really do much to try and figure out what is going on, as she’s busy getting into weird lesbian situations with the newly infected pod people and dealing with her always out of town boyfriend and model agency drama.
Why are the aliens lesbians? Probably because the movie is so terrible, it was an excuse to try and keep people’s attention but there’s no story reason. There’s really no story reason for anything, actually.
How terrible is the movie? It’s probably one of the most incompetent movies I’ve ever seen outside of Birdemic. The sound recording is awful, especially in the bizarre industrial building that the houses the supposed modeling agency:
There’s pretty much near constant background noise of air blowing through the vents, covering up most of the dialogue and a lot of other times characters in the background are not picked up at all on the microphone. It’s pretty obvious that they blew their entire wad for the year on Transmorphers and had to figure out how they could shoot a movie within a few square blocks Asylum HQ. Even the way it looks feels cheap, like they couldn’t even rent actual cameras and just shot everything on iPhones or something.
Does it at least follow the plot of Body Snatchers? Besides the general concept of people getting replaced, not really. There’s a seemingly crazy man who arrives at Melissa’s apartment, warns her about the aliens and then kills himself but she doesn’t seem too concerned about it, although she does buy a gun from a way too enthusiastic pawn shop owner.
There’s definitely none of the paranoia and dread of any of the adaptations and it doesn’t really seem like it’s happening anywhere else on Earth outside of the downtown Los Angeles area and it’s also just turning horrible people nicer and hornier, so probably not the worst invasion that could happen.
Is it worth watching? Hell no, watch either the 1956 or 1978 versions of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers instead and forget this atrocity ever happened.
Next Time (although it may change): Lorenzo Lamas leads a modern take on the classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, although with another 10,000 leagues added on to make it more extreme.