Invasion of the Body Snatchers

It causes insomnia and then inevitable nightmares.

A well directed, if frequently mocked, narrow little metaphor for the perils of group-think and McCarthyism. It's certainly a product of both its genre and the era, from the wide-eyed straight man constantly running to escape a hidden threat to the blunt, hammer-to-the-temple methods of the plot structure. I most enjoyed the opening act, when the jury was still out on whether the monstrous mimics were real or imagined. Though we can gather our answers from the title alone, it's fun to explore things from the other perspective and the film seems to enjoy dallying in that uncertainty, too. Once the giant, clumsy, man-sized sea pods start showing up, it's time for a hard turn into the cheesy stuff and a subsequent tumble into the usual pit of 1950's sci-fi tropes. The ending is a horrible mismatch, too, quite obviously crammed in at the last moment and completely at-odds with the message and the pace of the preceding seventy minutes. I couldn't stop thinking about one particular episode of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.