This is Not My Paranoid Fantasy.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1978 movie directed by Philip Kaufman. It reminds me of the time I spent a day in Anne Heche's brain.  I know it sounds silly now when you hear about Anne getting arrested and walking around the desert with no clothes on and talking to God about taking people back to heaven in a spaceship...but I'm still not convinced she was wrong. It's like Woody Allen says, "What if nothing exists and we're all in someone else's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?"  What if Anne Heche isn't crazy?  What if we're the ones who have it all wrong and she's just the noble-hearted tramp trying to save humanity by leading us to a celestial alien paradise?

See, this is what watching 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' does to a person. It absorbs you into its paranoid fantasy and makes you sympathetic towards the plight of the everyday schizophrenic.

The movie is actually a remake of a 1956 sci-fi flick of the same name directed by Don Siegel (Dirty Harry) and starring Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter.  The 1978 version stars Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Leonard Nimoy.  It has a really rad opening scene where we see these wispy, ethereal organisms floating up from an unknown planet like dandelion seeds and landing on Earth.  They grow into strange little flowers that contain these pods.  After Brooke Adams takes home one of the flowers, she notices that her boyfriend begins acting very strangely, kind of like a soulless yuppie.  She confides in her co-worker Donald Sutherland, who takes her to his psychologist friend Leonard Nimoy.  The doctor tells her it's all in her head. Calm down, baby, don't worry that pretty, little head of yours. Here, take a sedative. (I'm paraphrasing.)  But soon it becomes pretty apparent that half the population of San Francisco is acting strangely, as if they're all in on some global conspiracy.  The rest of the movie has Sutherland, Adams, my man Jeff Goldblum, and Alien-alum Cartwright on the run, trying to escape the fate of the pod people.

And now we enter spoiler-ish territory, so beware...

The pod people are duplicates of humans that take over their lives. Kaufman does a fantastic job of slowly building this atmosphere of quiet, unsettling terror.  So when we actually see these giant pods birthing out doubles, it's all the more shocking.  Most of the movie I was enjoying the sort of cerebral sci-fi thriller that I thought 'Invasion' was, then all of a sudden we have this fully bizarre, disturbing sequence where a naked Donald Sutherland double comes writhing out of this vaginal pod flower.

This damn youtube clip isn't embedding so watch it here.

By the time Donald bashes his own double's skull in, it's like suddenly you're watching an early David Cronenberg movie.  Heads will explode.

Sidenote:

Seriously is it just me, or is there an uncanny resemblance between Brooke Adams, Margot Kidder, and Karen Allen?

I'm not ruling out the possibility that they were concocted in a laboratory by Spielberg, DePalma, and Kaufman when they were in between making movies and hanging out at the beach.  KaRooGot were Frankenhooker triplet pleasure bots with secondary programming as actresses until Margot Kidder malfunctioned and went rogue. If you don't believe me, just look it up in the footnotes of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.