- Directed by Jack Sholder
- Written by Jim Kouf
- Stars Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Nouri, Claudia Christian
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 37 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl-iB4WAB0o
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This is heavily a science fiction cop action drama, but it has enough body snatching and body horror elements to qualify for the genre. Overall it’s a good story that’s well-made.
Synopsis
We get grainy black-and-white security footage from a bank as the credits roll. We watch a man walk in and look around carefully. Then he pulls out a shotgun and starts blasting. He stops and looks right into the camera and then smiles before shooting it.
The man gets into a sports car and speeds away, but the police are right behind him. There’s mayhem and damage as he causes other crashes and hits people.
Tom Beck, a detective, is already looking for the man, whose name is Jack DeVries. He soon arrives at a massive roadblock, gets shot many more times, and gets blown up. Somehow, they actually take him alive, but he’s on a ventilator in the hospital and not expected to survive. Detective Willis rattles off just how many crimes DeVries was guilty of, much more than just what we saw.
At the police station, Lloyd Gallagher from the FBI comes to the police chief to be assigned a local cop as a partner. He’s looking for DeVries as well; he wasn’t aware the man had been captured.
At the hospital, DeVries gets up and some kind of tentacled slug crawls out of his mouth and into the patient in the next bed. It’s quite large. The new man, Jonathan Miller, is said to be a very kind and honest man. He’s currently out violently robbing a record store.
Gallagher then comes to Beck, wanting to find Miller. That’s strange because Miller has no record at all. Beck gets the call from the record store and finds that Miller was the guy who did it. Why would he suddenly turn bad? Gallagher is vague about what’s going on, but he says the criminal he’s chasing assumes other people’s identities.
Miller watches Senator Holt on TV, and he’s very interested. Miller sees a sports car that he likes and chases it, but Miller’s got a bad heart. He eventually… gets the car.
Gallagher tells Beck that the perpetrator killed his partner. Beck invites him over for dinner. Gallagher is very strange, and he eats strangely. He does everything strangely. He also mentions the perpetrator killed his wife and daughter.
Meanwhile, Miller goes to a strip club, but we can see that he’s bleeding. The police spot his stolen car out front and they call Beck. Miller goes into the dressing room and harasses Brenda, one of the strippers. We soon see that his “bug” has transferred into Brenda.
There’s a wild car chase and a shootout; Brenda is hit several times but still runs away. Gallagher shoots her a dozen times and then points a strange device at her. Rather than be captured, she says she won’t come out and jumps off the roof. The police lieutenant’s dog investigates her dead body, but no people approach.
We see the dog growling when it sees Gallagher. Beck has seen enough to know something very strange is going on. When Gallagher refuses to explain further, Beck orders his arrest. With a background check, Beck finds out that Lloyd Gallagher was supposedly killed in a forest fire a month ago. He’s not who he says he is.
Gallagher admits what’s going on. There’s an alien creature that moves from one body to another. It can only be killed when it’s between bodies. He thinks that now that it knows he’s after it, that it’ll come after him. He’s been tracking it for nine years and now it’s here on Earth. Unconvinced, Beck locks Gallagher in a cell.
The police lieutenant, Masterson, comes to the station. Meanwhile, in the police lab, the technician finds Gallagher’s weapon, and Masterson hears it fire; he takes the weapon and a shotgun. He takes Beck hostage and shoots up the police station.
Now believing the story, Beck lets Gallagher out of his cell. It’s moved into Willis, Beck’s partner, now. Willis is going after Senator Holt for some reason. Willis goes in shooting and gets Beck twice in the stomach.
Willis corners the senator after killing all his security. They soon find Willis dead, and the senator gives Gallagher a look.
The senator gives a press conference and announces that he wants to be President. Gallagher runs into the crowded room, and he’s shot many times but keeps going. He pulls out a flamethrower and blasts the senator right on stage. The bug crawls out of the senator, and everyone sees it. Gallagher blasts it with his ray gun, and it explodes.
At the hospital, Beck dies, but Gallagher is there and puts himself inside Beck. His true form is more like an energy beam of light rather than the slug bug that his enemy was. Gallagher, now empty, dies, but Beck opens his eyes.
Commentary
We know from early on that the “perpetrator” is an alien that takes over innocent peoples’ bodies, but it’s a long while before Gallagher explains it to Beck.
The special effects are minimal; the bug creature was stop-motion. It’s more sci-fi police action than horror, but it’s got a lot of “body snatcher” and “alien invasion” elements, so we’ll call it horror.