User reviews

After a meteor shower in California, Melissa feels that her co-workers and her boss Samantha that work in the agency owned by Vickland are acting differently after receiving a weird plant.

This film has terrible sound, weak visuals, abysmal acting. I cannot even say there was any direction involved. As for the story, how do the writers sleep at night claiming they wrote this? The story was already written (a few times)... all they had to do was steal the credit.

This sinks even below the low standards that The Asylum usually holds itself to. Rather than be released, it should have been just been erased and burned in a bonfire. They could not even do the soft-core scenes right (of which there are far too many).

Picked this up in a 10-movie pack for five bucks at K-Mart.

Is it classic sci-fi? No. Is it a very good movie? Hardly.

But I look at it this way: 50 cents for a flick about an alien ginger plant that turns mean girls into sex-starved, naked lesbians? Oh, yeah, K-Mart, here's my four bits. Can't buy me a Hershey bar for that anymore.

Gotta admit, I find a certain charm to The Asylum's "mockbuster" movies. They remind me of my childhood, when I'd read "Cinemagic" magazine and make my own "Star Wars" films on Super-8. Terrible, to be sure, but made with a modicum of love and reverence for the source material.

In rare cases, Asylum's movies are actually better than those they're aping. I'll take "Allan Quartermain and the Temple of Skulls" any day over the incomprehensible "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." And while the first "Aliens Vs. Predator" was good in a comic book sort of way, "AVP: Requiem" didn't make a lick of sense. Asylum's "AVH: Alien Vs. Hunter," starring aged stoner William Katt, was far more enjoyable. And who'da thunk Asylum's martial arts version of "I Am Legend" -- titled "I Am Omega" and starring that dude from "Iron Chef" -- would be as charming as it is? Not me, brother. But it's now my second favorite version of the story, next to Vincent Price's classic "The Last Man on Earth."

For the record, I'm not some Asylum company suit posting fake positive reviews, and I acknowledge the vast majority of Asylum's output is crapola. I'm just some guy who appreciates bad movies, and The Asylum tends to make more of those than anyone else.

And as long as K-Mart keeps selling them for 50 cents, I'm gonna keep buying them.

First of all, the title of the movie is a clear indicator of what you are in for here. "Invasion of the Pod People" was very much a shameful rip-off of the classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", except it was just a horrible rendering of a classic movie.

I managed to sustain 42 minutes of the ordeal that is "Invasion of the Pod People" before I just gave up out of utter and complete boredom with the movie. Nothing happened throughout this time, unless you could women getting naked and making out and questionable acting as being worth mentioning of something happening.

The movie sounded like the audio was recorded from inside an empty metal barrel. The sound was just so annoying and poorly recorded. And more often than not that sound was serving as a nuisance and as an anchor around the movie.

Even the storyline was a blatant rip-off off the classic movie, but just don't less skillful. A meteor shower bring foreign celestial to Earth. And while the people see these objects as harmless, they harbor a darker purpose and a sinister ability to clone those in their vicinity.

The acting in the movie was wooden, rigid and questionable. It was obvious why most of the women on the cast list had been cast for this particular movie. Erica Kessler was actually doing a good enough performance from what I managed to witness, but then the script made her get naked as well. I am not a prude or anything, but the nudity in this movie was too excessive and didn't really serve the movie well.

"Invasion of the Pod People" was nowhere near to doing justice to the classic movie that the writers Ron Magid, Jay Marks and Leigh Scott so shamelessly had ripped off.

I have no intention of returning to finish watching "Invasion of the Pod People", and I would recommend that you watch the original movie over this at any time.

I watched the whole of Invasion of the Pod People with low expectations. Asylum makes rip-offs. But I didn't expect it to be this bad.

In terms of content, I can't figure out what we were supposed to see. Clothed humping? Naked women caressing each other? The movie was labeled (in a ten-pack) as a sci-fi movie, however it has elements of horror and random sex scenes thrown in, presumably just to appeal to the adult audience in the most effort-free way possible.

From a technical perspective, this movie is bad. The video looks decent but it's almost completely devoid of special effects. The audio is horrible -- the models' main office sounds like it's located right next to a loud washing machine. (And you KNOW it's the main office because the girls have nowhere else to go when they need to talk.) In outside scenes, people's voices are occasionally overpowered by the wind.

The dialog is horrible. Often I had to rewind and listen to the dialog again just to see if it made as little sense as I thought:

Zach: "I'm here to warn you. 'Cuz if you don't warn other people, there'll be nobody, like you, left." Melissa: "who?" Zach: "them."

Gun shop owner: "Maybe you should think about a shotgun, it only shoots in four directions... north, south, east, and west."

The girls' competence wavers drastically. One girl cannot figure out long-standing relational problems she has that are more than obvious to the viewers, and her friends. However she has a Sherlockian moment when she is able to accurately predict more about the aliens than even the audience knows.

But as the movie progresses, I start to wonder how horrible the pod people are (besides their tendency to constantly repeat "we just want to help you"), versus the regular people in this story. Before their transformations the men are hyperactive, the women are snobbish and whiny. Afterwards, everybody is extremely kind and easygoing. The Pod People seem to resort to violence only when absolutely necessary, feeling that gentle, kind coercion is the best option -- not bad for a race that's attempting to take over Earth.

Honest to goodness, after I watched that movie, I yearned for everyone to be a Pod Person -- no hammy acting, no annoying voices, no screwy dialogue.

Shame on anyone who gives this more than one star! (And that's generous.) This film is so cataclysmically dreadful that if the doctor tells you that you have two weeks to live, watch this film. You'll want the two weeks to end quickly.

The first couple of scenes start off well. Girl watches TV news report about mysterious meteorite shower, girl goes outside to see meteors blazing across the sky... nice. Then the camera cuts to her face and her reaction is precisely what I'd expect from someone who opened a carton of milk and found milk in it.

That was a clue to the standard of acting throughout. But it's still better than the lighting and audio.

As for the story... well, let's just say that what we have here is a porn script, complete with porn direction, but without the scenes you really paid your money for. Oh, there's soft porn, but it's as inept as everything else about this film.

And then there's the mysterious alien plant that's key to the pod people's invasion. Surely someone could have found some modeling clay and a bit of paint. But no, our prop is a piece of ginger. Not one character in the film recognized it as a piece of ginger. I'm not sure what offends me more: the fact that the prop is so dismally unimaginative, or the fact that no one on the production team seems to recognize a popular grocery item.

How do films this bad get made? It may be low budget but someone still had to put up the funds for this tripe. Did it make a profit? I need to go for a lie down.

In all honesty though that is not saying all that much. It is better than the likes of 2012: Doomsday, Alien Origin, Titanic II, Transmorphers, AVH: Alien vs. Hunter, Death Racers, War of the Worlds 2 and Universal Soldiers, but it is nowhere near tolerable(of the Asylum's movies I've seen so far their best has been I Am Omega, which was only on the decently-average side). Eric Roby is decent, but his performance is the only asset that is that. The special effects are thankfully at least not overused but they are still very artificial looking, but the dark unfocused lighting and the hopelessly choppy editing were what cheapened the film visually. The music is forgettable and repetitive, while the sound effects were even worse, there is far too much muddied noise in the background in every scene that sometimes the dialogue is incoherent. And speaking of the dialogue, it's no great shakes either, very cheesy and lacking any kind of flow, while the story is thin and predictable with scenes that either drag on or abruptly end. The characters are ones you don't learn anything about and also get on your nerves, and the rest of the acting shows no charisma or inspired line delivery whatsoever. The ladies are hot but their talent ends there. So in conclusion, really bad but The Asylum have done much worse. 2/10 Bethany Cox

Can you remember "Debbie Does Dallas"? Well, the acting in this one is almost as good. Remember "Plan 9 From Outer Space"? Well, at least Ed Wood managed to make it so bad it's good. No such luck here.

I wouldn't even want to slur first-year film school by comparing this to the efforts of any beginner.

If I had to guess, I'd say somebody bought a HD camcorder, invited all his friends around for the weekend and let's see what happens when you press and hold the red button.

David Latt seems to be in the business of churning out no-budget video productions with non-actors, negligible plots and spaceships-on-strings special effects.

I beseech you, do not dignify any of these by contemplating watching them. Go watch some paint dry, or a game of cricket. Oh, wait. Same thing.

After a meteor shower in California, Melissa (Erica Roby) feels that her co-workers and her boss Samantha (Jessica Bork) that work in the agency owned by Vickland (Michael Tower) are acting differently after receiving a weird plant. She shares her fears with her colleague Billie (Danae Nason) and with Detective Alexander (Marat Glaer) that are the only persons that she can trust.

"Invasion of the Pod People" is another remake of the classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", actually an awful rip-off. Erica Roby is the best in this flick, showing he lovely breasts and naked body and having a good performance with the poor script. This sci-fi – horror movie is so bad that the best scene is the lesbian party promoted by Samantha, especially when she seduces Melissa. The actors have lame performances in this forgettable crap. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "Devoradores de Almas" ("Souls Devours")

This movie had all the qualifications of a bad, bad movie; bad acting, bad dialog, poor plot progression, terrible soundtrack quality, bad set selection, scenes of people talking on cell phones, scenes of people in cars, stock footage and really bad special effects. When I see films like this I think, this was someone's film school project. The truth is it was probably an independent film festival project or made for Showtime.

To describe the acting as bad is using creative license on my part. There wasn't much acting in the film but there was a good bit of reading of cue cards or TelePrompter. The people in the film look at the side of the camera in every scene. The soundtrack had a lot of unexplained noise in a few scenes. The noise, which I figured out was supposed to be the pods multiplying, was so loud that the dialog was unintelligible.

The plot of the film would have been difficult to follow if I hadn't read the description on the DVD cover. The characters of the movie supposedly worked for a modeling agency. The story the film presents is; There's a company named Blockthorn that does something and one guy, the boss, wants something done and yells at his employees about getting it right. Then some of the employees become obsessed with a strange plant. One of the employees is attacked by a pod from the plant and then keeps sharing the plant with her coworkers. Yes, this movie was so bad that I wanted to turn away. But we suffered through to the end which left the plot open as if they intend to make a sequel.

Then there's the sex. Of course these pods from outer space know about seduction and use it to acquire their pod victims. There where at least four sex scenes with topless ladies. But these scenes were bad too cause only in low budget films to folks have sex without taking their pants and skirts off. Invasion of the Pod People is just bad. I wouldn't recommend that anyone watch this film.

I am a big fan of movies with this plot. There are a number of older movies with similar plots that to myself are very engaging. I fear that what makes this less so is the actual shallowness of the actresses and actors making up the cast. A movie like "decoys" has a fine cast, or else time was spent working with them and bringing out their performances. One feels empathy for both sides of the fence in that film. On the other hand, in this movie, though the acting later on is at times competent (but at times not), it is nonetheless next to impossible to root for the heroines or hate the villainous aliens because of weak performances in the earlier portion of the film. We do not see these people early on, with a couple of exceptions, showing any defiance to their trance-like condition as humans. They are cogs in the wheel. Maybe an alien race or Scientology would "bring them out of their pods" and help them experience their possibilities (that appears to be the big joke of the movie).

I am sure that the hope was to get an attractive cast and have them engage in some kinky sex as a subplot, without too much attention to finding truly likable performers. Unfortunately, because the characters don't have that depth, this lesbian and on-the-job sex is mostly uninteresting. If I were making a film and I could not get the leads to appear less shallow than this, or to have more consistency as characters, I would probably blame the culture the performers grew up in. 20 or 30 years ago it would be easy to find a few good character actresses to play these roles, but It could take years to find the right people nowadays, because none of the performers read books or give themselves enough time away from the hedonistic culture they're apart of to learn the art and pleasures of independent and critical thought. Therefore they could have no concept of what a writer, director or audience would need from them in these roles, or the nuances that a story like this one could offer if done well.

What I'm saying is that this genre is particularly dependent on something ironically lacking here, the knowledge of what it means to be freely independent of thought.

I've become a sort of connoisseur of Asylum movies. It's sort of like a book of the month club. Check the website, see what's coming up, then run to Blockbuster and let the fun begin. This is a pretty cool little movie with a lot of hot girls making out and a lot of nudity. I have to hand it to some of the guys over at the Asylum. It seems that all of the Leigh Scott, and now Justin Jones movies, have really choice nudity scenes. The girls that they get nekked for their films are light years beyond other B-movies (and I watch a lot of them). I guess I just don't understand why the continuity was so off and little things just didn't make sense. It was like someone took all of the scenes and put them into a blender. I wish I had the ability to re-edit the movie, because I bet if you put the scenes in order with the continuity it would make sense, and may even be better! And I disagree with the other poster. WAR OF THE WORLDS is one of if not the most boring Asylum film and its success started their whole "rip-off" deal which is a bit annoying. Some of the rip-offs are cool, but others really have no point (666 The Child anyone?).

Hilarious. So bad it had me chomping on snacks and just staring at it with bewilderment. Appalled by it. Worth a giggle if you have a morbid curiosity in absolutely terrible films. This makes other terrible films look like masterpieces and Shakespeare. I cannot even begin to imagine they got a cast and crew together for this and not in any way shape or form took advantage of their opportunity. Inferior and lackluster in every capacity. This was barely school project with your friends worthy. 1 star out of 10 turds. The movie title and film poster is a fraud to what this actually is. Whooof. Gonna take a while to forget that one. So bad I can't hate it. It was a doozy. I died when the woman held up potted ginger and said it was a pod person. damn. Was a travesty. Unbelievably bad could not believe it. Had me cracking up all through it.

This movie was actually worse than 1 star, but I couldn't find an icon that would be suitable. (Suggestion: a steaming pile of you know what!) There are no pods, no juicy transformations, like in all or any other pod/invasion type genre flick. Instead of a pod, a woman walks into a scene with a store bought piece of ginger root that's stuck in a little planter and proclaims how unusual this plant is etc. It's a stupid piece of ginger for crying out loud!! What did they think, no one would notice? Plus, this film is like watching a porn film without the porn. Once again, an entire budget went into DVD cover art and creating the opening titles, (which were the most interesting element of the movie.) To say this film had any merit what so ever, would be a stretch. The caliber of actors was the lowest tier of washed up "never beens" and "never will be's." An assortment of semi-hot girls that spewed awful, awful dialog (of what you could even hear. Most of it was unintelligible due to poor miking.) Special effects included a smidgen of ketchup on the corner of a person's mouth and what looked like "come" on dangling off of a woman's face, (goo from the pod/ginger root take over.) This was the biggest waste of time since Hide and Creep, another big mega bomb!! I think the actors in this film should stick to what they know best: working the rides at the traveling carny.

Invasion.Of.The.Pod.People should not make it to DVD.

The plot has major problems, the script couldn't get a D- in a high school film class, the camera had the finesse of a single chopstick, direction was completely absent, and the costumes made our heroine look like she just entered the third trimester. The dramatic tension came only from knowing it wasn't over yet. The effects consisted of a ginger root in a flower pot.

This is not a B movie, there is not one redeeming feature in this work, even the titillation, that started halfway through, was not erotic and the actress giving cunnilingus may have been asleep during filming.

I could go on, but please don't watch this film. It could made you feel like a pod.

Picked up a cheap secondhand copy of this (under its British title Invasion- the Beginning) on DVD, it's been sat in a box for a few years. Until now. The opening credit "The Asylum Presents" was enough to forewarn me not to get my hopes up. This is their sacrilegious take on the classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers story. Absolutely terrible. The acting, the sound, the script, the sets, the camerwork, the music, the "special" effects (what little there was). The only positive is that among the cast are several attractive young women who can shed their clothes better than they can say their lines! Terrible movie.

Erica Kessler plays Melissa, a sexy young employee at an agency who begins to notice people in her life behaving differently. Suddenly, her boss Samantha (Jessica Bork), whom she ordinarily can't stand, is a lot more pleasant. It turns out, something sinister is afoot: ugly alien plants are making the rounds, and producing carbon copies of human beings while they sleep. Soon Melissa is in the position of not knowing who to trust.

For those who don't already know, the movie producing company The Asylum has been in the business of making really cheap knock-offs of popular titles. Here, they clearly incorporate an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" type plot, but Jack Finney probably wouldn't have been too impressed with this micro budgeted rehash. Filmed on location in L.A., it features a cast full of insipid "actors" and "actresses". The ladies are certainly attractive, and there *is* one lesbian sex scene, but these aspects don't do much to enliven such a third-rate script (by Leigh Scott, who also has a cameo as the desperate Zach Richardson). The music by Chris Ridenhour is actually decent, and deserves to be in a better movie. The effects are *very* limited, so there's not even an agreeable gross-out factor that might have made this more fun.

As bad as most of the performers are, they're not totally without appeal. Kessler doesn't generate much sympathy for her heroine, but this viewer did like Danae Nason, the actress who plays her co-worker Billie.

Viewers are better off checking out or revisiting the '56, '78, or '93 versions of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", or, for that matter, the '94 adaptation of Robert Heinleins' "The Puppet Masters". Even B movie devotees may find this one to be terminally boring.

Three out of 10.

Spend less money on a nice dresses, annoyingly distracting jangly car origami, replica guns, bad make up and spend more money on a decent microphone, better lighting, better dialog, continuity, lozenges for the cast member that kept coughing during 2 girls chatting in an office ... oh and what the Hell was that office space? Cheap rent for working in the sewer?

I reserve the rating of "1" for those truly worthy of the rating. This film was so bad it doesn't even deserve to win a VERY WORSE award!!!

It's a real shame that the cast and crew were all invaded by Pod People before making this film, otherwise it could probably had made a rating of "3".

Is it true that ginger is an aphrodisiac???

Invasion of the Pod People (2007)

** (out of 4)

The Asylum's "mockbuster" is a take on THE INVASION with Nicole Kidman, which of course was a remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. In the story a meteor hits the Earth and soon afterwards a woman begins to realize that everyone around here is acting weird. If you're seen the previous movies then you know what's going on. If you don't know the story then I'd recommend to stop reading this and go check out the original film with Kevin McCarthy. A lot of people attack The Asylum for their really bad movies that are usually void of any talent or imagination. I really understand because they've made some awful movies but there are times where I find their "work" to be interesting simply because as a film fan I'm interested in seeing their take on a familiar piece of work. Yes, they could try doing something "original" but why should they when these things keep making them money? This film works "best" the same way their I AM OMEGA did and that's that the source material is simply so good that it's hard to mess it up too bad. Yes, this film has an ultra cheap budget and yes the story is a rip-off and yes the performances aren't that good but I think the central story is interesting enough to where the film kept me slightly entertained in a cheap, "B" movie way. There are some updated elements here, which are pretty funny and the biggest seems to be the fact that the female pop people all turn into lesbians. This here leads to some rather erotic sex scenes where new women are "taught" new things. Again, this movie is cheap on every level so it's clearly just going to be for those looking for some very light entertainment. I think this type of thing slightly worked for me because I enjoy bad movies and I can't help but compare this to the countless rip-offs that hit drive-ins after the original INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS was released.