Review: 'Snatchers' is a bloody good time

Posted Tuesday, February 18, 2020 at 3:57 PM Central
Last updated Tuesday, February 18, 2020 at 3:57 PM Central

by John Couture

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the Blu-ray I reviewed in this news story. The opinions I share are my own.

If you take equal measures of It's Alive, Gremlins and Clueless or Mean Girls then you start to get in the ballpark of Snatchers. The darling of the 2019 SXSW Film Festival, Snatchers is a darkly comedic horror film that serves both as a warning against teen promiscuity and misusing a blender.

When Sara's simple hunk of a boyfriend returns from Summer vacation a changed man, she decides that it's now or never for her to lose her virginity and keep her man. Unfortunately, her boyfriend contracted an alien bug on his vacation and she wakes up the next morning nine months pregnant with an alien baby. Now, Sara and her best friend must fight for their survival.

Have you heard of a little service called Quibi? You might remember it from their Super Bowl commercial earlier this month. Basically, it's a short-form mobile video platform from former DreamWorks head honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg. The idea is to bring high quality entertainment to mobile devices in highly consumable courses, say less than 10 minutes each.

I bring it up because Snatchers is precisely the type of product that Quibi hopes to bring to the public when it launches later this year. Snatchers started as a vignette of web shorts that spawned the feature-length film that used some of the existing content as well as new footage. The serialized nature of the web series certainly had its merits, but there's no denying the impact of the feature-length film.

The horror comedy genre has been strangled to death (pun intended) in recent years, so it really takes ambitious efforts to get me to stand up and notice a new entry. Kevin Smith's Yoga Hosers was one that certainly played to my wheelhouse and in many of the best ways Snatchers reminded me of the misunderstood gem from Smith.

While Smith's film smartly played up his slapstick strengths, Snatchers fell more in line with the horror aspects while never taking itself too seriously. While I found myself thinking often of fellow high school clique black comedy Heathers during my review of Snatchers, the latter doesn't quite go as far down the dark path as the former. The alien babies while certainly kitschy gave me fond memories of some of the more obscure creature feature Hammer horror films.

The one aspect that really struck me was just how tight the writing was. This is probably a product of having the opportunity to work on rewrites after the web series. It's a lot easier to pick and choose the best jokes and gags when you have real audience feedback. Of course, the flip side is that the serialized nature of the web series did rear its ugly head at the end. While I won't spoil anything, I was hoping for a bit more resolution and denouement, but overall it left things open to future projects. Perhaps it will all come full circle and a sequel will pop up over various episodes on Quibi.

Snatchers is one of those films that comes along every now and then such as Teeth or Sither that raises your curiosity based on nothing more than the oddball story. Some movies are better than others and Snatchers is definitely one that entertains more often than not.

Own Snatchers today on Blu-ray and DVD from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.