Director – John Murlowski, Screenplay – John Murlowski & Steven Palmer Peterson, Producers – William Fay & John Murlowski, Photography – Damian Horan, Music – Sven Faulconer, Visual Effects Supervisor – Chris Watts, Visual Effects – Flash Filmworks (Supervisor – William Mesa) & Ingenuity Studios (Supervisors – David Lebensfeld & Grant Miller), Special Effects – Spectrum FX (Supervisor – Donnie Dean & Matt Kutcher), Creature Design – Patrick Tatopolous, Makeup Effects Design – Michael Spatola, Production Design – Matthew C. Jacobs. Production Company – Union Hill Productions/Maple Island Films/Weathervane Productions/Sprockefeller Pictures.
Cast
Joel Courtney (Zach Henderson), Andi Matichak (Kayla Shepard), Calum Worthy (Randy Foster), Cam Gigandet (Deputy Josh Haywood), Terry Dale Parks (Pastor Greg), Vito Viscuso (Larry Shepard), Katherine McNamara (Hannah), Mason McNulty (Joey Shepard), Jennifer Pierce Mathus (Beth Shepard), Kevin Remington (Mr Henderson), Amye Gousset (Mrs Bissette), Tonetta Weaver (Mrs Henderson)
Plot
Zach Henderson and Randy Forster, two teenage best friends in high school, decide to conduct a vlog to chart the life of their small, placid hometown of Multon, Mississippi. In the course of doing so, they hear screams from the home of Miss Bissette. They rush to help her to see a small insect-like creature fleeing before being picked up by Pastor Greg. The deputy dismisses this when they go to him. Afterwards however, Miss Bissette has changed. Similar changes are happening all around them where people are bitten by the creatures and afterwards turn emotionless and insist that nothing is wrong. Zach is interested in Kayla Shephard and comes to her aid as her father tries to infect her with one of the creatures. As the entire town around them is being taken over, the three of them try to flee the body snatchers and get video of what they saw out.
Assimilate is a Body Snatchers film. This is a sub-genre that began in the 1950s with paranoid classics such as It Came from Outer Space (1953), Invaders from Mars (1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), featuring alien invaders infiltrating society, controlling minds and replacing humans with cold, emotionless duplicates. Most of the originals have undergone remakes and there have been a great many variants since where people are replaced by everything from androids to plant beings.
Assimilate comes with a couple of interesting spins on the body snatchers film. The first of these is that there is no explanation offered for what the body snatchers are – there are seen as tiny crawling bugs (?) early on, while those taken-over bring out a much larger bug to infect people. However, there is no explanation of where the bugs come from such as their being alien invaders.
The other interesting touch is that Assimilate is partially shot as a Found Footage film – not completely but the action alternates between the video the two central characters are shooting and regular framing. This does, at least in the early scenes, give the impression of a body snatchers film shot Found Footage-styled. This has some undeniably effect such as in the scenes going on in the background with the kid complaining “You’re not my mother” as they are dragged away.
(l to r) Teens Andi Matichak, Joel Courtney and Calum Worthy take on body snatchersThe body snatchers
Assimilate is a film that draws on the tropes and clichés of the genre and never does much more than rehash them. It even goes so far as to employ the body snatchers scream from the remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), albeit where the body snatchers now have digitally enhanced distending jaws. It may well be that the body snatchers film has had most of its moves all played out, although Significant Other (2022) that was released not long after this showed there were still some clever twists that could be employed. Director John Murlowski does mount everything to some passable suspense in the last quarter, even if there is nothing here that ultimately surmounts the routine.
John Murlowski is a director who has worked in the B-budget arena with various action films and family entertainment. His other genre films include:- Amityville: A New Generation (1993), Automatic (1998), Richie Rich’s Christmas Wish (1998), Contagion (2001), Terminal Error (2002), Black Cadillac (2003), Nowhere to Hide (2009), Freeway Killer (2010), Next Stop Murder (2010), Zombie Hamlet (2012), Fatal Defense (2017) and Healing Hands (2018).
