Remaking classic SF movies is nothing new. Doing it well is something else entirely. Re-imagining the entire concept is as rare as hen's teeth - Carpenter's extraordinary, gloopy The Thing is the only example to spring readily to mind.

Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers has, for some reason, been radically re-imagined by successive generations almost as a primal urge. In 1956 as political allegory (read either Communists or McCarthy-ists depending), and again in the "me" generation rewrite for Philip Kaufman's 1978 movie. Now it falls for the paranoid 90s generation to have their own rereading, and who better to marshal the camera than current poet of cinema paranoia - fresh off the visceral Bad Lieutenant - Abel Ferrara.

Ferrara's film, scripted by his regular collaborator Nicholas St. John and names like Stuart Gordon, Larry Cohen and Dennis Paoli, moves the whole kit and caboodle to its most obvious home - a post-Desert Storm military base. Environmental Protection Agency scientist Steve Malone (Terry Kinney) has been assigned to pollution tests on waters surrounding the Alabama camp, bringing with him teenage daughter Marti (Gabrielle Anwar), her stepmother Carol (Meg Tilly) and little brother Andy (Reilly Murphy). Naturally the base is being invaded by those damn space-pods, intent on their slow absorption of the whole of humanity.

A measure of the quality of Ferrara's film is immediate in the excellent title sequence - where letters are gradually replaced with identical, but dull twins - and then references the Siegal film with Anwar being warned not to sleep by a sweaty soldier in a gas-station rest-room. Indeed, the film relies heavily on a knowledge of its antecedents - details of the pod-harvest and their ability to assume human shape are both unnecessary and therefore thankfully scant. Instead the director concentrates on distilling a genuine sense of unease throughout the piece - his camera is restless, rarely ever still; faces are frequently shot in severe, shocking close-up; and best of all, rooting his tale on a military base, the line of conformity between pod-person and "just following orders" is never clearly delineated.

There are a number of stunning set pieces: Meg Tilly's chilling "Where you gonna go?" speech; Andy's first morning at Day Care where all the other kids paint identical pictures; the erotic pod-replacements (full marks for the excellent and sparingly used effects); and the superbly edited shock-sequence where Anwar barely escapes podding herself.

Anwar is particularly good, given a substantial role over her usual set-dressing on something like Scent of a Woman. And there is strong support from Tilly, and Christine Elise as Genn, the rebellious daughter of camp commander R. Lee Ermy (Full Metal Jacket). Also good, but underused, is Forest Whitaker's Major Collins, a doctor who suspects the water pollution might have something to do with curious mental problems he's seeing in camp personnel.

Better still, Ferrara sees the virtue in keeping things tight, pulling all this together in well under 90 minutes. And even more surprising, seeing as how all this is told in flashback with Anwar's voice-over, this creative team somehow fashion a truly startling finale, even when that finale is essentially just a string of nicely filmed explosions; it is both chilling in its brutality and forlorn in its consequences.

How many more times film-makers can go on remaking Finney's story remains to be seen, but Ferrara's movie, better than the Kaufman as it is, is the third time it has been fashioned to genuinely imaginative effect. Quite why then Warners has all but decided to bypass the cinema and bury this minor masterpiece on video is anyone's guess.