I was surprised to see a couple of interesting responses to my Superbad post on Saturday, (thanks no doubt to Jules Crittenden's link), which I quickly knocked out as I was heading out to Blog*Fest*West (and more on that, later).

Here's an even older Hollywood formula than horny teenager movies like Superbad, as the New York Times notes:

Few narratives in American popular culture have proved as durably resonant — or as endlessly adaptable — as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” the tale of a planetary takeover by extraterrestrial seed pods that replicate and replace sleeping humans. Originally a 1955 novel by Jack Finney, this paranoid fable has now cloned itself several times over, spawning four movies in five decades. Tapping into themes of individualism and conformity, personal freedom and social control, the idea of soulless “pod people” has become an all-encompassing metaphor that finds a sociopolitical relevance whatever the period.

The “Invasion” films add up to a veritable catalog of anxieties that have plagued the American psyche in the last half-century. Don Siegel’s 1956 B-movie, the first and still the most Rorschach-like, emerged from a national climate of Red scare hysteria and from a Hollywood traumatized by the blacklist. Philip Kaufman’s 1978 update, also called “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” relocated its ground zero from small-town California to a post-utopian San Francisco where summer-of-love idealism had curdled into a Me Decade morass of cultish psychobabble.

Abel Ferrara’s “Body Snatchers” (1993), which followed an election season thick with talk of “family values,” zeroes in on the domestic sphere. Set on a military base in the South, it also includes explicit references to the recently concluded Operation Desert Storm.

The fourth version, called “The Invasion” and opening Friday, appears to adhere to the outline while adding a few bells and whistles. (The film has not yet been screened for the press.) Starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig and directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (best known for the 2005 Hitler biopic “Downfall”), the film would seem to have an abundance of current qualms to exploit, from new pandemics and terror threats to extreme makeovers and genetic engineering.

Still, it would be quite a feat if the new “Invasion” musters even a fraction of the original’s ambiguous power.

No matter how much money she’s being guaranteed for movies these days, Nicole Kidman had better start thinking twice about her legacy as an actress.

Her new one, "The Invasion," opened Friday and bombed quite brilliantly. It took in a little less than $2 million. The price for this disaster? Over $100 million. And even though it co-stars James Bond actor Daniel Craig, nothing can make "The Invasion" into a hit.

What’s worse is, no one wanted even to see it in theatres. At boxofficemojo.com, a poll among subscribers showed almost no interest in "The Invasion."

Of course, the marketing didn’t help. The movie looked like "The Stepford Wives II," another Kidman disaster. And in many of the ads, Craig’s name wasn’t even mentioned. It was just Nicole Kidman, looking beautiful, running among dead eyed weirdos.

The public smelled a rat, Warner Bros. punted, and the rest is history.

Update: More at Libertas.