Overall Rating
  Awesome: 85.71%
Worth A Look: 6.12%
Average: 3.4%
Pretty Bad: 1.36%
Total Crap: 3.4%
8 reviews, 246 user ratings
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| Thing, The (1982) |
by MP Bartley
"You've got to be fucking kidding..."
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...for me, is one of the greatest quotes in film history. To find out why, you'll just have to watch John Carpenters take on the 1950's drive-in classic, and along with 'Halloween' and 'The Fog' one of his undisputed classics.Yes, 'The Thing' was released when a John Carpenter film was something to be actually excited about and not dreaded like a dose of scabies.
The first version, adapted from a short story called 'Who Goes There', was made in the early 50's and is set in an Antarctic base staffed by a small crew of men who find themselves besieged by a hostile alien. However for all it's reds-under-the-bed metaphors of an enemy within, much of the impact is lessened when the alien is revealed as a man in some dodgy make-up.
Carpenter's version takes the setting from the original and that's it. Thankfully he sticks more to the book, which has the alien hide itself in various members of the crew, and revels in the gore drenched detail. It's a set-up ripe for tension. The crw of the base are generally bored and lazily bickering amongst themselves against the hostile back drop of outdoors, totally unaware of how hostile they're going to become to themselves...
Make no mistake, any wannabe film-maker wanting a lesson in how to rack tension up to the level of forcing audiences to the edges of their seats can do no better than watching this. In a time when most films ruin any tension by idiotic comic relief (case in point, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. When his friends are being hacked to pieces all around him one character remarks how he's hunted and horny. Yeah right. If I was being stalked by a hook wielding madman, the last thing on my mind would be if I was going to get my rocks off) or by characters doing stupid things for no reason than a lazy plot device, 'The Thing' has virtually no laughs. Any that do come are in the early scenes. Once the massacre starts, there's no jokes. It gets so intense at one point, a member burns himself to death rather than face up to the thing that's stalking them around the corridors. And that kinda sets the tone for the film really.
And you get to see something you rarely see in any period of film: characters debating the sensible thing to do. One of the best scenes is where they have to decide whether to let one of their crewmembers back into the base after locking the door: he could be the thing. Alternatively they could be letting a friend freeze to death. It's a scene that's played right on the edge of fear and desperation and the cast get it spot on.
'Unbearable tension' is a phrase much over-used but there's one scene that comes as close to this phrase as anything else. It's the blood drawing scene and I'll say no more, except it requires some nerves to watch it without hiding behind your hands. This is a film where you really don't know 'who it is' or 'who dunnit'.
'The Thing' wants its cake and also gets to eat it. It pulls of the remarkable trick of having hugely effective scenes of sweaty, tension-racked men shouting at each other and scenes of slaughter as they quickly get whittled down in a red haze of dismembered limbs. Gore is rarely scary, but it's never been as effective as it has here. I've never seen a film that creates equal fear by both hiding the monster and showing it in it's full glory. Usually one or the other, but never both and it's great to see here. One of the best scenes comes in the first half hour, when MacReady comes back with the remains of a Norweigan from a base previously attacked. It's a mess of innards and broken limbs, while the face is twisted and melted into two. If this the aftereffect of the thing, what the hell does it look in action? That's the question the base ask themselves, echoing the audiences sentiments. Carpenter said we wouldn't see anything like 'The Thing' for a very long time, and we still haven't. CGI may have come off age but the effects used here still stand up as some of the very best
Carpenter knows how to use this limited location to its full advantage, contrasting the wide open ominous landscape with the cramped ominous research base. And as with every Carpenter movie, the music is superb. He doesn't write it himself for a change, but instead gets Ennio Morricone to do the job. And man, it's foreboding. Simple roaming shots of empty corridors are rendered intense by the score alone.
The cast are on the money here as well. Kurt Russell is the reluctant hero here: an unshaven, permanently bad-tempered drunk, Russell rises above a potentially cliched character by giving him a rough hewn intelligence combined with an instinct for survival. This is a man who will quite happily shoot everyone else if he even suspects they're alien. And he's the one they look to for leadership. Keith David is equally strong as Childs, looking every inch like the action star he never became. The rest are generally obscure (hey! Didn't that guy play
the president in Clear And Present Danger?) but fill their parts as alien fodder with aplomb, and that thing you don't often get: sincerity. There's no real character development, but from their few actions we get to learn a lot about them and group dynamic. Most of them are bums and not conventional heroes. But then, there are no heroes in 'The Thing': just survivors...
God knows what Carpenter was doing on the shoot, but the whole cast seem genuinely terrified for the most part. And he keeps the horror cranked right up to the end. It's a coldly scary ending as the dark night settles in on the shattered remnants of the base...When it was released in 1982, 'The Thing' was overlooked both critically and commercially by another, more people-friendly alien visiting Earth, E.T. As Spielberg's cuddly creation gets a 20th anniversary outing, it seems right to re-evaluate Carpenters alien as well. It's a primal, lethal machine of a movie that once it hooks itself into your brain doesn't let go. Oh yeah,this one's scary as hell...
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=2453&reviewer=293
originally posted: 04/02/02 01:57:23
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 ScreamFest L.A. Horror Festival. For more in the 2004 ScreamFest L.A. series, click here.
Horror Remakes: For more in the Horror Remakes series, click here.
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USA
02-Jul-1982 (R)
DVD: 26-Oct-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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