Horrorfest 23: The Thing (John Carpenter's)

I've seen the original THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, from the 1950s, multiple times, but I only got around to seeing HALLOWEEN director John Carpenter's 1980s version, THE THING, until last night. I've been aware over the years of the film's cult following, popularity, and influence on other movies, so it's nice to finally see it. Video game designers must have been influenced by this film and the original, whether they know it or not -- tons of games involve wandering down claustrophobic hallways with a shot gun, waiting for aliens to jump out at you so you can blast them.

It follows the basic plot of the original: American scientists isolated at the South Pole stumble across a flying saucer buried in the ice, bring a seemingly dead alien back to the lab, and find out too late that it is alive and knocking them off one by one.

The best part of this version is the hook that The Thing not only kills its victims but also gains the ability to imitate all varieties of life, from dogs to humans. So, the characters are not only fighting a powerful alien, but they spend a lot of time getting paranoid and suspicious of one another, wondering who is still human and who has been taken over by the monster. This leads to one of the best scares in the film in which the scientists devise a blood test and slowly test each sample one by one until. . . but I don't want to give it away.

These transformations, from alien to human, provide a lot of opportunities to exploit gory special effects. Additionally, The Thing has the ability to continually adapt -- if you cut off part of it, that part will grow new parts and become its own monster. The effects shown here are top notch. Divised by Rob Bottin with an assist from Stan Winston, they're always super gross and never look dated. Why throw in computer animated blood splatters in current thrillers when the art of gore was perfected over two decades ago? Like a David Cronenberg flick, the amount of gore and fetishistic attention to detail almost becomes a subject or a theme unto itself, which, if you buy into it, can actually make up for the sparseness of some of the rest of the film -- lack of character development, for instance. Maybe the point is, humans ARE just interchangeable shells, bumbling around the world, surviving by luck.

Then again, maybe not. I mean, there's still Kurt Russell, kicking ass. He plays a helicopter pilot and becomes the main character of the film through process of elimination -- his natural sense of leadership and willingness to fight keep him one step ahead of the other scientists and the alien itself.

Don't call him an interchangeable shell or he's liable to shoot you in the face.