The movie has its fair share of tension and thrills. It also has more than its fair share of frivolities.
Tools:
Send to a friend »
The late 1970s and early 80s saw two remarkable remakes of popular 1950s horror films: Philip Kaufman´s 1978 "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and John Carpenter´s 1982 revision of the old Howard Hawks production, "The Thing From Another World." Critics were understandably disappointed with both remakes, especially "The Thing." I´m sure it was hard for them to accept anyone´s tinkering with favored classics. But I enjoyed both reworkings slightly more than the originals, and now both of the remakes are classics in their own right.
I found "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" more suspenseful the second time around, and "The Thing," for all its excesses, simply more fun than its dead-serious predecessor. Now on DVD, "The Thing" looks and sounds better than ever. It´s amazingly silly, but I continue to enjoy it.
Based more closely than its forerunner on the story "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, "The Thing" is set in an Antarctic research station, hundreds of miles from nowhere. Twelve men, including the star, Kurt Russell, are isolated there when an alien being from another planet comes among them. The first thing the men see is a dog running across the snow toward their labyrinth-like base camp, followed by a Norwegian helicopter shooting at it. The dog manages to escape and the helicopter blows up. Don´t ask.
It turns out, the dog is really a thing from another world, come to Earth in a spaceship 100,000 years before and frozen in the ice ever since. You bet he´s ticked off, too, after waiting all that time to get thawed out. Of course, the thing isn´t really a dog. It´s a shape-shifter; it can devour its prey and imitate its form. Thus, the film becomes an Agatha Christie "And Then There Were None" or "Ten Little Indians" kind of story, with the monster killing off each of the humans one by one and duplicating them in turn. The survivors quickly catch on to the creature´s behavior, but not until the paranoia builds to a pretty high level. Who is next, who is human, and who is the creature this time? We´re kept wondering until the very end.
The movie has its fair share of tension and thrills. It also has more than its fair share of frivolities. When a man´s head disengages itself from its body, sprouts legs, and scurries crab-like across the floor, it´s hard to really be scared. In fact, it´s hard not to laugh out loud, as my wife does every time she watches it. Nevertheless, the film is loaded with good, if somewhat outrageous special effects. Some of them are gory and gross; some are quite amazingly realistic. Some are both.
Average user rating (1-5):