Monday, June 18, 2012

The Thing


"I know I'm human. And if you were all these things, then you'd just attack me right now, so some of you are still human. This thing doesn't want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It'll fight if it has to, but it's vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it's won." Macready


The Thing (1982)
In 1982 Horror master John Carpenter brought us "The Thing" an intense gore-filled thriller with questions around every turn. So why did this movie flop so much at the cinema back in ‘82? Two letters: E.T. Yes, that little bug eyed creature ruined “the Things” box office. 
During the first five minutes of the film you are just wondering what the heck is going on. A dog is running across the icy plains of Antarctica pursued by two Norwegian men in a helicopter. I, being super confused, think that the dog has just escaped from their camp and they are going after it to return it; but when one of them pulls out a sniper rifle and starts taking pot shots at it, you know something weird is going down here! They then chase the dog all the way into a nearby American science base. The Americans think the Norwegians are attacking them, and proceed to kill the two men and adopt the new dog. Unfortunately for the Americans their new best friend turns out to be an alien that can shapeshift in to whatever organisms it has killed. Carpenter’s filmmaking really freaks you out at this point with shots of a lone dog walking down a hallway. 
Led by Macready (Kurt Russel) the team heads into a blood bath of confusion among the ranks. Who’s who? Am I really human? What’s really great about this film is that it leaves it open so that anybody could be the Thing! Is Macready really who he says he is? Doubt is well placed in your mind in the second half of the film. During the infamous blood test scene you could really feel the tension that this movie oozes! It just makes you think, “What would I do in this situation? Would I be able to take a life on a hunch?” Being one of the remakes that still scares people to this day, this 1982 version of “the Thing” still stands as the best adaptation of the 1938 “Who Goes There?” The film’s ending leaves you with more questions then when you started. This truly is a masterpiece.
So:
Lets just sit here a while… see what happens…

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