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Post by novastar6 on Dec 9, 2021 0:21:54 GMT
Just saw this one the other night, love love love it. Okay I get for the early 80s that kind of gore hadn't been explored a whole lot and was a shock for people, but I don't get the initial hate for it. Now obviously, heavily influenced by Alien, but I also see a lot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers oozing through, past and future, the tentacles are very much like the 90s remake Body Snatchers, ewwwwwwwwww, but moving on, also seems like a prelude of sorts to the remake of the Blob, a lot of the effects are very similar, which I thought was cool.
So much ambiguity, who's a Thing, who isn't? Is anybody even left at the end? Are they both still people, or neither, do they both die or not? Theories abound with the fans, but what's the canon answer? Or is there one?
That said though, is there anyone, has there ever been ANYONE who didn't automatically know Blair was a Thing as soon as he started taking an ax to the radio equipment? Mental breakdown doesn't cover 'you think it wanted to be an animal? No dog could make it a thousand miles in the cold!' That's something only a Thing could tell us.
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Post by politicidal on Dec 9, 2021 1:40:24 GMT
I think people (both audiences and critics) just weren't used to gore that visceral and explicit at the time. It was not just people being killed but their bodies and even animals being reshaped into absolute abominations.
It did get some praise from a few critics. Weirdly enough Gene Siskel liked it and I never took him for someone really into movies like that. Roger Ebert wasn't necessary harsh towards it;I think he gave it 2.5/4 stars.
Plus I do think it faced unfair comparisons to E.T.: The Extraterrestrial that year.
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Post by Penn Guinn on Dec 9, 2021 1:51:15 GMT
There was no introduction to the characters.
All the men look pretty much alike so when they are worried about one of them the reaction was
WHO IN HELL IS THAT ?
Gore alone does not make a movie a scary movie.
Did not see this until recently so the newness of the gore in the 80s does not come into play.
The Thing from Another World is superior for story telling as well as character development and genuine suspense.
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Post by novastar6 on Dec 9, 2021 2:41:34 GMT
There was no introduction to the characters. All the men look pretty much alike so when they are worried about one of them the reaction was WHO IN HELL IS THAT ? Gore alone does not make a movie a scary movie. Did not see this until recently so the newness of the gore in the 80s does not come into play. The Thing from Another World is superior for story telling as well as character development and genuine suspense.
This looks alike to you?
The gore was the frosting on the cake. The suspense is the chronic paranoia who is safe, who can be trusted, it's 12 men a thousand miles from anyone else and there's nothing out there but snow, ice and sub zero temperatures, and one among them is the Thing, nobody knows who, we don't know who, not entirely different from the characters in And Then There Were None, you know one of them is a killer, they know one of them is a killer, they don't know who, how do you find out? How do you stay safe from whoever it is? Who do you trust?
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Post by Stammerhead on Dec 9, 2021 8:19:14 GMT
I didn't know Blair was a Thing simply because the story worked on the basis of people's suspicions often being wrong. I saw this at a press screening (a journalist friend had something else to do that day) which was a pretty dry experience. Only me and one other man laughed at the reaction to the head scuttling away.
I still prefer the first version but this one is more faithful to the story.
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Post by wmcclain on Dec 9, 2021 11:29:18 GMT
The Thing (1982), directed by John Carpenter. The damned Norwegians dug up something frozen in the ice that got away from them. They're dead. Now everyone at the next Antarctic base must die. I remember not liking this much at the theater. I was probably being loyal to the The Thing from Another World (1951) original and this was just too gooey for me. It's a great premise and the isolated ice-bound base is an appealing location for SF, horror and thrillers, but I still see nothing but problems with this film: - Too many characters and not enough time to get to know them.
- Can't see their faces through their beards.
- Ok, it's a creature feature, but everyone seems to know they are in a monster movie and behaves accordingly.
- Where did they find all this bad attitude? That dope-smoking guy: I would have put him out in the snow weeks before the creature appeared.
- We have a long period of no trust and no strategy. The plot just stalls.
- Where's the sense of wonder, of the alien-ness of encountering a being from another world?
- Flame throwers? Abundant firearms? A natural language AI computer?
- Ambitious special effects but still too gooey.
- Is that the pre-eyepatch Snake Plissken?
I do give them credit for the ambiguous un-Hollywood ending. Ennio Morricone score, although the "dum...dum-dum" bit sounds like Carpenter. Available on Blu-ray. The director and Kurt Russell provide a happy commentary track. Lots of trivia. 
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Post by Anonymous Andy on Dec 9, 2021 18:34:01 GMT
I didn't know Blair was a Thing simply because the story worked on the basis of people's suspicions often being wrong. I saw this at a press screening (a journalist friend had something else to do that day) which was a pretty dry experience. Only me and one other man laughed at the reaction to the head scuttling away. I still prefer the first version but this one is more faithful to the story. I didn't know Blair was a thing, either. I assumed on my first viewing that we were purposefully and very obviously being lead to think he was, which meant he wasn't. Which of course means he, uh, was. The movie does a great job of toying with our perception in this way. We don't trust anyone! Jealous you got to see it when it opened. I was two years away from being born when it came out. I did get to see it in theaters last September which was a real treat, even though I've seen it countless times. I'm also envious of OP and anyone who is seeing this for the first time. |
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Post by novastar6 on Dec 9, 2021 18:59:30 GMT
I didn't know Blair was a Thing simply because the story worked on the basis of people's suspicions often being wrong. I saw this at a press screening (a journalist friend had something else to do that day) which was a pretty dry experience. Only me and one other man laughed at the reaction to the head scuttling away. I still prefer the first version but this one is more faithful to the story. I didn't know Blair was a thing, either. I assumed on my first viewing that we were purposefully and very obviously being lead to think he was, which meant he wasn't. Which of course means he, uh, was. The movie does a great job of toying with our perception in this way. We don't trust anyone! Jealous you got to see it when it opened. I was two years away from being born when it came out. I did get to see it in theaters last September which was a real treat, even though I've seen it countless times. I'm also envious of OP and anyone who is seeing this for the first time.
I'm the same way, I envy people who were actually in the theaters in a pre-spoilers world, people who didn't know Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father, that Norman Bates was his mother, what the Phantom of the Opera looked like.
And I've seen parts of this one on TV, scariest movie moments compilations, etc., so I knew some of the stuff, I knew about Norris's whole transformation, the doctor getting his arms bitten off, the head sprouting spider legs and crawling away, etc., and I knew who the last two people at the end would be, so I figured I'm not coming into this with any real surprises, wrong, definitely wrong. There were a lot of gaps I had no idea how they'd be filled between the stuff I knew, it was all a very pleasant surprise to see it all in full.
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Post by nicktatler76 on Dec 9, 2021 19:13:42 GMT
It's hardly surprising Blair was infected, during the autopsy he prodded the carcass with a pencil and then put the pencil in or around his mouth (always found this odd for a doctor who should know better). Especially as Fuchs later recommended everyone preparing their own food and eating from tins to avoid infection.
This is where I think he was infected as after his meltdown he was isolated and the person he spent most time with was Fuchs who was human.
The part where the dog's walking around camp and it goes into the room with the shadow on the wall- I'm fairly sure that shadow looks like Norris, has that been confirmed anywhere? I think 'Norris' killed Fuchs.
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Post by Penn Guinn on Dec 9, 2021 19:20:33 GMT
Part of the real problem with The Thing is the failure to introduce the characters as PEOPLE before starting to kill them off ! They are anonymous monster fodder and sources of gore. wmcclain 's post outlines very well the reasons for the failure of this movie to engage with the characters or care what is happening to them. Perhaps wanting more than gore and jump scares in a movie is another problem with being able to like this one. |
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Post by Stammerhead on Dec 9, 2021 19:58:05 GMT
I didn't know Blair was a Thing simply because the story worked on the basis of people's suspicions often being wrong. I saw this at a press screening (a journalist friend had something else to do that day) which was a pretty dry experience. Only me and one other man laughed at the reaction to the head scuttling away. I still prefer the first version but this one is more faithful to the story. I didn't know Blair was a thing, either. I assumed on my first viewing that we were purposefully and very obviously being lead to think he was, which meant he wasn't. Which of course means he, uh, was. The movie does a great job of toying with our perception in this way. We don't trust anyone! Jealous you got to see it when it opened. I was two years away from being born when it came out. I did get to see it in theaters last September which was a real treat, even though I've seen it countless times. I'm also envious of OP and anyone who is seeing this for the first time. The only problem with being old enough to have seen The Thing when it came out is that I’m slowly beginning to resemble Wilford Brimley.
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Post by novastar6 on Dec 9, 2021 20:13:50 GMT
Part of the real problem with The Thing is the failure to introduce the characters as PEOPLE before starting to kill them off ! They are anonymous monster fodder and sources of gore. wmcclain 's post outlines very well the reasons for the failure of this movie to engage with the characters or care what is happening to them. Perhaps wanting more than gore and jump scares in a movie is another problem with being able to like this one.
I don't see it that way. I get a ton of introduction to the shitty characters in the modern crappy horror movies, they're all unlikable and borderline too stupid to live, so we actually cheer them getting killed when we're supposed to 'care' if they live or not. We don't know these guys, fair enough, that doesn't make them unlikable, that doesn't make them so aggravating we are counting down the minutes till they get killed off. It's not like the girl's father in "Silver Bullet" that the first time I saw him I was literally thinking 'I can't wait until *you* die'. If you stumble into a random episode of a cop drama you previously haven't seen or much heard of, you don't know who any of the characters are, and you might only get a crumb of insight on any single one of them, but you automatically want to see them catch the bad guy and save the day.
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Post by Anonymous Andy on Dec 9, 2021 20:23:03 GMT
I didn't know Blair was a thing, either. I assumed on my first viewing that we were purposefully and very obviously being lead to think he was, which meant he wasn't. Which of course means he, uh, was. The movie does a great job of toying with our perception in this way. We don't trust anyone! Jealous you got to see it when it opened. I was two years away from being born when it came out. I did get to see it in theaters last September which was a real treat, even though I've seen it countless times. I'm also envious of OP and anyone who is seeing this for the first time. The only problem with being old enough to have seen The Thing when it came out is that I’m slowly beginning to resemble Wilford Brimley. Hopefully without the diabeetus... |
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Post by Stammerhead on Dec 9, 2021 20:24:42 GMT
One of my favourite characters in The Thing is the dog who was played by Jed. You might have seen Jed in one of his other films in which he doesn’t mutate and sprout tentacles. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jed_(wolfdog) |
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Post by Anonymous Andy on Dec 9, 2021 20:52:11 GMT
One of my favourite characters in The Thing is the dog who was played by Jed. You might have seen Jed in one of his other films in which he doesn’t mutate and sprout tentacles. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jed_(wolfdog)Who's a good boy?! Impressed he lived to 18. When I re-watched Pumpkinhead back in October, I noted that the dog looked familiar and was pleased to find the same actor, Mushroom, also played the dog in Gremlins. Always fun to see the same animals pop up in multiple movies/TV. |
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Post by Penn Guinn on Dec 9, 2021 21:30:50 GMT
Always fun to see the same animals pop up in multiple movies/TV. Yep ! Like Orangey and Jimmy the Crow / Raven.
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Post by masterofallgoons on Dec 9, 2021 21:33:55 GMT
One of my favourite characters in The Thing is the dog who was played by Jed. You might have seen Jed in one of his other films in which he doesn’t mutate and sprout tentacles. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jed_(wolfdog)I remember John Carpenter praising the terrific acting by that dog on the commentary. He did some complicated blocking in a long tracking shot that Carpenter was sure would be hard to pull off but the dog was a pro. |
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Post by theravenking on Dec 9, 2021 22:36:39 GMT
I'm somewhere in the middle when it comes to this movie. I did enjoy it, but I thought it could've been improved in certain areas. I agree that the characters weren't interesting enough to make one care about them, I also felt that Kurt Russell's character could've been more badass and charismatic. The sense of isolation and the mystery aspect should've been played up more.
I also didn't care for the open ending. I'm someone who usually hates these sort of ambiguous endings. Some regard it as brave and thought-provoking, I find it frustrating and needlessly downbeat.
Overall a great idea and excellent effects though.
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Post by novastar6 on Dec 9, 2021 23:27:34 GMT
I'm somewhere in the middle when it comes to this movie. I did enjoy it, but I thought it could've been improved in certain areas. I agree that the characters weren't interesting enough to make one care about them, I also felt that Kurt Russell's character could've been more badass and charismatic. The sense of isolation and the mystery aspect should've been played up more. I also didn't care for the open ending. I'm someone who usually hates these sort of ambiguous endings. Some regard it as brave and thought-provoking, I find it frustrating and needlessly downbeat. Overall a great idea and excellent effects though.
Maybe we don't care about them but I don't think we need to know a character's backstory to know none of them deserve what happened to them.
I agree a few loose ends could've stood some tying up, as to the ending, in itself it's not one of my favorites, but I think it's very cool 40 years later people are still debating, arguing, theorizing who's who and what's what. You rarely see that with any movie, that proves people are interested in it, in the fate of the characters.
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Post by Penn Guinn on Dec 9, 2021 23:35:12 GMT
... I think it's very cool 40 years later people are still debating, arguing, theorizing who's who and what's what. You rarely see that with any movie, that proves people are interested in it, in the fate of the characters. OR it proves that many feel that a better film COULD have been made .. one with some character development and less flash bang gore jump scares at the end of the film I was just happy to see that it was finally over and still had no idea of who the characters were as individuals and didn't care what the future held for them. They had lost me from the moment someone went looking for someone who was missing and I had No IDEA who that character was ... and it went downhill from there.
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