The Thing (1982)

(Movie Review)

When I was watching the director’s commentary of “Planet Terror” (see previous post) Robert Rodriguez kept talking about how he was trying to imitate John Carpenter movies. And it occurred to me, I had never seen a single John Carpenter movie in my life. So, when I saw this in my video store, I decided to check it out.

Actually this has been kind of halfway on my viewing list for a few years now because:
When I was 13, back when I was a huge fan of classic horror movies, I saw the original 1952 version of “The Thing”, and enjoyed it. I didn’t think it was possible to improve on the classics, but I’ve always been somewhat curious just to see what the 1982 take on it would be. And this movie stars Kurt Russell, and Kurt Russell holds a certain nostalgia value for me because when I was a child we were forbidden to watch regular TV at my house, and could only watch “The Disney Channel” and “PBS”. So I grew up watching those old Disney Kurt Russell movies rerun over and over again on “The Disney Channel”. (The Disney Channel had a somewhat different line up back in the 1980s than it does today. In those days it was almost exclusively used for showing old stuff from the Disney vault, and I grew up watching re-runs of Davy Crockett, Zorro, and Kurt Russell teen movies).

In fact, I never even knew Kurt Russell had a career as an adult actor, until “Tombstone” became a bit of a dorm classic on my floor freshman year. This was probably because almost all of the films Kurt Russell made during the 80s, like “The Thing” I was forbidden to see at the time.

Anyway…
The DVD at my local rental store was chalked full of extras. A commentary track with Kurt Russell and John Carpenter, An 1 hour and a 1/2 documentary on the making of (which unfortunately has too many talking heads and very little visuals, but I guess that’s what happens when you do the “making of” segment 20 years later), and lots and lots of data on the production staff. It made me feel like I had stumbled upon a real classic, and I guess this is a bit of a classic in sci-fi/ horror movie circles.

To my surprise, the story in this movie is significantly different from the 1952 version. But, upon listening to the director’s commentary, I found out that this version is actually truer to the original short story. (I didn’t even know there had been an original short story).

In the 1952 version, the monster is a big lumbering giant, similar to Frankenstein’s monster. In John Carpenter’s 1982 version, the Thing is a shapeshifter that absorbs the bodies of anything it attacks. It can also perfectly imitate people.

Thus, the drama becomes a lot more a cross between “10 Little Indians” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. No one knows who in their midst might have been taken over by the monster already. Paranoia starts to reign.

There’s a fair amount of guts, blood, and gore in this movie. (Very little of it is actually human. Most of the gore is the creature's).
In fact, as I was watching this movie, I suddenly remembered playground conversations from 20 years ago (as long forgotten memories sometimes come back with the right trigger). Some kids who had been able to see “The Thing” were telling the rest of us how gross it was.
(In the Christian school playground atmosphere, those kids whose parents allowed them to see movies like this would quickly assume a “more worldly and sophisticated than thou” attitude towards those of us stuck watching re-runs on the Disney channel. They would always convey their reports on these type of movies with a tone of, “Well, I could just about handle it, but you, I don’t know if you could have taken it. It’s probably best you weren’t allowed to see it”.
….Of course as you can imagine, this just increased my curiosity and my desire to see these movies even more.)

I’m sure if I had seen this movie back in the 1980s, the blood and guts would have really horrified me. But standards change so fast that I think these days most kids have seen it all before anyway. There’s very little in here that would shock an audience in 2008.

I am, however, reminded of something my 7th grade music teacher told us once. She was showing us “West Side Story”, and she was giving us an (unnecessary) apology for the fact that the violence in the movie was all bloodless. But she also said, “In today’s movies, you’re so busy being grossed out when someone dies that you don’t realize, ‘Hey, this person is actually dead!’”.
This, I think, is definitely true of “The Thing”. The first half of the movie you get to know and care for the characters stationed up on a lonely outpost in the Antarctic. But when they start to die off, there’s so much shock value associated with a lot of these deaths that you don’t really feel for any of the deaths. The human characters just become fodder to be ripped apart.

Still, all in all enough shocks and cheap thrills to justify the rental. And as a bonus, after having watched this movie I do finally understand “The South Park” parody of “The Thing” now.

Link of the Day
Iraq: A brief parable.

Bonus Link: More Japanese Music on Youtube

Yo ga aketara by Maki. It's from the mid 60s, and it really does a good job of making you imagine a smoky night club in somewhere in Tokyo.

The Thing (1982): Movie Review (Scripted)