A cult horror classic

Rating: 8/10 (16 September 2009)

It's not so often I encounter the chance to revisit a classic on the big screen yet yesterday I had that privilege to watch John Carpenter's cult horror classic 'The Thing' at the Cineworld Cinema near Piccadilly Circus.
The film begins in the midst of the Antarctic snowfield where a helicopter is circling an American research base chasing down a husky with a sniper. When the helicopter crashes and the pilot is killed, the passenger survives only to continue his mission of pursuing and killing the dog and in the process shots one of the members of the research team to get to the dog. The gunman who appears to be Norwegian is shot down by the captain of the base as he obviously appears to be steered crazy and incredibly dangerous.
When they eventually find out that this dog isn't what it appears to be, two members of the team, one being MacReady (played by Kurt Russel who gives a fine performance here), goes on a search for the Norwegian base to see what clues they can find. When they do find the abandoned base, they find a large block of ice which looks as if something had been frozen in it for centuries and a half burnt corps that looks like something they've never seen. Of course this corps is brought back to the base, and after a few autopsies are made, one of the doctors makes the shocking discovery of a creature that imitates cells
When one of the members of the base is left alone with the remains of the creature, another team member enters the room only to discover the creature is not dead and is now in fact imitating a member of the team. When help comes forth, the creature has almost finished the process and looks exactly like the team member except for a few last features.
This is where the tension really begins; paranoia hits everyone and hits them hard. Did they kill the creature? Are there any remains of the creature left? If so, has it taken shape of any other team members? Who is human and who is the creature? Who can they trust? You can even feel the tension in the atmosphere of the base, the silence, the darkness, and the reactions of the team members when they suspect another team member.
If one person gets out of their sight for an instant then that person is automatically a suspect. The best example of paranoia is shown by Dr. Blair played by Wilford Brimley who delivers the best performance in the film. He discovers that if this creature reaches civilization, it will eventually imitate mankind little by little and this drives him over the edge and wants no one from the base to escape for the sake of mankind.
I felt quite fortunate as to have previously visited Howard Hawk's original Sci-Fi classic 'The Thing from Another World' which is quite an impressive film especially for 1951, did not feature a shape-shifting creature, instead it featured a gigantic creature that required human blood in order to reproduce. The director John Carpenter, being a fan of Howard Hawks did not try to copy the original; instead he went back to the original novel 'Who Goes There?' by John W. Campbell Jr. from 1939 which did feature a shape-shifting creature, thus making the film more tense and more suspenseful.
John Carpenter has never been known for his character build up; in fact the villains in his movies are usually mindless and lack emotion or personality as shown in this film and many others such as Michael Myers in his merciless masterpiece 'Halloween', the car Christine in 'Christine' or the zombie-like ghosts from 'The Fog'. But he is famous for his tense scenes and his dark and creepy shots as hardly any of his movies contain more than ten minutes of daylight. This is a well paced, well shot film and with these sorts of movies, that's rare.
Watching 'The Thing' again I couldn't help but be reminded of Don Siegel's Sci-Fi classic 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' from 1956, where a doctor in a small town practise finds numerous patients of his claiming that their relatives or close friends are not who they seem to be but in fact impostors who look exactly them. These two films feature the same sort of paranoia, only John Carpenter makes the decision of showing the shape-shifting commence by using extremely grotesque and gory special effects. Although I am not a fan of grotesque special effects, especially as over blown as they are here, John Carpenter's version of 'The Thing' still succeeds as a haunting tale of paranoia and is a highly entertaining and action packed sci-fi film that is sure to entertain even if it's not as great as Don Siegel's classic.
Upon the film's release back in 1982, the film did not do so well in the box office, maybe because it came out only two weeks after the phenomenon 'E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial' or maybe it's simply due to its extensive use gore and violence which it earned it an "R" rating by the Motion Picture Association of America. It instead went on to become a cult favourite and is now considered to be one of the best and scariest horror films ever made.