"What you fear most.. is among you"

Rating: 4/10 (7 May 2012)

Long story short: I had large expectations for this film. It's been coined one of the scariest films of all time. The Shining and Exorcist are also coined the same thing, which are actually scary. It had a great plot. I loved the whole mystery thing it had going on, not knowing what 'it' is. And it was made by John Carpenter. He's the director who has created the iconic character of Michael Myers and made the classic horror film. So with all these added up, I was really excited to see what was to come. It had all these things that had it coming, but here's the biggest shocker: it was horrible.
The Thing has all the components of a horror film, and the strangest thing is that it uses them, but for what reason? So the beginning was done fantastic. My expectations were huge, kept me wondering what this film could do. Ready to be scared off my seat. But maybe my expectations were too high.. Carpenter thinks he can create an eerie feeling throughout the entire thing, which he's half right/half wrong. The sense of paranoia IS there, but it just dies down every time something happens. Carpenter also takes the gimmicky effect of gore itself, and uses it to make these far-fetched images, that he thinks will scare us, but then comes off a bit silly. One scene was this guys turn into some crawling creature, which way back in 1982 would surely look stupid. And it does. And Carpenter's vision of aliens itself are just absurd. I imagine aliens as short, green fellows with one eye and a laser gun; the stereotypical vision of them. Carpenter thinks they are shape-shifting guys that we never get to see. And that's the problem with me. Carpenter uses the gimmick to not show the aliens, which sort of comes of as a mixture of stupid and curiosity, but for me? I sat in half-confusion, half-bored. There was no sense of tension between the characters, and the slow-burn pacing never helped either.
So I wouldn't recommend The Thing. It's cracked up to be one of the greatest horror films of all time, but it never ever shows this. It's was boring, slow, pointless, and tension-less. It's not even one of those horror films that you want to watch with your friends, because all you would be doing is watching the gross-out scenes that seamlessly go nowhere. If you loved Halloween, and hate the gimmicky effect of gore, The Thing will be hated by you. If you hate Halloween, love gore, love horror movies that come out today, then this is your sort of film. I didn't like it, my opinion, my fact. The end.
4/10.