Dull storytelling mixed with imaginative schlock

Rating: 4/10 (23 March 2018)

The time-honed story of a small band of people trapped in the middle of nowhere facing an unknowable, unstoppable entity is one that never seems to get old. Far from being purely the realm of dumb slasher films, the best examples of this genre are brilliantly taut exercises in primal dread. Classics such as the original Alien are apex examples of this type of story.
The Thing is one of the more influential entries into the genre, pitting a team of Antarctic surveyors against a shape-shifting alien capable of perfectly imitating other lifeforms. The premise here is simple but effective - if the eponymous thing can replicate anyone perfectly, then who can you trust? Who is human, and who is not? It's a brilliant idea with endless potential for suspense and paranoia.
Sadly, despite the high praise The Thing has garnered, I found it to be a rather sub-par splatter film, sacrificing logic and tension for the sake of gory excess and contrived story turns. That isn't to say the film is without its merits, it's just that director John Carpenter seems to have little interest in exploiting them. For every scene of slow-creeping dread where the ambiguity of the characters' predicament threatens to unnerve the audience, there has to be a protracted sequence of comically over-the-top gore to suck out every ounce of tension that proceeded it.
The special effects in this film are indeed technically impressive and creative, but the end result is absurd and indulgent. Nothing is left to the imagination once the thing reveals itself - every sickly gooey detail has to be shown plain-as-day without the slightest attempt at subtlety or hiding the unknown. I even burst at laughing at several moments from the absurdity of the gore, which I'm pretty sure isn't the intended effect in a film as bleak as this one.
The story itself doesn't fare much better - characters are constantly wandering off or otherwise finding contrived reasons to be on their own, even after the true nature of the thing becomes fully apparent. This is repeated so frequently, especially during the finale, that I pretty much ceased to care about the fate of any of the characters - they act so unremittingly stupid that it becomes less about the slyness of the mysterious life-form and more about the laziness of the screenwriter to imagine a more believable excuse for characters to be separated for one another.
The Thing has its moments of course. The infamous blood test scene brings the skill of the cast to heel in horrific vividness, the audience hanging on every beat as the inevitable payoff of the scene draws ever closer. But even this must end with a drawn-out sequence of nauseating splatter to deflate the suspense the past few minutes constructed so effectively. Every thriller/horror film is based around the peaks-and-troughs of tension and release, but The Thing makes these troughs more exhausting than chilling, inducing fatigue where there should be ever-present dread.
In short, The Thing strands an excellent cast and an atmospheric setting in the middle of a contrived story punctuated by extended moments of putrid icky gore. There are flashes of brilliance where the promising premise of paranoia shines through, but for me this was mostly drowned out by a deeply-flawed plot built around dull stock characters acting with blithe stupidity. If I were more predisposed to gore, I might have enjoyed the film's macabre visual imagination, but in the absence of any meaningful substance, The Thing instead left me out in the cold.