An equal to Alien

Rating: 10/10 (9 March 2008)

This stands next to Alien and Invasion of the Body Snatchers '78 as one of the great horror/sci-fi hybrids of the era. The film takes place in an American research base in Antarctica. A Norwegian helicopter chases an escaped sled dog into camp, shooting at it with a rifle. When the shooter wounds one of the Americans, they kill him in self-defense. It's probably not the smartest move, seeing as how insanely the Norwegians were trying to kill it, but the Americans take the dog in. Little do they know it's not a dog at all, but an alien life form mimicking a dog. Soon it reveals its true form  kind of  and is burned to death. Unfortunately, it's a crafty organism and has likely infected one or more of the men. But how could you know? It's a perfect mimic, pretty much undetectable until it's too late. The film features some of the best special effects of its time  they have not dated a bit, and are every bit as creepy and nasty as they were in 1982. The monster, when it reveals itself, is a true Lovecraftian thing that takes on all kinds of forms, probably an amalgam of the different organisms it has mimicked over its lifetime. Put the monster aside, though, and there's this great, intense study of paranoia. "Nobody trusts anybody" as star Kurt Russell puts it. Reminiscent of perhaps The Big Sleep, if you closely scrutinize the series of events, the plot makes no sense. There's no conceivable way the persons who eventually end up as the thing could have become it. But this lack of logic itself is part of why the movie is so horrifying. You never can tell who is or who is not an alien. Carpenter wisely never lets the audience see anything. Kudos to him for that. And also kudos to him for including two black characters who don't die in the first ten minutes of the movie, an almost unheard of feat for an African American person in a 1980s (or '90s or even '00s) horror movie! A masterpiece of the genre.