Who is who

Rating: 6/10 (16 September 2016)

John Carpenter remade Howard Hawks 1951 sci-fi film, The Thing From Another World.
The film starts in the icy plains of Antarctica as a man in a helicopter is try to shoot dead a runaway dog. The dog survives as it reaches a base where some American scientists reside, the Norwegians in the helicopter do not.
The dog is in fact The Thing, a being from outer space that arrived in a space ship some 100,000 years ago and remained buried in the ice in Antarctica. It looks like the Norwegian base camp uncovered it to their cost. The Thing can ingest and then assume the form of any living being whether human or animal.
In some ways John Carpenter's film is similar to Alien as the members of the base camp will be knocked off one by one, not helped that they seemed to be left alone or go out on their own too many times so they can be taken over by the shape shifting creature.
The film actually starts out slowly and the characters are painted in broad strokes, in short thin characterizations. There are no female characters in this film but there are two black actors in the cast, one rather stereotypical who seemed to have walked in straight from the hood listening to Stevie Wonder. Rather a few of the characters including star Kurt Russell did not convince me that they were research scientists.
What the film did have was gross out special effects that would had scared the hell out of people in 1982, it certainly scared me in that era. Stretchy body parts churned inside out, gore galore, hands being severed, a head sprouting legs and walking off like a spider.
What you get in grotesque special effects you lose in a coherent narrative. The film failed at the box office when the film was released but later acquired a cult following.