A masterpiece of filmmaking.

Rating: 9/10 (6 December 2018)

What can I say about John Carpenter's magnificent The Thing that has not been said already? It is a masterpiece of suspense, paranoia and dread. . Why does the film work so well you ask? The setup is standard stuff, establishing that the characters are isolated and can expect no help from the outside but it is the realization there could be an alien among them, and any one of them might not be human, is what launches The Thing into a spiral of escalating tension. The quest to identify the alien consumes about half the movie's running time, and includes several red herrings and the gripping blood test sequence in which MacReady uses a hot wire and samples of everyone's hemoglobin to clear some members of the crew and damn others. The final confrontation with the alien, despite providing the most grotesque special effect of the movie and allowing plenty of pyrotechnics, is anticlimactic. Then again, after the extended suspense of the middle section, it's hard to see how any resolution could rise to that level. This is great filmmaking and the Thing came during Carpentar's most fertile period as a filmmaker. Kurt Russell shines as do the rest of the all male cast. If you enjoy horror, suspense or thrills than this movie, more than thirty five years old is unmissable.