You gotta be ******* kidding me.....

Rating: 10/10 (10 April 2015)

An American scientific expedition to the frozen wastes of the Antarctic is interrupted by a group of seemingly mad Norwegians pursuing and shooting a dog.
The helicopter pursuing the dog explodes, eventually leaving no explanation for the chase. During the night, the dog mutates and attacks other dogs in the cage and members of the team that investigate.
The team soon realises that an alien life-form with the ability to take over other bodies is on the loose and they don't know who may already have been taken over.....
It seemed in the eighties, well the majority of the decade, Carpenter made a career defining movie, every time he made a movie, especially if it starred Kurtz Russell.
He changed the face of horror for over twenty years with Halloween, Changed the attitude of Science Fiction with Escape from New York, BTILC, They Live, and this, probably his greatest film of the eighties.
And it's great because its so simple, it's tense because you put yourself in their situation, in the middle of nowhere,with literally nowhere to go or to hide, and not being able to trust anyone.
And that's the premise, it could be any film, any genre, any setting, but the fact that its in the middle of the coldest place on earth, and the inclusion of a body morphing alien, that generates the terror, and it generates it in droves.
Before anything happens alien wise, there is still an air of tension between the crew, after all they are confined to the setting, so they must get tired of each other from time to time.
And then the dog arrives.
After that, it just goes bonkers, and even almost thirty five years after its initial release, those special effects are still amazing, oh to see this on its initial release must have been something else.
The cast are brilliant, Russell appears and acts a lot advanced in his years, and the film keeps you guessing until the end.
If you do enough research, one of the survivors isn't as he seems during the final reel, and it makes it all the more chilling.
Groundbreaking stuff.