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For all its many flaws, I'm inclined to be charitable towards "Thing". There is the nugget of an interesting, creepy, claustrophobic Hitchcock style story here. Put this in the hands of a writer like Theodore Sturgeon or (if you prefer British perspective) Robert Bloch, or the guy who wrote "Day Of The Triffids", and you might have had a nasty, unsettling little spook story that was the best thing in an book anthology of horror and suspense stories.
However, someone chose to tell this story as a feature length movie, and a cheap, 2nd rate at that, and so most of the potential is wasted. A story like this really needs a voice like Sturgeon's to bring out interesting quirks of character in a better light. His classic story "The -widget-, the -wadget-, and Boff" is an example of how he can gather together an isolated group of "ordinary" characters and in the space of 40 pages can turn them into the most amusing, sympathetic and fascinating people you've ever met. A good writer can, with a few chosen words, make the reader "see" some of the most vivid and memorable events ever to scar his emotions.
Instead, we get a movie where some of the most irritating and unlikeable characters ever made are lumped together and made to interact in unconvincing "Where did that come from??" moments that just lie there. (IE the blond psychic girl declaiming that "You're all evil and I hope you are destroyed!"). We get leaden pacing and slow motion blocking and dull sets and stiff actors. I blame the director for the 'stiff and shallow' part. These are all 3rd rank character actors who never made the big time, but they are also 'real' actors, and a good director could have gotten better performances out of them. We get uncalled for lesbian overtones that make the viewer feel uneasy and exploited without delivering any kind of payoff. (If I'm going to have my baser instincts exploited and feel guilty about it, I want done by stuff staged better than this). And we get over an hour of creepy build-up diffused in about 35 seconds in one of the worst anti-climaxes I've ever seen.
Good things about "Thing"? Um, well...some of the closeup shots of the warlock's head silently mouthing its directives were pretty effective. The miserly and shrewish widow rang true to life (even if I wanted to stuff a sock in her mouth). The first scene where the big, "simple" ranch hand silently turns on the oily cowboy and kills him had a bit of shock value, because the plot had taken the trouble to establish the big guy as a fairly sympathetic character. And like I said earlier, the idea of an insidious force from the past turning the members of an isolated community against each other is a good one and can sustain interest far above the actual merit of a bad performance.
Which this definitely is.
But, as I said, I'm inclined to be charitable, because the director was probably working under a penurious budget, breakneck time constraints and the best actors he could find for the money. Heaven knows how future generations will judge facile crap like "The Cave", "Wrong Turn" or the remake of "House of Wax" 40 years from now. I hope they are charitable towards our own tastes in supporting our generations wastes of film stock.


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