Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Kurt Russell, A. Wilford Brimley, Keith David, Richard Dysart
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, of course. In fact, I was a little surprised that I hadn’t written a review of this one, as the we did do the show on Beyond the Cabin in the Woods, but it must have been in that brief time between when I joined the show and when I started these reviews.
Did I Like It: An idiot out there might say—and probably did when this film was initially released—that decided that Carpenter had effectively run out of juice after Halloween (1978)*.
This film is an absolute triumph of everything Carpenter excels at. It is lean. It is mean. What it adds to the proceedings that Carpenter’s earlier films—largely out of necessity—lacked is a visceral (and I do mean of, pertaining to, or possessing qualities of viscera…) . The various Thing-creatures are some of the most nauseating and unnerving creature work in the movies. Those images stuck with me before I ever even managed to see the movie. I remember a kid’s book from the library I devoured when I couldn’t have been any older than six or seven featuring various movie monsters. Godzilla was there, and Dracula, but also the recently revealed Norris-Thing (Charles Hallahan), all contorted face and absurd limbs. It stuck with me then, and it sticks with me now.
What’s more, this film is still unnerving and still scary as hell. The scene where MacReady (Russell) is testing the blood of the other men. I’ve seen this film. I know how it ends. But I’ll be damned if I don’t feel every inch of the tension as it proceeds, and I’ll be doubly damned if I wasn’t completely thrown for a loop when the blood finally reacted.
If a movie can blow past forty and still hold power on multiple viewings, that’s magic of a high order, and no one can take that away from Carpenter. He certainly never ran out of juice by the time The Thing was released, and for my money he never did. He may have eventually given it up after he didn’t have any use for it anymore, but that’s up for debate.
*The original The Thing from Another World (1951) was, naturally one of the films playing on TV during Carpenter’s breakthrough hit. The other was Forbidden Planet (1956), and I’ll never not wonder what Carpenter’s remake of that film could have been like. Might even be better that it is always something that I’ll have to just imagine… Unless, you know, he decides to make one on his couch. It just now occurred to me that Russell would probably have to play the Walter Pidgeon role… Which, now that I think about it is essentially Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2019). God damn that was a long footnote…