The Thing

John Carpenter's The Thing is a classic science fiction horror thriller that has become infamous for the excessively gruesome display of special creature and splatter gore effects, images that make it a landmark of cinematic disgust. The film out-Aliens Alien, the film from several years earlier it most closely resembles. Alien, make no mistake, was sickening. However, it never quite reached the level that The Thing takes it to. The audience will be astounded (and repulsed) by shredded dog faces, bursting chests with shark-like teeth, amputated limbs, writhing tentacles, stomachs full of digested canine, and grue and sickening biological slop by the bucketful. This is a film that pulls no punches when it comes to making the audience queasy.

Having said that, the film itself is stark, plodding, and understated, and even at times dull. The characterizations are of a crew of "just average" folks, much as in Alien, with a few stalwart Fifties-type, all-American, monster movie stock actors thrown into the mix. Wilford Brimley and Donald Moffat mix it up with Kurt Russell, T.K. Carter, and Richard Masur, among others, and the mix is beffuddling. Who are the "scientists" here? Why are these people stationed at the U.S. Antarctic Outpost 31? None of them seem like research scientists (although Brimley's character is obviously a super genius and manages to construct a prototype flying saucer in around forty minutes or so while being locked in a freezing equipment shed).

Kurt Russell, as the sombrero-wearing helicopter pilot MacReady, is, much as can be expected, the strong, silent hero who rises to the occasion, remaining relatively calm and powerful while the world around him turns into a horror of paranoia (it being discovered that "the Thing" can take on the form of ANY living organism, be it man or beast, and mimic that form perfectly). The first scene revealing it, in a kennel of dogs, shows us a gruesome, shredded, "flesh flower" bursting from the ripped-apart skull of a wolf hound, emitting a long, snake-like tongue, whiplashing tentacles, and spidery arms. It shoots a poisonous stream at a doggie, and blood and death is everywhere in the darkness. But I give away too much, perhaps.

The Pulse of Doom

The characters, even Russell's MacReady, are in ways affable but never really rise to being interesting. They are horror and monster movie modern stock characters, such as the dope-smoking hippie Palmer (David Clennon) who wears a denim vest with patches and the sleeves ripped off. The paranoia aspect of the plot, wherein no one knows who the Thing might be, becomes muddled and confusing, as we never really have a hook to hang our hats on, as far as these characters. In a way, as brutally and vomitously as they are dispatched, we care very little, relishing only the look of the special effects, saying to ourselves, "Man, they really outdid themselves on the live creature effects with this one!"

Things happen and events unfold slowly and sometimes abruptly, and we are muddled in our comprehension of them and find ourselves yawning a lot, waiting for the next gore-drenched manifestation of the alien terror at the heart of the film. It's not that the performances here are bad, it's that the film itself has all the charm of an autopsy. There is nothing here to look at except the blood, gore, snow, ice, grey walls, and the handsome visage of Russell, who becomes increasingly unhinged as he marches toward what he knows must certainly be his own death.

"None of us are getting out of here alive!" he tells Moffat at one point and, indeed, the double bass notes played on the soundtrack, the second a quaver above the first it seems, give one the impression of something that is moving, slowly, methodically toward its own end. Death punctuates The Thing. This is NOT a feel-good movie.

Russell, at the end, speaking with "Childs" (Keith David), a man he threatened to kill, says, "Let's just rest here awhile..." while out in the freezing snows. This echoes the theme of The Thing, that there was something hideous, vile, waiting out there, in all that vast frozen emptiness, just waiting for the proper time to come forth, and feed its repulsive hungers. I mean, in such a "cold, dead place," there could be anything hidden.

Anything at all.

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