The Thing
By Mark Shuper
Critics slighted it, audiences, for the most part, ignored it. And in a summer where audiences fell for fantasy, John Carpenter's THE THING definitely was marching to a different drummer. Instead of lovable aliens and high adventure, Carpenter dished up a saga of bone weary men fighting off an uninvited extraterrestrial creature that looked God-awful and ate everything in sight - humans included.
With THE THING, Carpenter attempted a merger of the 1950s stock sci-fi, "B" feature with the special effects of the 1980s. What resulted was a predictable group of stock characters fighting off the special effects department - and special effects won, in each and every way. With such oddities as a creature sprouting strange appendages - human, dog and who knows what else - as well as walking heads, exploding bodies and Kurt Russell's ever-ready flame thrower, the rest of the cast never had much of a chance for anything other than breathinga little life into their roles. And sure enough, they ended up "consumed," one by one, by creature and film.
Carpenter's direction is solid - and typifies the journeyman approach of the old Hollywood directors he adores. His major problem with THE THING is the absence of a Carpenter hallmark - pure, psychological horror. The cast do what they have to do, and they do it solidly. Russell on-screen is superb - electric. And the sound and score - indeed, all production values - are exceptional.
But it's the Thing, photographed in all its grisly transformations, that steals the show. Ultimately, the special effects wrest the film from Carpenter's grasp. And Carpenter's own dark flourishes, added to the genre, violate the rules of the form: the audience, like the survivors at the film's end, are in a state of near collapse, unsure of what has happened, if what has happened is really over, and, ultimately, uncaring one way or the other.
On the other hand, it would make a great double bill with HALLOWEEN on the revival circuit.
