THE THING (2008) January 19, 2007
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , trackbackAs a special treat for readers of this blog, a review of a future classic from 2008.
This film is a work of supreme insight and a canny re-imagining of a sadly dated piece of ’80s cinema. Set in a remote High School on the Canadian border, it depicts the struggles of a geek teenager who watches his schoolmates being systematically taken over by The Thing while his school is cut off from the nearby town by a blizzard. He is helped by his science tutor who, in a neat nod to fans of the John Carpenter effort, is played by none other than Kurt Russell. The horror has been unknowingly triggered by a class science project which was digging for ore samples in the school playing fields before disappearing in the snow storm. Two days later the only survivor of the doomed field class is a ginger cat that is chased back to the school by the school gardener who knows that the cat is infected by The Thing.
Alas the school security guard, startled by the sight of the fork-welding mad gardener, shoots him dead and gives the sinister moggy to the school janitor who is the first to die in a horribly unique cgi-fest. Indeed the twenty-six deaths in the film are all grotesquely imaginative uses of huge amounts of cgi while still achieving that all-important PG-13 rating.
The biggest change from the original is perhaps the doomed love story that has all the female cinema-goers weeping in their popcorn. Recognising the opportunity to start a franchise Universal have already greenlit a sequel, VERY BAD THINGS FOR SALE set in a shopping mall isolated by yet another freakishly bad snowstorm.
Comments»
i love the sarcasm!! this is exactly what me and other john carpenter “the thing” geeks are afraid of in the proposed remake to come out in 2009.
keep up the optimism.
why dont they do a 25 years later or just after the 1982 film ended. this sounds like a rubbish remake by hollywood. i mean how did the thing get to canada? It wouldve caused some fuss in the American public if a ship landed. even the presence of a ship from aoeons ago would have been fopund by now. ive been a big fan of carpenters film but although ive waited for this film for ages I am slighlty dissapointed with the new plot.
The ‘isolated in a shopping mall’ also sounds too much like dawn of the dead. And I ask were is this shopping mall becouse if there was a mall you would expect there to be rescue workers trying to free the people captured in the mall. Thinking about it. how would the thing get into a mall. The first film quoted that if the thing reached civilisation then the entire world would be consumed in 27000 hours. his makes it sound too much like some appocalypse film. On a lighter note i hope that they include psycological horror aswell as just mutations. In the origional film only a small number were killed by the thing. many were killed by others or by themselves (as in the case of Fuchs)
with the thing from the 80’s bieng one of my favorite movies(as well as rated R) i am kind of skeptical of how this will all play out, and honestly, the sequel sounds STUPID. whats up with the pg-13 thing. has everone really givvin up on making good horror, is it all just for our money? cause ill tell ya what, NO ONE is gettin any money from me if you put a cheesy love story in The Thing…. theres NO place for that!