THE THING (1982)

After consolidating a rep for ultra-profitable small-budget indies with a big studio hit (HALLOWEEN/’78 to ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK/’81), John Carpenter underperformed critically & commercially on this pricey nihilistic followup, only to see it grow over the years in popularity & influence, undeservedly so.  Ostensibly expanded from the old Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks’ Arctic Monster pic, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD/’51, it’s more ALIEN/’79 meets INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (the glossy ‘78 remake).  And if you can still feel the unanswered commercial expectations of Universal Studio execs,* you can also see why it eventually caught on.  But Carpenter (or is it scipter Bill Lancaster?) makes missteps almost from the start (one minor; one major) and the film never quite recovers.  It opens well, an unsettling prologue as a rogue Norwegian helicopter from a neighboring Antarctic Science Outpost hunts down a husky in the snow, one of the American crew’s dogs.  (An updated silent film trope pointing out the villain by having him kick a little boy’s dog.)  But then the film proper opens with Kurt Russell wrecking his personal computer after losing at chess.  Really?  And where is he likely to get a replacement in 1982 Antarctica?  Character sacrificed for a cheap gag.  Next, they give the whole game away with an alien monster doing its transformation trick on the dogs and then a human.  Nothing for the rest of the film to do but enlarge scale in gore & creepy creatures bursting thru flesh.  No doubt, the idea was to stay ahead of an audience already on to the alien threat and looking for bigger gross-outs, or see who’ll die next, or hum Ennio Morricone Carpenter-esque repetitive two-note theme.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Why does D.P. Dean Cundey give so many of his films the same weird orange glow?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Universal Execs hoping to match ALIEN’s ‘In Space No One Can Hear You Scream’ only coming up with ‘MAN IS THE WARMEST PLACE TO HIDE.’  Lame