I’m a bit concerned about this “Thing” thing. This is the thing; “The Thing from Another World” was an admirable picture for 1951. Margaret Sheridan would have definitely been supremely doable bent over a stump in a garter and some hose with a bright red ball gag in her mouth, and Corporal Barnes went on to manage the production of several episodes of Batman, Land of the Giants, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Time Tunnel and Lost in Space; some of the best TV Sci-Fi of my youth. Of course, no one can forget a young Marshall Dillon as the carrot from outer space. The black and white portrayal of the Arctic monochrome and the creeping claustrophobic paranoia of hunting the budding extraterrestrial vegetable definitely gave the movie an “in the produce section, no one can hear you scream” quality. The Cold War (Arctic, Cold? anyway…) was in full swing and we were under siege from every treachery imaginable with nothing but the All-American electrical technology of Nikola Tesla to preserve us. I didn’t see the movie for the first time until around 1970, but I was young enough, and not quite completely spoiled enough by “special effects”, to still find it frightening.
Along comes 1982, Reagan is President, and I, listlessly killing time between the Army and college, go with my sister and some friends to the Omni in Atlanta to see John Carpenter’s “The Thing”. It’s an afternoon matinee and, consistent with Atlanta’s demographic, the crowd is almost exclusively black. Without undue stereotyping, it is accurate to report that many patrons were already talking to the screen while Snake Plissken was still in the Viking research station eyeballing frozen corpses. What proceeded to unfold was a grotesque ballet of nauseating imagery, gallows humor and the anxious fear of genuine uncertainty. I’m not going to say that “The Thing” is a masterpiece, but “The Thing” is a masterpiece. I have this movie on DVD and have nearly worn a hole in it. I never get too much of Kurt Russell’s sneering or Wilfred “Diabetes” Brimley’s deadpan. And the black guy doesn’t get killed first, or perhaps, at all. Keith David, whom I sleazily loved in “Requiem for a Dream” and admired in “Dead Presidents”, is the perfect foil for Russell’s I’m-young-and-good-looking-and-in-charge-and-also-white. It was 1982, remember. I will say, while I did miss some of the dialog that day, I don’t think I had before or since enjoyed a more blissfully uncontrolled communion of terror with my fellow Homo sapiens. Anyway, I didn’t feel John Carpenter had ripped off “The Thing from Another World” so much as allowed it to evolve. It was more than “updated”; it was transformed into the gag reflex horror of the full color, post Vietnam reality of human civilization which the naiveté of hiding under a desk to escape from a 20 megaton hydrogen bomb would never have been able to comprehend. It was simply, “The Thing”, and it didn’t matter where the fuck the thing was from; it was fucking bad news. John Carpenter had already proven he could generate return on investment with “Halloween”, “The Fog” and “Escape from New York”, so you knew it was going to be good, but it was better than good; it was different.
So now, along comes “The Thing” 2011 style. Of course I have not seen it yet, and, of course, I will, but I can’t help feel like somebody wants to replace the Mona Lisa with a digitally enhanced Mona Lisa. Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. hasn’t directed shit, and while Mary Elizabeth Winstead is a babe, eye candy does not a horror movie make. You just can’t tell me that you can do better than MacReady and Childs, surrounded by the flickering remains of the research station, sharing a drink, while the frozen darkness slithers in from all sides. My children say I’m getting old and stupid, but I’m still smart enough to follow MacReady’s advice and just wait here for a little while... see what happens.
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