Upon its theatrical release in 1982, John Carpenter's reworking of the 1951 sci-fi classic The Thing From Another World took a drubbing from some outspoken genre devotees who thought it deviated too much from the original and sported unnecessarily gross special effects. In fact, writer-director Carpenter (Halloween) deliberately avoided paying obeisance to Christian Nyby's 1951 film and instead went back to the source material, John W. Campbell's 1938 novella “Who Goes There?”, for inspiration. The basic premise remained the same: a research team working in a remote Antarctic outpost comes across the body of a frozen alien and brings it back to the base, where the creature thaws out and begins killing the men one by one (but Carpenter played up the original story's central conceit, making the alien a shape-shifter capable of perfectly mimicking any life form it ingests). Kurt Russell, who had teamed with Carpenter on the preceding year's Escape From New York, is rather subdued as the fatalistic hero, and the similarly restrained supporting performances of first-rate character actors Wilford Brimley, Richard Dysart, Richard Masur, Donald Moffat, and T.K. Carter help lend believability to a patently implausible situation. Rob Bottin's special effects, while certainly on the repulsive side, were extraordinarily convincing by 1982 standards (although they won't seem quite as impressive to younger viewers weaned on the CGI effects employed in genre offerings of the last decade). In retrospect, Carpenter's The Thing was much better than it was given credit for, as viewers will discover in this reasonably sharp-looking "collector's edition," which includes a commentary by Carpenter and Russell, a "making-of" documentary titled “Terror Takes Shape,” and a host of other extras (work-in-progress special-effects footage, conceptual art and storyboards, and even some stop-motion animation that didn't make the movie's final cut). Recommended. (E. Hulse)
The Thing: Collector's Edition
Universal, 109 min., R, DVD: $19.98 Volume 20, Issue 1
The Thing: Collector's Edition
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