The Thing (1982)

The Thing Man

The Thing
USA 1982 Directed by John Carpenter
Arrow Ltd Edition Blu Ray Box Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Man is the warmest place to hide huge spoilers if you’ve not seen this movie.

I’ve already said that, out of all three movie versions of John W. Campbell Jr’s novella Who Goes There?, my favourite version is always going to be the 1951 adaptation, The Thing From Another World, (reviewed here) regardless of the inaccuracies to the source material... which is something they are all guilty of, one way or another although, I think the prequel to this movie might actually be closer in some ways, ironically. That being said, I absolutely love John Carpenter’s The Thing and it’s nothing short of a modern horror classic. I can’t believe it was such a huge flop when it released in the summer of 1982 and I find it hard to understand the critical attacks on it. This film, like many of those released that summer, gave us things we hadn’t seen before on screen and, certainly, this is something which I think has had a huge influence on modern horror directors.

Starting with a saucer flying down to the earth, Carpenter then goes out of his way to replicate the title card of the original movie (minus ‘from another world’ obviously, which in itself was only added to the original to distance it from a comedy, novelty song of the time). We then start the film proper with a low, pulse rhythm which is absolutely reminiscent of most of Carpenter’s other scores but was also composed by Ennio Morricone. Actually, the music in this is one of those huge mystery puzzle pieces to the layman like me as not all of the score was retained (some of it turns up in Tarantino's The Hateful Eight), some of it not used in its final form and some was composed by Carpenter himself.

We see a Norwegian helicopter chasing a dog in Antarctica, trying to shoot it to slow it down so the occupants can blow said dog up with a stick of TNT. The dog makes it to safety as we are introduced to the personnel of the American base camp and this includes the only female presence in the movie... the voice of MacCready’s Chess Wizard computer voiced by Carpenter’s then wife, Adrienne Barbeau. Her inclusion is short lived because, when the computer wins at chess, MacReady pours the rest of his J&B into the machine and it dies a death as he comments, “Cheating bitch!” I don’t know if Carpenter was already, at this time, having problems with his marriage but, if he was, this seems like a perfect line for him to express himself with. I really like Barbeau myself and am looking forward to reading her autobiography soon.

As the dog makes it to the base, we get the whole team out there and the Norweigans come to a sticky end, one by a bizarre, clumsy accident which destroys him and his helicopter and the other, by the base commander shooting him through the eye, after the intruder accidentally wounds one of his men. We have the one and only Kurt Russell playing the main protagonist/anti-hero MacReady and he is ably supported by a full ensemble cast of Wilford Brimley (Blair), T.K. Carter (Nauls), David Clennon (Palmer), Keith David (Childs), Richard Dysart (Copper), Charles Hallahan (Norris), Peter Maloney (Bennings), Richard Masur (Clark), Donald Moffat (Garry, yes that’s right folks... REM from the Logan’s Run TV show is in this), Joel Polis (Fuchs) and Thomas G. Waites as Windows. This really is an ensemble piece here although, when MacReady is forced to take charge of the situation later, it becomes clear that this is his film.

And it’s got the whole, lurking paranoia and trust issues that was a hangover from the original source material, mostly absent from the 1951 classic (of which, from what I understand, Carpenter is a huge fan). It’s also got some really unusual and surreal gory, alien transformation effects as various people are assimilated or attacked by The Thing throughout the movie. Including what I should probably call ‘the split head dog’ scene and the eye popping moment when the doctor is trying to revive one of the men with a defibrillator and the whole stomach caves in, revealing teeth which bite both his arms off. Also that wonderful moment when the head pulls itself off of a body, sprouts big spider legs and eye stalks... and tries to sneak out of the room past the others.

The make up effects were primarily spearheaded by the very young and enthusiastic Rob Bottin, who had worked with Carpenter previously on The Fog (which I reviewed here). I understand he put so much into the opportunity that he was hospitalised with stress sometime into the shoot but, when you look at what he and his effects crew achieved here, it’s nothing short of remarkable and, surprisingly, there’s not a heck of a lot like it out there in movies since (although, obviously, the prequel rightly took a page out of the same book, if memory serves). It’s pretty much exactly the kind of twisted, organic look you might imagine when reading an H. P. Lovecraft story... it’s surely the closest we’ve had to an actual manifestation of Cthulhu like namelessness on screen. It’s been said that Campbell’s original story was influenced by the classic Lovecraft tale At The Mountains Of Madness but, I think that’s probably not all that accurate if you’re comparing the story content dispassionately and I’m not 100% sure if Campbell ever went on record as saying that, to be honest.

Carpenter pays homage to the Christian Nyby version of the tale when he has MacReady go over to the Norweigan base camp to find the aftermath of the people who have already been ‘Thinged up’. He finds the big, thawed out block of ice (no idea how the Norweigans got it through the door but maybe I missed something on the interiors) and when they check out the videotape footage of their ‘discovery’ later, lots of the shots are silent, restaged versions of the crew in the 1951 version discovering the saucer. However, what Carpenter also cleverly does... because the grotesque aftermath of the camp and what they find there occurs before the dog-splitting scene... is to ramp up the tension by showing the audience the kind of ride they are soon going to be in for themselves. Make no mistake, this is a master of horror at the top of his game here.

And I won’t spoil anything else for you but, suffice it to say, the 1982 remake/adaptation is just as essential viewing as the original is. Fans of cinema truly need to see both versions. The limited edition Arrow Blu Ray box has a nice slipcase, posters, booklet and cards but I’m assuming the non-limited edition which is still around also has the same Blu Ray extras. There are a lot of those on here too and I haven’t watched them all as yet but, one of note would be a new documentary which details, not just the making of this version but also the original story and the making of the 1951 version. Another featurette lasting just under a half an hour tries to shed some small light on just why The Thing might have been ‘lost in the woods for the trees’, so to speak, by highlighting many of the incredible, modern classics of cinema that were released around the same time... so stuff like Conan The Barbarian, Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan (reviewed here), Blade Runner (reviewed here) and the horrible horrribleness that was E.T. - The Extra Terrestrial. There’s even a FrightFest short from one of the previous years which is a mini, twisted version of the famous ‘wire in the blood’ scene from John Carpenter’s The Thing. It’s a nice transfer of the movie too, obviously and... all in all... tremendous value for money for one of the all time classic pieces of early 1980s cinema. Always worth a watch and the Arrow Blu Ray is definitely the way to go. There’s no thing like it.

The Thing at NUTS4R2

The Thing From Another World (1951)
The Thing (1982)
The Thing (2011)

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2

The Groot, The Bad
And The Ugly

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2
USA 2017 Directed by James Gunn
UK cinema release print.

And so I come to one of the Marvel movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) that I’d been looking forward to the least... Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2. I’d been wary of this one because the first of the GOTG movies (reviewed by me here) was one which, although I found it mildly entertaining and, perhaps, gave it a better review than it deserved... I was mostly unimpressed by.

It’s been widely said already that this new volume in the series is either better than the first movie or at least as good as that one. I’d have to say that now I’ve seen this second outing, neither of these popular sentiments are something I would agree with. The second movie is at least consistent with the previous, though, in that it both fails and triumphs in the same areas as the first... for this viewer anyway.

Okay, the negative stuff. Action for the sake of action can be dull and mind numbing and this pretty much sums up a fair amount of my cinema experience with this one. Even though the movie was big and loud and dumb enough to be the kind of joyful Hollywood popcorn fodder I would hope for, this was a film in which I consistently found myself nodding off for a few seconds here and there, especially during the convoluted action sequences in the second half, which were edited in such a way that I couldn’t really work out what the heck was going on for a lot of the time anyway.

Perhaps one of the problems was that it felt like nothing was at stake. Even with a high stakes sacrifice towards the end of the movie (no, I’m not going to put any spoilers in here by elaborating on that statement), it felt kind of lifeless and ultimately like it was really not addling much to the current Marvel Cinematic Universe movies we’ve seen thus far. The director has gone on record saying that it’s a stand-alone piece and this does, at least on the surface, seem to be the case here. So you really don’t need to see this one to make sense of any of the MCU movies which are about to be unleashed on us... although there is at least one or two characters who would be unfamiliar or, in one instance, unexpected in their inclusion of future films if these characters are, as I suspect, making appearances in the forthcoming Avengers: Infinity War movie for 2018.

So yeah... for me this movie was noisy enough to keep me awake some of the time but, alas, dull and dreary enough for it not to succeed at that for any great length of time.

All that being said, there’s also some nice stuff happening in this movie too...

The regular Guardians cast... Chris Pratt as Starlord, Zoe Saldana as Gamora, Dave Bautista as Drax, Vin Diesel as Baby Groot, Bradley Cooper as Rocket Racoon, Michael Rooker as Yondu and Amy Pond herself, Karen Gillan, as Nebula... are all as solid as you would expect them to be and they are joined by such great actors as Pom Klementieff as Mantis and some old timer superstars such as Kurt Russel, Michelle Yeoh and Silvester Stallone. There’s some lovely stuff with a ‘younged up’ Kurt Russel set prior to the opening of the last movie which I can only assume is CGI and the character chemistry and development is, mostly, as good as it was on the first film... one of the strengths of the franchise, as far as I’m concerned. This meant, however, that as much as I enjoyed Bautista’s portrayal of Drax... he felt a little bit over-the -top and forced into his new role in some ways. Still pretty funny though, so there’s that.

And there were some great moments with characters from other bits of the Marvel Universe referred to or mostly unexplored getting a look in here. A character from the first movie which was a big surprise in the last one has another little moment here. There’s also a reference to a Christ-like Marvel figure who looks like he will at least appear in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Stan Lee continues his cameo against a creature (or creatures) who, similarly, also got his/their debut in the pages of Fantastic Four and this is all very nice. About that cameo... Stan has two sequences in this film and there are also, if you are interested, five post credits scenes in this one... which play out at regular intervals throughout the cast and crew shout outs. And absolutely none of them seem to have any relation to other movies upcoming in the MCU other than the creation of a certain person coming for Vol 3... who is mentioned by one name only. Also, about that Stan Lee cameo... it’s pretty cool because it references at least one other Stan Lee cameo and does so in a context where the seemingly random (as they were originally conceived) Stan Lee cameos can now be part of a single character cameoing at different points through Marvel history so... yeah, that was quite cool.

Ultimately though, as I said before, this wasn’t interesting enough of a movie to keep me from falling asleep for a few seconds at a time and it certainly, in my humble opinion, wasn’t as entertaining or as vastly ‘Universe trotting’ as the first installment. That being said, the audience I saw it with were certainly getting a kick out of it (kids dancing in the aisles to the end title sections) and if you were a big fan of the original movie then you are almost certainly going to love this one. Not a film I’d recommend to anyone else but, if you liked the original Guardians Of The Galaxy, then this is kind of a necessary watch, for you.

The Hateful Eight (aka The H8ful Eight)

This Film Has Not
Yet Been Hated

The Hateful Eight (aka The H8ful Eight)
2015 USA
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
70mm Ultra Panavision Roadshow Version.

This was my birthday trip this year.

On the occasion of my 48th Birthday I, and a merry band of six of my friends, met at a pub and then went to see the only 70mm Ultra Panavision Roadshow print in the UK of Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, playing at the ODEON in Leicester Square. Apparently, apart from the obvious difference that this version is actually proper film stock rolling through projectors, this Roadshow version has some differences in some sequences which were extended to show off the print in 70mm (I’m guessing this stuff all takes place within the first 30 minutes of the movie), an eight minute intermission and a beautiful overture by Ennio Morricone, part of his original score for the film.

That last being something I thought I’d never hear of when it comes to the scoring of a Tarantino movie, who regularly uses a lot of Morricone’s (and others) old scores to needle drop his films with. Although, having said that, the director does also insert assorted cues from other Morricone scored films here too, such as Reagan’s Theme from Exorcist II - The Heretic and various pieces from his mostly unused but commercially released score to John Carpenter’s The Thing... the former also being a movie which stars Kurt Russel holed up with some people in the middle of a snowy wasteland. I can’t quite place where the Exorcist II track was used in the movie but there is a set of sequences in the second half of the film where Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character looks the dead spit of Linda Blair in certain horrific scenes in the original movie, The Exorcist, which I thought were very blatantly referenced, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this was dropped in there at some point. Will have to go back and dig the soundtrack out and re-listen to it... there’s not much good to be said about Exorcist II - The Heretic other than Morricone’s score, though, I reckon.

So anyway, okay, we have a partially new Morricone score which certainly harkens back to his early successes in the Spaghetti Western genre and which sounds incredible but... it doesn’t make this movie a Spaghetti Western and, although the spectacle of the “blood and snow” element of the film combined with Morricone’s score certainly recalls to mind the look and ambience of Sergio Corbucci’s classic movie The Great Silence, I think The Hateful Eight owes a little more to the feel of Altman’s McCabe And Mrs. Miller and perhaps more of a tonal similarity to the Revisionist Western cinema of Sam Pekinpah than anything else. Tarantino himself cites Carpenter’s science fiction/horror remake of The Thing as being why he wanted to write this one and there are certainly big elements of that movie in this in terms of the “locked in to keep the elements out while the paranoia inside runs rife” aspect... indeed, I felt sure towards the end of the movie that he was going to go the whole hog with one of the Jennifer Jason Leigh character’s possible premises of what will happen next and use pretty much the same ending as Carpenter’s ‘let’s wait and see’ style ‘down note’ on this one. He doesn’t but, by that point in the movie, he might as well have done, to be honest.

That being said, the postmodern eclecticism that almost defines the cinema of Tarantino isn’t so overbearing in this one that it becomes anything to detract from the director’s visual and written verbal style and, although in some ways the film almost seems like a remake of his first movie Reservoir Dogs for a lot of the running time, it’s an extremely entertaining run through and his casting is dead on, as usual. Samuel Jackson is perfect channeling, I can only assume quite deliberately, the look and visual mannerisms of Lee Van Cleef’s character Colonel Mortimer from the 1965 western For A Few Dollars More and Tarantino completes the reference by also giving Jackson’s character a military rank. Kurt Russel, in contrast, in terms of his voice and delivery of his lines, seems almost intent on revisiting the vocal talents of John Wayne but it seems to work pretty well and is a standout contrast from some of the other actor’s choices in the movie... as is Tim Roth in an almost dual voice role which, frankly, I’m not going to go into too much for fear of spoilers. But I will say that The Hateful Eight is one of the few films where I’ve really started to appreciate the acting talent of Tim Roth, for sure. I would like to have seen a lot more screen time given over to Bruce Dern in this movie but you can’t have everything, I guess, and he’s always a great actor to have around, anyway.

Jennifer Jason Leigh is absolutely amazing, as I’ve always said about her, but one of the main criticisms levelled at this film, it seems to me, is the amount of brutal, probably misogynistic violence levelled at her character. Well this is true and the film does get quite mean spirited and extremely grisly in the second half. It’s pretty violent and, misogynistic or not, I think it’s mostly justified in that this is the right kind of tone that you would get from the characters as they are portrayed here. I was more concerned with the use of the ‘N’ word during the film, which is excessive to the point when it seems to me that people just wouldn’t use it as much as they do here if any of the characters have a grain of common sense between them, which they mostly do... although, at the end of the day, none of these characters are really, in any way, likeable. This use of the racial term, which is highly sensitive these days, bothered me a little more than the anachronism of the term ‘pen pals’ which the script flaunts at one or two points.

My other main problem with the film stems from the opening of the second half, directly after the interval on this Roadshow version. The film is split into chapters like Kill Bill and Tarantino does use his common modus operandi of releasing one of those chapters in a different order to the way it actually occurs in the chronology of the piece... and that’s fine. It serves a purpose in the order it’s in to build up suspense and allow a surprise moment in the chapter leading up to it. He also does a little time-slip to put in some extra details by way of a semi repeat of the ending of the previous chapter before the interval... which is again fine and although it reminded me of the ‘cheating’ openings of various cliff hanger serials of the 1930s through to the 1950s, again I think it was the right thing to do because it fulfils something cinematically by showing the audience the credibility of not noticing something through distraction (especially when you load the dice and keep the camera completely away from it Quentin). However, Tarantino puts himself in the picture as a voice over narrative giving a recap of sorts at this point and, frankly, it’s totally unnecessary and smacks of spoonfeeding the audience perhaps because he wanted to get himself in there somehow. I really think it would have been better to just replay it without comment and let the visuals do the work on the mind of the spectator at this point but... hey ho... different artist, different ideas. It’s a minor quibble and doesn’t really intrude too much on the action.

Another big niggle with this movie is that it claims to be in Cinerama, running the old Cinerama logo at the start of the picture but it really isn’t... it’s that fake, cheapened down format rebranded as Cinerama a couple of years later in that it isn’t three cameras shooting simultaneously and then giving vertical line joins as the projectors sew them up together again on the presentation. It’s the very nice but ultimately single lens 70mm Ultra Panavision version of the brand. Even the Roadshow programme for The Hateful Eight, which is similarly designed to mimic the style, somewhat, of an old Cinerama programme... doesn’t get as blatant as the movie does in proclaiming it to be Cinerama. It’s as much of a Cinerama movie as something like 2001: A Space Odyssey was... which as far as I’m concerned is not true Cinerama, no matter how much the Marketing people try to label it as such.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about The Hateful Eight. Long but spectacular looking, perfectly performed, outstandingly scored and mostly entertaining. Certainly a lot better than the director’s previous film, Django Unchained (reviewed here), in my opinion. Definitely a must-see if you’re a fan of this guy's work, although anyone who thinks The Hateful Eight is really “The 8th Film by Quentin Tarantino” as it says on the credits is possibly high on crack or just too lazy to count. If you’re going to see this one, though, I would especially try and seek out this 70mm Ultra Panavision print of the movie if possible. It’s quite spectacular looking and worth paying out for in terms of both fiscal resources and time allocation.

And thanks to Kerry, Teresa, Dave, Chris, Ross and Peter for coming to see this one with me on my birthday. Much appreciated.

Adios amigos.