Fullofkittens wrote:

It's rare to find a horror movie that's even better than you remembered it. I hadn't seen The Thing (1982) for probably ten years, watched it again last night on Netflix streaming.

HERE'S A THING THAT HOLLYWOOD CANNOT SEEM TO DO ANYMORE: create a believable workplace. That's something I noticed while watching Alien as well: both films are set in totally imaginary places and yet the environment seems like it's lived-in and the characters seem like they know each other. Maybe it's all down to the cast? Moon is a notable modern exception.

Anyways, here's a couple of great things(!) about the 1982 film:

• The pacing. The movie does an awesome job of getting you to understand where the movie is set (with the beautiful and strange helicopter sequence at the beginning) and letting you get to know the characters by seeing what they do when something happens. It notably does *not* introduce the setting and characters by bringing a new person onto the base and bringing them around for introductions.


• The gore! Either I am used to a TV version or the director's cut is now the standard cut, but there is some CRAZY in-camera gore in the movie. The scene with dogs is a masterpiece. The scene with the defibrillators! YAAAAY.


• As you mentioned: the characters act like fucking grownups for once. Wilford Brimley does an autopsy on this horribly mangled half-corpse half-mutant half-alien thing (which, BTW, is shown in loving detail, which would not happen now. Too much work!) and he correctly intuits that what they are seeing is some kind of organism that mimics other organisms and it was killed before it completely transforms. No one says "THIS IS RIDICULOUS I WON'T STAND HERE WHILE YOU TALK THIS GARBAGE" and no one goes hysterical and fucks everybody over by being a giant baby and screwing up. These are guys who work in Antarctica! They are confronted with a very serious problem and they decide that they need the flamethrowers.


• The gore again.


• The ending (though a lot of horror movies have gone this route so it's super remarkable in this regard, but at least it's not insulting).