THUNG

Difficult to know what to make of this brief tease for The Thing, the unwanted prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 Antarctic apocalypse. The footage has been well received, but all I'm seeing is a karaoke drag-act, with the demure Ms Winstead standing in for weirdy beardy Kurt Russell. Many shots look like straight lifts from the Carpenter calibration, even aping Dean Cundey's overripe location lensing. The creature's barely glimpsed - likely due to the all-ages rating for this shill - but the brief convulsion snatches we do see suggest shape homage. Fuck that noise! The whole premise of the creature is a revoltingly utilitarian approach to dimension. It rends and tears its flesh and bone to fit objective. The idea that it could have default guises and sizes not only undermines Rob Bottin's (and Stan Winston's) kaleidoscopic SFX work on the '82 model, it also goes some way to making the creature seem uniform and dull. Hopefully the splendidly named director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr, whose priors include a feature about a homicidal lift, will prove me pessimistic.