The Thing

Fortunately for me, I seem to naturally space out my viewings of The Thing just enough that I forget who turns out to be infected. Heart attack Norris is a constant, his face as engine to a repulsive insect form is seared into the part of my brain that pores over books about 1980s make-up effects (Mark Salisbury's Behind the Mask in particular). I'm less sure of everyone else though. It helps that there's a lot of doubling in the film - at a glance Blair and Doc Copper could pass for at least cousins. Palmer and Windows have a similar acid-fried outline. Kurt Russell's bearded MacReady toys with having a twin in kennel master Clark, only to trump Clark's modest baseball cap with a fuck off ten gallon. Individuality asserted.

The Thing endures, and thrives, because the threat is mostly abstract. John Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster are never tempted to telegraph anything specific. Instead danger exists as a potential, logical constant. The men deprive themselves of sleep and attempt to build alliances, slow to get a handle on a creature that gobbles up men and spits out facsimiles. A couple of the drones don't even seem sure they're imposters - it's only when cornered that their characters break, the creatures cycling through violent looking attack modes to stress threat while a contingency plan slithers away.

Unlike the Alien that stalked the Nostromo, the Thing is cowardly and opportunist. The shapes it takes don't prowl, attempting to sexually dominate the humans, they skulk. Masters of misdirection. Matthijs van Heijningen Jr's wobbly remake-cum-prequel proposed a drunken mugger, desperate to procreate. This Thing is more like a rapist. It waits until its prey is alone, success momentarily secured, before it dares to strike. It's a wimp playing a numbers game. When a defective component is offered the opportunity to lead it denies the promotion. It screws its face up and drops bass, feigning the kind of weakness that leaves trace levels of disgust. Leader Thing could've sabotaged from the front, plunging the survivors into needlessly dangerous situations, weakening the group. It didn't though. It considered short term gains irrelevant, dangerous even. Instead Thing chose to bide its time and blend into the crowd. Above all then the Thing is a survivor. It isn't driven by pride or anything else recognisably human. It'll debase itself, wrench its body apart, in order to see another day. It's truly alien.

The Thing (2011)

Dishonestly sold as a prequel, Matthijs van Heijningen Jr's The Thing is instead a beat for beat remake of John Carpenter's 1982 model. Minus, of course, pesky things like nuance, or that film's suffocating sense of despair. 2011's Thing is lean to the point of being malnourished. Outpost 31's predicament was a slow burn realisation of utter extinction. This Norwegian camp - staffed by at least as many Americans - instead knuckle down immediately to action movie posturing, lest they burn any of their brisk 90 minute screentime on anything as wasteful as creeping dread. There are no asides depicting husky shaped Things stalking around dozing men here, those infected have apparently mutated through osmosis, programmed to reveal themselves in bombastic fashion when the audience's attention starts to drift.

The psychology of the threat differs too - in Carpenter's film doppelgangers transformed into abstract organ mashes only when cornered, and frequently only as a distraction to allow smaller components to escape. 1982's Thing was desperate to survive, and would tear itself apart to do so. This Thing instead prowls around flashing combat modes at the drop of a hat, changing into insectile lumps to stalk the talent in extended peril sequences like an animalistic dickhead. These forms disappoint too. Rob Bottin created a creature that cannibalised bone and organ to fit utilitarian objectives. Reveal set-pieces were intense, kaleidoscopic nightmares - bearded men battling horrifying, transcendent shapes. Desperately unable to compete, Image Engine have simply lifted ideas from elsewhere, so in 2011 we have Mary Elizabeth Winstead at war with Dead Space's car crash slashers, and a literal human centipede. Although too efficient to be completely awful, The Thing 2011 still resembles poorly conceived jump-start sequels like Predators or Terminator 3. These are films made by people inheriting other's hard work. They have no connection or passion for these creations, and they do not understand these creatures as anything other than a brand ripe for exploitation. This Thing is a merchandise movie.

THUNG 2

The most unwanted follow-up since An American Werewolf in Paris continues the anti-wow with this red band attention grabber. Jump scares! Imperilled hotties! No obvious practical creature effects! This shit looks antithetical to the utter hopelessness the Carpenter flick routinely generated. Aside from a whip thick tentacle capped with a flower-head sucker, the biology of the creature is failing to excite. Bottin's beast was an impossible mess of innards programmed to ensnare. This calibration lacks anything approaching that level of intensity - shifting bones and bits are always concealed by elasticated, discoloured, CG skin. Deforming human shapes can be fun, but the thing shouldn't have base elements, it should be insane.

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.