PERSONAL FAVES: The Thing

Right. I’m going to kick off this piece with a bit of straight-up, unapologetic opinionism:

‘The Thing’ is to the horror movie what Beethoven’s 9th is to the symphony, what Henri Cartier-Bresson is to photography and what Talisker is to single malt whisky. It’s the bee’s knees; the mutt’s nuts; the daddy; da bomb.

I dig ‘The Thing’. Here’s a few equally superlative-laden paragraphs to explain why.

Did I mention that Dean Cundey’s cinematography was one of the chief assets of ‘The Fog’? That goes double here. Of the five John Carpenter films he shot – and all of them look amazing – ‘The Thing’ boasts easily the most impressive visuals. The anamorphic ratio is used to astounding effect. Cundey’s work here puts him in the same league as Lucien Ballard, Vittorio Storaro or Roger Deakins. Besides, you’ve got to love someone who has ‘Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheikhs’ and ‘Jurassic Park’ on their CV.

Bill Lancaster’s script is tight as a snare-drum, shucking off the McCarthyist undertones of Howard Hughes’ original (‘The Thing From Another World’) and getting back to the isolationism and clammy paranoia of the source material, the short story ‘Who Goes There?’ by John W. Campbell. It avoids politics other than to have Nauls (T.K. Carter) speculate, “Maybe we’re at war with Norway.”

The incident that occasions this conjecture is a superbly realised set-piece which opens the film. A husky runs panting through the wastes of Antarctica, towards United States National Science Institute Station 4, whose mismatched occupants are weathering a particularly ferocious winter and unable to effect radio contact with the outside world. The husky is being pursued by a helicopter from a Scandinavian research complex. The two Norwegians in said whirlybird use semi-automatic rifles and grenades against it, but demonstrate terminal incompetency. Not only does every shot miss, but one of them drops a grenade into the snow as the helicopter sets down, blowing up both ’copter and pilot and barely escaping with his own life. When he stalks the husky into Station 4, letting rip with another pathetically aimed burst of fire, base commander Garry (Donald Moffat) proves himself a considerably better shot and the Norwegian is despatched before anyone can ask themselves – and they certainly can’t ask him now – just why it was so important to whack the dog.

While pilot MacCready (Kurt Russell) and medico Dr Copper (Richard Dysart) brave the bad weather and fly to the Norwegian base – they find everyone dead, the place half burned to the ground, and the remains of something that doesn’t look human – tensions rise at Station 4 and it’s not long before Garry’s crew have more to worry about than Nauls playing his music too loud or MacCready accusing the computer of cheating at a chess game and tipping a glass of J&B into the mainframe.

If the presence of J&B evokes the giallo, then the ice station is as effective a backdrop to the carnage that ensues as any fashion house or stylish apartment building, and who needs a black-gloved killer with a fetish for broken dolls and sharp knives when a shape-changing alien thingie is running around killing the cast off in a various horrific ways, assimilating them into its physiognomy and imitating them in order to get close to its next intended victim.

One of the scientists, Blair (Wilford Brimley), postulates that if the creature were to make contact with a heavily populated area the effects on humankind would be apocalyptic: mass infection within 27,000 hours. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and Blair reacts by going loco, smashing the radio to pieces, destroying supplies and equipment, and disabling the snow-cat.

MacCready, coming to the fore as a leader when Garry almost shoots Childs (Keith David) and resigns his position professing no further confidence in himself, overpowers Blair and orders him locked away. Urging everyone to stay together and “watch who you’re with”, MacCready is nonetheless powerless to prevent further deaths. Mistrust runs rife. Rivalries surface. There is speculation that MacCready himself is the thing.

The blood reaction test MacCready devises to prove who’s who is a showstopper in a film wall-to-wall with tense set-pieces, edgy confrontations and jump-out-of-your seat moment. Carpenter generates tension worthy of Hitchcock. Elsewhere, Rob Bottin’s FX work is nothing short of miraculous for a film made twenty-seven years ago and without a pixel of CGI. If H.R. Giger’s work on ‘Alien’ was terrifying, Bottin’s achieves the sweaty clamminess of a waking nightmare, grotesqueries out of Hieronymus Bosch come to life.

‘The Thing’ is Carpenter’s masterwork: there isn’t an ounce of flab on the film; there isn’t an image or a line of dialogue that doesn’t empirically contribute to the overall sense of gnawing tension and unremitting dread. ‘The Thing’ is one of the darkest horror films there is – not because it’s visceral, unflinching and dripping with gruesome effects (although it certainly ticks all of those boxes and then some), but because the horror comes from the darkest place of all: the human condition.

‘The Thing’ throws a group of ordinary people (ordinary in the sense that, while they might be pilots, doctors or scientists, they’re ultimately just a bunch of guys doing a job and it’s generally a shitty job and they bitch about it and bitch at each other and in short behave exactly how men in any job behave) – next to Peckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’, ‘The Thing’ is one of cinema’s most acutely-observed statements on masculine interaction – into an extraordinary situation and observes how little friendship, camaraderie and calm, reasonable behaviour count for anything once a huge dose of paranoia has been injected into the proceedings.

And having done this, it segues from an explosive denouement to an open-ended coda, signing off with an enigma in place of an ending, and making sure ‘The Thing’ will rattle around in your mind, in your imagination, in your subconscious for plenty of time to come. Years, in my case.

THE FINAL GIRL FILM CLUB: Grindhouse

Do you know how excited I was about ‘Grindhouse’? Imagine the adrenalin levels of a kid on Christmas Day, a fat kid in a sweetshop lockdown and no adults around to tell him not to, a pyromaniac in a fireworks factory, a dipsomaniac left in charge of a distillery, a voyeur given carte blanche to roam around the Playboy Mansion, and a member of the NRA at an arms bazaar. Now combine all those adrenalin levels, throw a few tequila slammers into the mix and shoot the whole thing full of heroin.

That’s how excited I was.

Tim at Antagony & Ecstacy reviewed it under the pullquote ‘The Movie I Was Put on This Earth to See’, and I was almost wetting myself.

And. Then. Something. Happened.

‘Grindhouse’ underperformed at the American box office. I started hearing dispiriting rumours: the film was being split in two for its European release; ‘Death Proof’ would come out first; there was no confirmed UK release date for ‘Planet Terror’. There was a big question mark over whether the spoof trailers would be released theatrically.

I. Was. Not. Happy.


I’ll admit it here and now: I was looking forward more to ‘Planet Terror’ than ‘Death Proof’, having been monstrously underwhelmed by ‘Kill Bill Vol. II’ (another Tarantino opus that got released in two parts, with a six month wait after the blistering first instalment with its iconic “House of Blue Leaves” set-piece).

Sure enough, the handful of lobby posters I’d seen for ‘Grindhouse’ quietly disappeared, to be replaced by ‘Death Proof’ posters. Frequent IMDb visits seemed to confirm that there was still no release date for ‘Planet Terror’. In the meantime, I’d tracked down the spoof trailers online and bookmarked them.

A week before ‘Death Proof’ opened, I got hold of ‘Planet Terror’ on Region 1 DVD, featuring the ‘Machete’ trailer (my personal favourite of the four spoofs). Me and Paula decided to have our own, cobbled together ‘Grindhouse’ experience: we watched ‘Planet Terror’ on DVD in the morning (including ‘Machete’), fired up the computer and watched the ‘Don’t’, ‘Thanksgiving’ and ‘Werewolf Women of the SS’ trailers, then went to the cinema and watched ‘Death Proof’ on the big screen in the afternoon.

It doesn’t quite equate to taking your seat in the cinema, watching two 90-minuters (each complete with ‘missing reel’) back to back, interspersed with the spoof trailers – ie. three and a half hours of moviegoing designed as an affectionate, often ironic but ultimately down and dirty throwback to the grubby joys of the exploitation B-movie double bill.

The point of those 70s double-bills was that you saw them in a cinema. Usually a dingy fleapit where the seats were dimpled with cigarette burns, smoke was still hanging in the air courtesy of the audience at the earlier screening, your shoes adhered to the floor thanks to a combination of melted ice cream, popcorn and spilled Ki-ora, and the films were interrupted at least a couple of times during the screening due to technical problems with the projector.

In order to recreate the experience, ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Death Proof’ – the former more authentically – are scratched and distressed and jump about a lot, simulating hamfisted splicing, and in the case of ‘Planet Terror’ the film seems to bubble up and burn into white nothingness.

Seen on DVD, you think “hmmm, that’s quite a convincing effect”. Seen on a computer, the spoof trailers are quite obviously that: spoofs. You find yourself picking hairs. Both ‘Thanksgiving’ and ‘Werewolf Women of the SS’, as sleazily inspired as they are, are billed as “a film by Eli Roth” and “a film by Rob Zombie” respectively, the latter trumpeting a big star name (Nicolas Cage) – but no zero-budgeted exploitation flick would be thus advertised. Edgar Wright’s ‘Don’t’ hits the mark as acutely as ‘Machete’, though, delivering a minute’s worth of stalk ‘n’ slash highlights while the voiceover drones monotonously “Don’t … don’t … don’t … don’t.”

Still, all of these component parts were meant to be taken together, as a three and a half hour whole … and were meant to be seen at the cinema. Instead, we got expanded cuts of ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Death Proof’, the former now clocking in 1 hour 45 minutes, and Tarantino’s opus pushing the two hour mark, again pushing the films another step away from their original aesthetic.

The damage done to both films is that you view them as separate entities, which leads to pointless exercises in critical approach whereby you try to reconcile the more authentic ‘look’ of ‘Planet Terror’ with the post-modern ironic playfulness of ‘Death Proof’ instead of thinking “zombie movie – cool; car chase movie – cool”. Or ruminating on the promise of the erotic given the plethora of eye candy (two quartets of heroines in ‘Death Proof’; cleavages a-go-go courtesy of Rose McGowan, Marley Shelton and Stacy Ferguson in ‘Planet Terror') and the non-inclusion of actual nudity (want topless women? the ‘Machete’ trailer’s the only place you’ll find ’em) and coming to the conclusion that an implied salaciousness : disappointment ratio is par for the course in exploitation movies and Rodriguez and Tarantino have played on this most effectively … when you should, of course, be thinking “wow, hot chicks”.

Tim comments, in his brilliantly written review, “the structural vulernability of Grindhouse makes it the same as those things it mimics, even while the very soul of Grindhouse is that, as a mimic, it is not the same thing. Therefore, the film becomes both thesis and antithesis”, and he’s absolutely right. To discuss structure is perhaps the most intelligent way to approach ‘Grindhouse’ critically. Otherwise, as just as valid, you can simply kick back with a big tub of popcorn, turn off your critical faculties and let your mind go “zombies, cool … wow, Rose McGowan’s a fox … machine gun leg … shoot-outs, cool … stuff blowing up … fast cars, cool … wow, Vanessa Ferlito’s a fox … Kurt Russell being a badass, cool … wow, how long’s this car chase gone on for? …” and so on and so forth.

They’ve been constructed deliberately – and a lot more cleverly than a first viewing might lead you to believe – but the component parts of ‘Grindhouse’ are quite simply a hymn to the gleeful pleasures of moviegoing in an age where hot chicks, fast cars, cheesy special effects and 90-minutes of low-budget mayhem were their own raison d’etre.

Comparing and contrasting the films is a redundant exercise. The distributors, by splitting ‘Grindhouse’ in two, have left the likes of your humble blogger here with no choice other than to do just that. I was even tempted to use this post as a prologue to articles on ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Death Proof’ over the next two evenings.

But I won’t because I’m convinced that if I ever get to see ‘Grindhouse’ in the format Messrs Rodriguez and Tarantino intended me to, then I’ll have seen a masterpiece of post-modern throwback indulgent irony. Yup, I know those last four words seem like a quadrille of contradiction but I reckon the movie that underperformed in America and never made it to the UK has what it takes to synthesise them; and until ‘Grindhouse’ gets released in this country in its original format (preferably in a theatrical run), or until I can get my hands on a Region 1 DVD, it will have to remain the best movie I’ve almost seen.