Screen

It's a pity, because this is by far the best movie Carpenter's come up with, and the script by Bill Lancaster is far away the best he's had to work with. It might well be that it's run into trouble because of all the "so what" remakes of perfectly dandy horror classics which have somewhat pointlessly stalked across the screen of late, culminating with that recent Scrader effort--it's-cute-but-is-it-really-Cat People--starring the splitting panters.

The fact is, this is one oldie but goodie for which there was a perfectly valid reason for a remake. The original, as everyone knows, was a dandy Howard Hawks production with big Jim Arness as the monster and a swell cast of short people headed by Ken Tobey as the hero. Arness was very nasty and towering thoughout, and in spite of their limited stature, the brave crew of the United States Arctic Air Force Base managed to dispatch him neatly and permanently at the end, to everyone's great satisfaction.

But this was not the story it was based on, which was written under a pseudonym by the science fiction editor John W. Campbell, Jr. (possibly in the hope that his authors wouldn't notice he'd bought one of his own stories) and which had as its basic premise the idea that the Thing could take any form it wished, so that you couldn't tell it from a malamute or your Uncle Henry, depending on which one it had eaten. Hawk's Thing had no such ability at all, so why not make a new movie wherein it did?

Also, for what was really the first time, the application of new and advanced special effects technology to an old but entirely successful classic made sense. Val Lewton's subtle misdirections worked beautifully and satisfyingly in the original Cat People and needed no gussying up, and the plant creatures of Invasion of the Body Snatchers underwent no particular improvement by being presented in color and far more numerously; but the transformations required if one was to bring off Campbell's shape-changer were really too much for the cinematic magicians of the fifties (although I bet Lewton could have pulled it off with his brand of hocus-pocus), so Hawks was probably wise to say the hell with it.

We, lucky us, are in the explicit eighties,a dn with the likes of Rob Bottin to design it, Roy Arbogast to supervise it, and albert Whitlock to handle the special visual effects (you'll note my pencil point held up this time), the Thing a la Campbell could not only stalk but do a little dance tune if this struck its fancy, and it does all that and more in Carpenter's production.

Another change, and a slightly depressing one, is in the sort of folks we have manning polar bases in movies these days. It's true that htis one is in the Antarctic, unlike Hawks's gang, and thaty they're civilians instead of air force, but, by God, the bunch in this '82 Thing could really use a good talking to from Ken Tobey's Captain Hendry! Drunk out of their sklls--I mean, the head hero is at least a quart-a-day man--smoking pot, saying words I'd hesistate to print inthis family magazine: it really makes a body wonder. I think if Jim Arness had shown up infront of this lot of toughies wiht his super-carrot makeup, they'd have spat at him.

So it's a good thing Carpenter's provided them with something really diverting--which he has. With the help of Messrs. Bottin, Arbogast, and Whitlock, this Thing can do just about anything it wants to. Great fun is drived from the idea that it can't cange into Toto or Auntie Em just like snap, but has to have a little time to work on them to get the transformation just right. It's first try at Toto's face, say, might have a couple of extra noses, and while parts of it may be excellent simulated fur, other sections might tend from merely slimy all the way to pure gick.

There are also some amusing little sight gags, reminding me of certain of my own efforts in the cartoon field. One involves what happens to the doctor, but I won't tell lest I spoil it for you. another will still be effective if I whisper that it involves an ultragotesque spider effect.

There is real tension among the drunkards of the camp as they begin to wonder more and more whihc among them is another drunkard and which is a whatsis, and the revelations are invariably shocking. The test used to determin who's which is taken from the original Campbell tale, I believe, and involves a squeaking drop of blood--something really new in horror movies.

Throughout the film, there are friendly little tributes to, and jokes about, the original production: the title is the same burn-away number as the original, and the discovery and messing up of the alien ship are, by a clever script gimmick, handled in black and white in exactly the same way as Hawks did.

This last, however, presents an incongruity which makes Carpenter's Thing seem a little inconsistent: it arrives in a flying saucer of the same general type as Hawks's--a sort of spread-out fighter bomber, rivets, vents and all. But it is altogether the wrong sort of vehicle for this blobby, shifty fiend. A rigid spaceship with hatches of fixed dimensions is quite appropriate for James Arness's vegetable, but a thing along the lines of Carpenter's would surely have evolved a far more flexible vehicle, an outre object suggesting soft sculpture, perhaps, or a congeries of bubbles.

The end has a nice ironic mood to it--again, it seems that the alien invaders of '82 would find Earth a much more complicated planet than those of '50--and while some in the theater seemed unhappy with it (another reason it may be faltering in sales), my group was in no way displeased. One wonders what the filmic Martian will encounter on our planet thirty-two years hence!