The Thing is...

I saw John Carpenter’s The Thing over the weekend; a one sentence summary: A research base in Antarctica must fight off an alien presence that infects people and mimics them. First off I thought the movie did a good job setting up, it emphasized the base’s isolation before stuff really started happening. Once the action started, I really liked the paranoid feeling where the guys didn’t know who to trust. There’s a scene where they test each other’s blood to find the infected, and even the person whose blood is being tested sighs a breath of relief when they see that they aren’t the Thing. There were some seriously gory scenes of dudes turning inside out and alien guts spraying everywhere, all in fantastic 1980’s monster gore glory. Funny thing though, neither of us winced until the people started cutting their own thumbs with a scalpel to draw blood for the test. Billy said “Why would they draw blood THAT way?” as I squirmed and looked away from the TV... When the movie was over, I said “I think that might be the best horror movie I’ve ever seen!” (admittedly, horror isn’t a genre I watch much of). But Billy set me straight by saying “What about Alien?”; “Oh, yeah” I said, “That’s still better.” So there’s my official review, it’s a good horror movie, but Alien is better.