So this is the English version of Thingu — wait, no, I’m being informed that actually it’s a John Carpenter social deduction co-op traitor movie.

Okay, so the idea here is that there’s an alien race that basically replicates by taking over other organisms and becoming them… and now we’ve got a bunch of schlubby middle-aged dudes[1] holed up in an Antarctic research station, and oh shit, any of them could be an alien.

So obvs I have seen a lot of Thing-influenced media. There’s an X-Files episode, there’s all the movies that are described as “The Thing in space/underwater/on a boat/whatever.” And so one of the things that remains durably true is that the originator of a subgenre is not the purest form of that thing.

In particular, this subgenre normally leans really heavily on the distrust and accusations and misleads and deceptions, right. And that exists here. There is some of it. But… it’s just one of the many elements of the thing. The movie actually leans really hard into the SF background that most Thing-influenced media gloss over (because they can just be like “you get it, it’s a Thing pastiche!” and this actually had to walk you through it[2]). So I kept expecting to get the really super-tense scenes of betrayal and breakdown and psychological pressure, and they never quite arrived in the way I was expecting.

But what I did get was a lot of… I don’t know if body horror is quite the right word, but horrifically mutated corpses, and slime, and that kind of thing. The kind of props where you wonder how someone went home and slept after building that. I feel like at the time, this was probably received as an SF creature horror film, rather than the psychological thriller horror that its descendants so clearly latched on to.

And speaking of “the time,” we of course saw this on 4K Blu-ray, in a beautiful restoration with HDR and a remastered DTS:X soundtrack, and it was wonderfully cinematic — but one of the extras on the disc was the trailer, which was not restored, and looks like something that I might have seen on one of those budget matinee theater screens of my youth or maybe even on a UHF channel. And watching that was kind of nostalgia-inducing, because I could see the movie that I would have watched on UHF channel 26 on a Sunday afternoon: The fuzzy low-def thing in a 4:3 aspect ratio with the sides cut off, broken up with commercial breaks for Dr. Pepper and Time-Life’s UFO Mysteries or whatever. And I feel like it’s to this movie’s credit that it both 1000000% works in that context, but also legitimately is a movie that works in this kind of high-quality “classic cinema” context, too.

Recommended as a decent movie, highly recommended as a critical piece of historical cultural context.

  1. If they remade this today, the cast would have women in it, and also everyone of both genders would be 10-20 years younger and super-hot. The former seems like an obvious win, but I think there’s something to be said for movies featuring unattractive old people, tbh. ↩︎

  2. Done with a helpful computer that prints out exposition in 72 point type on its monochrome monitor. This was only my second-favorite computer of the movie, though, after the chess computer that had period-accurate low-res monochrome graphics, but also talked in a synthesized voice that’s right out of the early 21st-century. I bet yutes watching this movie won’t even realize how absolutely “movie-computer” that voice was seen at the time, and how nerds of 1982 would have been like “lol a computer with that kind of voice synthesis would have enough computational power to beat József Pintér himself!” ↩︎