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HORROR IN 2025

Dolfan in NYC

By Dolfan in NYC
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Curt McGirt

Curt McGirt

Posted
Posted

Hey, some more CFQ showed up. Here's their review of The Thing which is waaaaaaay more positive than I remember... followed by a sidebar that pretty much says "yeah this is nice but everyone else shit all over it". Jeez...

Spoiler

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John Carpenter's new version of The Thing, like all his work, is more an elaboration of his superficial interests than a revealing personal statement. Carpenter's mercurial public image matches the changeable nature of the monster in The Thing. We never glimpse The Thing in a totally personal formation; it is constantly donning the guises of other personalities, just as Carpenter is prone to duck behind his heroes rather than burn brilliantly as the original artist responsible for Halloween. But just this comparison makes The Thing Carpenter's most personal film... in spite of himself.

Perhaps because of his love for director Howard Hawks (who made the original movie, The Thing from Another World) and John W. Campbell's source novella Who Goes There?, Carpenter's decision to remake The Thing was a natural. By taking on his great idol, Howard Hawks, Carpenter's movie acts as something of a graduation. He isolates Hawks' 1951 treatment of this idea with two perfect, brief allusions to the earlier film, and then Carpenter proceeds to liberate himself from that belabored apprenticeship and make his own movie.

He clearly has learned how to weigh his scholastic debts, how to accredit the wind of other men in his sails without letting their ghosts steer the ship. In fact, Carpenter's film is to Hawks' The Thing from Another World what Philip Kaufman's film is to Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers: a revision, as opposed to a remake.

There is other evidence of Carpenter's growing assurance as a director. He cut his usual repertory of players to one traditional actor, Kurt Russell, whose bearish, manly looks and cynical alienation embody the movie's primary conflict without straining to appear symbolic. Also, for the first time in his career, Carpenter has left his music scoring to another composer, Ennio Morricone, who unfortunately strove to reproduce the electronic Carpenter ambience instead of suffusing the score with his own personality.

A featherweight ending leaves the movie feeling disappointingly top-heavy and carries an ashen tag of artistic exhaustion. Most of The Thing, however, is marvelous, all of it is intriguing, and Carpenter's in-jokes (which trivialized Escape from New York) are largely, and happily, self-directed.

Rob Bottin and his 40-person effects crew created a consistent catalog of the most startling and mysterious special makeup effects ever showcased in a horror film. Bottin's work on The Thing makes his contribution to The Howling—which looked state-of-the-art only last year—seem downright primitive. How far can this type of escalation in shock effects continue?

Not only is each effects sequence eye-popping in itself, but Carpenter's pensive choreography renders each new effect more potent and punchy than the one before. The first effect appears after a great deal of handsomely subdued, brooding footage involving a Norwegian dog (actually The Thing), and when the effect comes, it leaps right off the screen. (This dog kennel sequence, the last to be shot, was executed by Stan Winston while Bottin was hospitalized with pneumonia.) It is a dizzying display of techno-magical proficiency.

The Thing's moister moments are also indicative of Carpenter's regained willingness to play ball in the gory arena, having deliberately steered clear of heavy bloodletting since a little girl was vividly shot through the chest in Assault on Precinct 13 (he believes the film became a commercial disaster because of that scene). Ironically, The Thing has not done well commercially (see sidebar), perhaps for the same reason.

But willingness isn't necessarily readiness. The autopsy scenes in The Thing are not as uncomfortable to watch as they are handled uncomfortably by the director. Carpenter insists that his audience share his sense of repulsion. Cinematographer Dean Cundey's reaction shots of surgeon Blair (A. Wilford Brimley) during these syrupy moments are much grainier than the surrounding footage, as if Carpenter wanted to use the texture of the image to suggest his, and Blair's, creeping nausea.

Unlike some critics, I believe that screenwriter Bill Lancaster's cast of characters is personable, ponderable, and engaging in a host of complex ways. Using only one Hawksian nickname ("Windows"), each of Carpenter's and Lancaster's 12 Antarctic outpost men is individualized by his indulgences (J&B scotch, dope, roller skates, videotapes, caring for dogs). They are also melded into a whole by these indulgences, which exist to numb them to the reality of their regional divorce from the rest of humanity. A pack of asexual, apathetic, unsociable outcasts, it befalls them to save humanity from this unsuspected horror, and they are made heroic by the humanness of their response.

The Thing may be "gross" (as the people behind me kept insisting through most of its running time), but it is also an incorrigibly clever film. In one exterior night shot, while Russell is telling his assembled colleagues how the Thing can't be present in all of them—else they would be ganging up on him—Carpenter directs his camera in a pan across the attentive, thermometer-covered faces. With winter parkas and ski masks concealing everything but their eyes, the image mockingly echoes the idea of alien intelligence hiding in a human husk.

Also, in the outpost's recreation room, a poster can be glimpsed of a pretty girl wearing a tag that reads, "I have VD!" and, above her, the caption: They aren't labeled, chum! Of course, by the end of this paranoid parable, no one is.

—Tim Lucas

 

  • Like 2
RIPPA

RIPPA

Posted
Posted

Opus

Written and Directed by Mark Anthony Green

Ayo Edebiri, John Malkovich, Juliette Lewis, Murray Bartlett, Amber Midthunder, Stephanie Suganami, Young Mazino, and Tatanka Means

Curt McGirt

Curt McGirt

Posted
Posted

I wonder if any death metal band ever used the music for Meatcleaver Massacre in a song. Creepy! (And no, I am not going to go look through Mortician's whole discography haha)

Curt McGirt

Curt McGirt

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What is your favorite Paul Naschy film, if you're a fan? I've got a couple but forget them from their similarities. Hunchback of the Morgue might be the pick of the litter. 

Dolfan in NYC

Dolfan in NYC

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  • Author
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Matthew Lillard will return for Scream 7.

How?  Fuck you we're out of ideas.  That's how.

  • Haha 1
Curt McGirt

Curt McGirt

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Is that what everyone's moaning about? I've heard on FB that there is "controversy" over the new one but no one said WTF it was. 

EDIT: Okay, further reports from FB. "Some kinda politics issue. Israel/Palestine shit. One of the stars of the last few ones (Melissa Barrera?) either quit the project or was kicked off and Matthew Lillard supported her and now they are saying he’s a sell out for coming back. That’s the gist I picked up from people’s posts but haven’t really looked." "Then some people are also just divided in his character being dead since part 1, how are they bringing back."

She made pro-Palestinian posts viewed as antisemitic. Surely that will be a minefield for actors now, as they will be for students on college campuses, and everyone else, but... go see the Discord. 

Anyway my idea is that since Scream is halfway a fucking comedy franchise and totally meta then why not reintroduce Lillard as a completely different character, and keep making snide references to the previous one, people saying "you know you look like somebody I met once..." etc. etc. Fuck it, the series always sucked anyway.

Edited by Curt McGirt
  • Like 2
driver

driver

Posted
Posted
15 hours ago, Technico Support said:

Your mama so fat, when the full moon comes out she turns into a werehouse

Or if she's selling stuff a wareshouse.

 

(BP)

(BP)

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The Vourdelak is great folk horror influenced by Hammer and 70s European arthouse period dramas. I’d classify it as comedic horror I suppose. The creature and its interactions with the ensemble are so goddam funny; the less you know going in the better. It has a lot of fun with the differences and similarities between the 18th century and today’s masculine ideals. 

The line, “May those who won’t open their eyes answer for our imminent woes,” really got me. 

  • Like 2
Curt McGirt

Curt McGirt

Posted
Posted

The bloody Monkey isn't playing at either theater in town. Heart Eyes got the nod instead. I'm compelled... but then there is also the Led Zep movie in IMAX which I'm sure is skull-crushingly loud. 

Travis Sheldon

Travis Sheldon

Posted
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2 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

The bloody Monkey isn't playing at either theater in town. Heart Eyes got the nod instead. I'm compelled... but then there is also the Led Zep movie in IMAX which I'm sure is skull-crushingly loud. 

The thing about Led Zeppelin is you can never turn them up too loud.

I've busted a few receivers trying.

  • Like 3

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