sf-lovers (07/05/82)
>From JPM@Mit-Ai Mon Jul 5 07:43:20 1982
SF-LOVERS Digest Monday, 5 Jul 1982 Volume 6 : Issue 4
Today's Topics:
SF Movies - The Thing & Star Trek: The Motion Picture,
Random Topics - Commercials at the movies
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Date: Tue, 29 Jun 82 09:25:15 EDT
From: dyer at NBS-VMS
Subject: The Thing
THE THING Rated R
Nano-review :
One of the summer's missable movies. If you've read the short
story by John W. Campbell, Jr., then you don't need to see THE THING.
Micro-review :
A research station in Antartica discovers an alien frozen in
ice. When the alien thaws out, the men discover that the alien is
still alive. It also has the peculiar property of being able to
imitate other life-forms down to the cellular level, by eating them.
Before the crew of the research station discovers this, the
alien has eaten several dogs, and has /become/ several people (No one
knows, of course, just /who/ has been turned into an alien, because
the creature is a perfect mimic.)
In a series of very explicit gruesome scenes, the aliens are
ferreted out and destroyed. A way of telling humans from imitations
is developed. However, the last scene of the movie does not really
seem like an ending -- it is almost as if the shooting crew had run
out of film and decided to stop. There is no resolution -- will the
earth be invaded by the THING all over again?
This movie is another example of what can happen when a
producer gets carried away with special effects. Characterization has
been thrown aside in an attempt to 'gross out' the audience with
slithering, slimy tentacles and violent scenes where (more often than
not) yet another character/monster is destroyed. What's a research
outpost in Antarctica doing with a grenade launcher and a
flamethrower?
I don't recommend THE THING. Its a poor imitation of ALIEN,
with few redeeming characteristics. The film's only shock value is
that of displaying new and bizarre ways in which to kill off
characters. The ending, which might have been meant to be
thought-provoking, is simply a cheat.
------------------------------
Date: 24 Jun 82 16:35-PDT
From: mclure at SRI-UNIX
Subject: The Thing
THE THING
By Richard Freedman
Newhouse News Service
(UNDATED) That fellow sitting next to you on the sofa slurping
beer and watching television - is he really your husband and the
father of your children, or a clever clone who looks and acts just
like him? Does it matter?
He could be a ''replicant'' from ''Blade Runner,'' or (gasp!) a
Thing from ''The Thing.'' Each of these new movies could be a clone of
the other.
Although ''Blade Runner'' is set in futuristic Los Angeles and
''The Thing'' in Antarctica last winter, they share common themes and
common problems.
Both deal with the ultimate paranoid nightmare that we don't
really know who even our nearest and dearest are. And both submerge
the acting talents of their leading men - Harrison Ford in ''Blade
Runner'' and Kurt Russell in ''The Thing'' - beneath a mass of special
effects.
Come to think of it, Clint Eastwood fares no better in
''Firefox.'' This may be the summer of the computerized matinee idol.
Furthermore, ''The Thing'' is adapted from the 1938 pulp science
fiction shocker ''Who Goes There?'' by John W. Campbell Jr., which was
made into a 1951 B-movie by Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks called
''The Thing from Another World.'' It also supplied the basic gimmick
for both ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers'' films and ''Alien.''
Maybe it's time this particular property was given a proper
burial. What's buried instead in ''The Thing'' is a loathsome mass of
protoplasm that crash-landed in Antarctica 100,000 years ago and has
lain there encased in ice ever since.
Inadvertently released by some Norwegian scientists, it comes back
to scare a dozen Americans - working for the National Science
Foundation - out of their longjohns.
The film's opening sequence is brilliant, as we see a
black-and-white husky madly running for its life from a helicopter
pilot determined either to shoot it or blast it with dynamite.
Instead of phoning the ASPCA, the American scientists learn to their
sorrow why this cowering canine must be destroyed.
The scene is also brilliantly lit, with the sun glaring
mercilessly on the Antarctic ice mass.
The rest of ''The Thing,'' unfortunately, is so murkily
photographed, either outdoors at night or within the labs and barracks
of the scientists, that it's very difficult to tell one from the
other, except that MacReady (Kurt Russell) seems to be the most
important. At least he's one of two survivors by the end of the film.
Otherwise, the characters are so characterless they can only be
distinguished by whether they wear beards or not. When they don their
parkas to venture into the 40-below cold, there's no telling them
apart.
No matter. The whole point of ''The Thing,'' as a German Romantic
philosopher might have put it, is the Thing itself, brainchild of
special-effects genius Rob Bottin.
Bottin has created some of the most horrific and disgusting makeup
ever to appear on screen for a blob that gets into your blood serum,
replicates all your cells, and then discards the original you as
casually as a tangerine skin.
This naturally causes some consternation among scientists A.
Wilford Brimley, T.K. Carter, David Clennon, Keith David, Richard
Dysart etc., since they're increasingly unable to tell who is a pal
and who is a Thing in pal's clothing.
Occasionally the Thing erupts out of the men's bodies, much as the
Alien in ''Alien'' burst out of John Hurt's tummy, scaring the
daylights out of the survivors. As well it might. Seen au naturel, the
Thing looks like a giant octopus with a skin made out of pizza with
pepperoni.
''The Thing'' is directed by horror specialist John Carpenter
(''Halloween''; ''Escape from New York''). He seems to have spent less
time and thought creating plausible characters his actors could sink
their teeth into, than creating a monster who sinks its teeth into
them.
If you're going to see ''The Thing'' - and don't rush - at least
go before dinner.
''THE THING.'' A dozen scientists in Antarctica are devoured one
by one by a horrible blob of 100,000-year-old protoplasm, which then
takes on their original characteristics, thus unnerving just about
everybody in the igloo. Terrific special effects, but not much else.
Rated R. Two and a half stars.
------------------------------
Date: 27 Jun 1982 1648-PDT
From: Jim McGrath <CSD.MCGRATH at SU-SCORE>
Subject: The Thing
THE THING
By Vincent Canby
c. 1982 N.Y. Times News Service
NEW YORK - John Carpenter's ''The Thing'' is a foolish,
depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction
to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other.
Sometimes it looks as if it aspired to be the quintessential
moron-movie of the 80s - a virtually storyless feature composed of
lots of laboratory-concocted special effects, with the actors used
merely as props to be hacked, slashed, disemboweled and decapitated,
finally to be eaten and then regurgiated as - guess what? - more
laboratory-concocted special effects.
There may be a metaphor in all this, but I doubt it.
Carpenter has demonstrated that he can make good, comparatively
plain, old-fashioned scare-movies (''Halloween'') and effective
suspense thrillers (''Escape From New York''), but he seems to lose
his own head when he combines two or more genres, as he did in ''The
Fog'' and does again here.
For the record, it should be immediately pointed out that this new
film bears only a superficial resemblance to Howard Hawks's 1951
classic ''The Thing,'' though both were inspired by the same source
material, John W. Campbell's story, ''Who Goes There?''
The setting is a small, self-contained, American scientific base
in Antarctica, and ''the thing'' is a creature from outer space,
frozen for 100,000 years in the south polar icecap and accidently
thawed by some unfortunate Norwegian scientists. One of the film's
major problems is that the creature has no identifiable shape of its
own. It's simply a mass of bloody protoplasm that, as someone
solemnly explains, ''imitates other forms of life'' and thus, for much
of the movie, walks around looking like ordinary people.
In this respect, Carpenter's ''The Thing'' seems itself to be
imitating other forms of movies, particularly ''Invasion of the Body
Snatchers.''
Kurt Russell, Richard Dysart, A. Wilfred Bramley, T. K. Carter,
Peter Maloney, David Clennon and other worthy people appear on the
screen, but there's not a single character to act. All that the
performers are required to do is to react with shock and terror from
time to time. Like all such movies that don't trust themselves to keep
an audience interested by legitimate dramatic means, ''The Thing''
shows us too much of ''the thing'' too soon, so that it has no place
to go. It plods in circles from one mock-horror effect to the next.
It's entertaining only if one's needs are met by such sights as
those of a head walking around on spiderlike legs; autopsies on dogs
and humans in which the innards explode to take on other, not easily
identifiable forms; hand-severings, immolations, wormlike tentacles
that emerge from the mouth of a severed head or two or more burned
bodies fused together to look like spareribs covered with barbecue
sauce.
''The Thing'' is too phony looking to be disgusting. It qualifies
only as instant junk.
------------------------------
Date: 15-Jun-82 10:26:28 PDT (Tuesday)
From: Newman.es at PARC-MAXC
Subject: Commercials BEFORE the movies
In Los Angeles, nearly every theater has a Los Angeles Times
commercial before the movie. The newspaper requires it in exchange
for accepting the theater's advertising.
/Ron
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Date: 16 June 1982 0106-PDT (Wednesday)
From: lauren at UCLA-Security (Lauren Weinstein)
Subject: Commercials during Films & ST:TMP
Hmmm. It seems to me that years ago, there used to be rather specific
commercials during intermissions for candy, popcorn, and other
goodies. I'm not too sure that there's anything all that different
about more "conventional" advertising. However, inserting commercials
into a film which would not otherwise have an intermission should be a
criminal offense.
----
The recent newswire story about ST:TWoK which refers to someone
watching 2001 alot during the writing of ST:TMP caused me to chuckle a
bit.
When I was working for (gasp!) Robert Abel & Associates (the ORIGINAL
effex crew for ST:TMP), the core effex group saw a number of private
screenings of "classic" SF. I seem to recall watching "Forbidden
Planet" and "The Forbin Project" (classic?) at Paramount, plus "Star
Wars" and "2001" over at Todd-AO. One of the major people on our
production team was Con Pederson, who was one of the primary effex
people on 2001. Con even had a collection of the little HAL 9000
stickers that he stuck on some of the local computers. In any case, I
learned alot about the design behind ST:TMP during those screenings,
particularly from listening to Roddenberry and Wise. It became clear
that Wise was not really a Trek fan, and Roddenberry was definitely
looking for a rather "grandiose" statement rather than "another Star
Trek episode".
I could go on with a number of amusing anecdotes from that period, but
I guess I'll pass for now ... interested parties can contact me
directly. I will mention one bizarre point, however. At one stage of
the production, I was assigned the task of inventing the Klingon
character set for the Klingon ship displays. Just to show some of the
other staff people what I was talking about sometimes, would you
believe I used the Stanford (SU-AI) "Find-A-Font" catalog as a guide
to the "sorts" of fonts I was talking about? Strange, but true.
Of course, Abel never finished the project, and I successfully removed
myself from the inner world of Star Trek. Now, if only I could get
rid of this case of dilithium crystals...
--Lauren--
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End of SF-LOVERS Digest
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