Welcome to Tubi Tuesday. An ongoing experiment where we dig into some of the weird, underrated, and downright abysmal movies we don’t think our real life friends would let us talk at length about. At the time of writing, this movie is streaming for free on Tubi, the home of Super Bowl LIX!
The Thing (1982) has a pretty convincing argument for my favorite movie, and a much more inarguable argument for best movie ever made. Having seen that one a dozen or so times, I finally decided to go back and check out the first movie to adapt the short story Who Goes There.
The Thing From Another World has a lot in common with its more famous remake. It’s set at a freezing arctic base, and uses its icy setting to establish an overwhelming sense of dread and isolation. The crew of this base find a crashed UFO, which ultimately unleashes a confusing and hard to kill alien that wants to destroy them. There is even an incredible sequence where the crew light the alien on fire in a desperate attempt to stop it, which I will certainly think about every time I watch the remake and they bust out flamethrowers.
I did something I rarely do with this one and came in with a notepad, knowing I wanted to write about it for this, and I realized pretty quickly as I took notes that even though I find the similarities interesting, I am way more fixated on some contrasts between this film and Carpenter’s.
This movie exists outside of typical slasher structure.
I wouldn’t call Carpenter’s film a “slasher movie” necessarily, but I feel like horror movies in general, especially after Carpenter himself helped change the genre forever, often have a consistent pattern of eliminating their large cast piece throughout the film. In the 1951 film, the monster is loose somewhere in the base, and the cast of like twelve guys continuously split up to find it.
My movie brain tells me that this is so that the monster can pick them off one by one, but the movie never falls into this rhythm. There are a few characters that are killed off-screen because they were left in a room alone, but overall the body count is low. There is even a character who is attacked alone, only to survive with injuries. By the end of the movie, eleven of the twelve we started with are basically celebrating the fact that they easily lived through the movie.
There’s a woman in this one, and that’s why everything turns out fine!
It seems like I’m doing a bit but I’m not. If you have ten men together on an arctic base for long enough, they will kill each other regardless of whether or not the thing shows up. That’s just statistics. There is a woman on the base in the original movie, and why she doesn’t actually “do” much other than hang out and hide from the monster, I think it’s completely fair to assume that her presence at all raises the group’s survivability by like 1000%.
Chain of command is vital when dealing with a shapeshifting monster.
One of the biggest difference between the two films is the dynamic between the groups at the base. In the older film, there is a clear leader, and his command of the situation never falters, which is a huge reason so few people die, whereas the men in the remake are closer to peers, and have no issue turning on one another. In this one, his men seem to like him and love doing what he says.
There’s only one character that doesn’t agree with his plans, a scientist (nerd!) that thinks they should idiotically try to communicate with the alien since it is smart enough for intergalactic travel. Luckily, everyone hates this doofus and then the monster yeets him down a hall way before our heroes lightning blast it into ashes.
So for those keeping score, it is Bomber jackets – 1, Science – 0