Rapid Response: The Thing (1982)

John Carpenter’s remake “The Thing” has stellar makeup and special effects, but it’s lacking in the narrative department that its horror counterparts share.

If there’s something missing from “The Thing” it’s certainly not The Thing. We see plenty of it.

John Carpenter’s “The Thing” is a remake of a number of sci-fi B-movies from the ’50s that played on the Red Scare, and while this film lacks that cultural poignancy, it makes up for it in the stylish special effects of the day. Like David Cronenberg’s “The Fly,” it has stunningly outrageous makeup applied in all the wrong places, and it holds up because they’re tangible make-up effects rather than CGI.

Carpenter is of course the horror legend behind “Halloween” and a number of other ’70s and ’80s horror staples. “The Thing” however has a firm place on the IMDB Top 250, presumably for its unseemly effects and people that die really good. Some are incinerated, some are eaten by The Thing’s opening chest cavities or heads, Wilford Brimley shoves his fist into another guy’s mouth. It’s ridiculous, over the top violence that is handled all too gratuitously, but it at least works as a novelty.

Unfortunately, the movie is missing character depth, wit, charm, and even an eerie sense of cabin fever that dominates trapped on the far side of the moon monster movies.

As did the ’50s “The Thing from Another World” or “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “The Thing” is a movie about paranoia and being uncertain about your safety when the enemy could be any of your closest friends. But it’s not an engaging story when all of the characters are one-dimensional, underdeveloped and uninteresting. We catch glimpses of faces and names but are only even partially attached to Kurt Russell’s character MacCready.

And allow me to say now, it’s a bad thing when Kurt Russell is the one giving your movie’s strongest performance. The acting throughout is pretty stilted, and my guess is that the camp appeal in the characters better fits the preposterous goriness.

The verdict is that “The Thing” can barely hold a candle to say, “Alien” or “The Fly,” amongst many others, although I’ll give this ’80s version benefit of the doubt that it is more visually inventive and absurd than the CGI gore-fest of a remake that’s being released in theaters today.

Rapid Response: Tender Mercies

If a movie is good enough, you can enjoy any music in it. I’m not a country music fan, but I’ve been an admirer of the filmmaking, performances and sheer charisma on stage in movies like “Walk the Line,” “Crazy Heart” and now “Tender Mercies.” It’s also hard to deny Robert Duvall’s sheer acting presence in any film he’s in, and this is the one he won his Oscar for, despite being one of the most understated performances of his career.

It’s about a former country music star, Mac Sledge, who lost his fame, fortune and family to the bottle and will now try to make a comeback in a way other than just with his music. It did remind me a lot of “Crazy Heart,” as did Duvall’s character in comparison to Jeff Bridges’ (ironically, Bridges won his Oscar for that role as well), but “Tender Mercies” is in many ways better than it. Rather than show Mac’s plummet, we meet Mac at his low point and see him rise from there, and we also don’t know anything about his past, least of all as a country singer. Instead, the movie floors us with his history all at once when a journalist outs his presence in this small Texas town to the world.

There are no cornball scenes of him falling back on alcohol or montages of him writing music again. It doesn’t even devote too much attention to his marriage to Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), but that’s because there’s more to this character than just his surface level problems. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Tender Mercies”