The Thing [Unnecessary Prequel] (2011): a prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) written by Eric Heisserer and based as was Carpenter's and the Howard Hawks-produced first adaptation The Thing from Another World (1951) on "Who Goes There?" (1938) by John W. Campbell Jr., a novella that owes a lot to H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1936); directed by Matthijs van Heijningen; starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the only character the film develops enough for you to care about her fate: It's a lot like John Carpenter's The Thing, only without the grungy, lived-in characters and lived-in monster and lived-in living quarters.
The prequel exhaustively and exhaustingly extrapolates what happened at the Norwegian Antarctic Base back in 1982 when the Norwegians dug up that strange visitor from another planet who had been frozen for 100,000 years.
We assume from our knowledge of the first few minutes of The Thing (1982) that two Norwegians, a dog, and a helicopter will still be around when this movie ends and The Thing (1982) begins. We know a priori what will destroy the Norwegians and their camp if we have seen Carpenter's Thing. And we've seen that aftermath in that camp, as characters in The Thing (1982) visit the Norwegian camp early on in The Thing (1982) and we watch as they alternate shock, horror, and bafflement at what they find there.
So the script of The Thing (2011) does explain how everything and everything we saw in that Norwegian camp in The Thing (1982). Connect the dots! The damn movie is a connect-the-dots exercise!
Only one character is memorable, and it's not the fault of the actors: the movie wastes that big, beefy, red-bearded Wildling we all love in Game of Thrones. It wastes that actor you've loved as Mr. Eko on Lost and probably not recognized as Killer Croc in Suicide Squad. Most of the characters are Norwegian, but there are some American pilots hanging around so that some scenes can plausibly occur in English.
Oh, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, our heroic American ice-paleoarchaeologist, is good and has enough lines and acting chops to make us wish she were in another movie, or maybe just The Thing (1982).
I will unreservedly recommend exactly one scene that involves Winstead, one of the Norwegians, a search for keys in a storage room, a Thing, and the only iteration of the Thing in this movie to be both unexpected and unexpected horrifying. Oh, well. But you've got to locate that scene. Highly recommended for a 2 minute stretch; otherwise not recommended.
Creepshow (1982): written by Stephen King; directed by George Romero; starring Hal Holbrook (Henry), Adrienne Barbeau (Wilma), Fritz Weaver (Dexter), Leslie Nielsen (Vickers), E.G. Marshall (Upson Pratt), Viveca Lindfors (Bedelia), Ed Harris (Hank), Ted Danson (Wentworth), Stephen King (Jordy Verrill), and Joe Hill King (Billy):
Is it an anthology movie when all the segments are written by the same person or a collection movie?
Oh, well.
This homage to the horror comics of the 1950's, written by Stephen King and directed by George Romero, is a mixed enough bag that it almost feels like an anthology movie from several different writers.
Creepshow is enjoyable. And it was adapted by King and Bernie 'Swamp Thing' Wrightson as an even more enjoyable comic book, complete with a cover by EC great Jack Kamen, who also provides some of the comic-book panels seen in this film. But Creepshow almost succeeds in spite of itself: King and Romero's take on those horror comics, and specifically the great EC Comics of the early 1950's, is too campy and arch by about 50%.
The decision to play up the comic-book aspects of the production with odd frames and effects and shots doesn't help things either. As in Ang Lee's Hulk, the extremely comic-booky visuals just look sorta stupid. And in the context of the illustration style of EC Comics, which tended to stick to a very strict grid pattern for the comic book panels, many of the visual choices made by Romero make no historic sense except in relation to the Batman TV series of the 1960's.
The final mistake is literally two-fold. Romero casts Stephen King as the lead actor in one segment and his son Joe Hill King as a child in the framing story. They're both terrible actors. Romero compensates for this terribleness in King's segment by making it the most archly comedic sequence in the movie and having King yuck it up like a Little Theatre actor who got all coked up for opening night. The result is cringe-worthy and funny for all the wrong reasons -- it's like amateur hour at the Grand Guignol. Or the adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's seminal "The Colour Out of Space" from an alternate reality in which the adaptation appeared on Hee Haw Country Playhouse.
Other segments with actual professional actors in them fare better. "The Crate," the longest segment, is adapted by King from a short story of his that has never been collected in one of his collections (yes, there are stories by Stephen King that even Stephen King doesn't like). Nonetheless, it's an excellent piece of comic horror that's at its best when it's not being comic at all: only the decision to make Adrienne Barbeau's character, an annoying faculty wife, into a shrill, clueless Harpy almost undoes the rest of the segment.
But Hal Holbrook and Fritz Weaver, old pros both, make one believe in the rest of the narrative. Tom Savini's monster design for this segment is pretty solid, though not as alien as the creature described in the story, and a little more alien might have been nice. Of course, he's limited by the visual effects technology of 1982 and the film's budget: the thing in the story couldn't have been a guy in a suit.
Really, the non-King-Family cast is terrific. Leslie Nielsen and Ted Danson shine in a tale of adultery and revenge from beyond the grave. And E.G. Marshall does nasty, blackly comic work as a squirmy, technocratic businessman (dig that early 1980's computer technology!) besieged by an endless army of cockroaches in his Kubrickian white-walled apartment. A young Ed Harris is almost unrecognizable in the weak first segment, which offers as its main charm a really beautifully imagined walking corpse. Kudos again to Savini and his creature team.
Overall, Creepshow is worth watching, or watching again. Other than the unfortunately arch comic-book visualizations, Romero's direction is effective throughout. "The Crate" creates real tension, while E.G. Marshall's segment offers a number of clever ways to send a cockroach skittering across the screen. The frame story is negligible, and the tone would better have been modulated towards the dramatic end of things. Even the Stephen King segment generates a certain amount of poignance by its end, though I'm not sure if one feels sorry for King's rural bumpkin or for King himself being exposed so thoroughly as a dreadful, dreadful actor and then being seemingly exhorted to overplay that terribleness. In all, recommended.
The Dark Country by Dennis Etchison, containing the following stories: "It Only Comes Out at Night", "Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly", "The Walking Man", "We Have All Been Here Before", "Daughter of the Golden West", "The Pitch", "You Can Go Now", "Today's Special", "The Machine Demands a Sacrifice", "Calling All Monsters", "The Dead Line", "The Late Shift", "The Nighthawk", "It Will Be Here Soon", "Deathtracks", and "The Dark Country." (1972-1982; Collected 1982): It took nearly 20 years of being published before Dennis Etchison got his first collection of short stories. It's a dandy, collecting the best of his work from the 1970's and early 1980's.
Etchison's idiosyncratic style and subject matter are in full view here, from the near-future horrors of the "Transplant trilogy" ("The Machine Demands a Sacrifice", "Calling All Monsters", "The Dead Line"), in which the demand for organ donors has ventured into Pythonesque territory, to The Hardy Boys Goe To Hell weirdness of "Daughter of the Golden West."
The award-winning title novella is perhaps the weirdest story here, a subtle horror story about a bad Mexican vacation in which the horrors never completely manifest themselves. It's like a vignette from Apocalypse Now by way of Spring Break. There's also blatant, bloody revenge fantasy suggestive of EC horror comics in "The Pitch" and "Today's Special" and "We Have All Been Here Before."
Two of Etchison's major tropes -- Southern California and "the road" -- appear again and again here, sometimes in concert (the Los Angeles area has a lot of cars and a lot of drivers, after all). Everyone seems to be in transit; everyone is the target of sinister but often undefined horrors that can come from anywhere, anytime. The seemingly ordinary -- late-night convenience-store clerks, highway rest stops, tow trucks, even television laugh tracks -- shimmer with hidden menace, sometimes fatally revealed. Some things come out of the dark; some things hunt in the sun. Highly recommended.
