The Thing

Sound of Music

LOL Uncle Owen from the Star Wars prequels is in this.

trailer predictably reveals several bad decisions right off the bat

oh my gosh that looks shit

ie, mixed-gender cast, CGI face-morphing, car crashes, various shots cribbed from the original

that's the funniest tagline ever.

in a place with nothing...they found....BWOMMMMM.....SOMETHING

lol it stars "Kim Bubbs"

Sound of Music

rly? have never seen sound of music, guess it's achieved full background media ubiquity tho.

ie, mixed-gender cast, CGI face-morphing, car crashes, various shots cribbed from the original

don't see why any of these are bad or uninevitable.

trailer looks okay-ish, if unremarkable. points for fairly naturalistic cinematography for a contemporary film and a suitably grizzled cast. lead seems terribly unconvincing, but i'll reserve judgement on that. the fact that she's a fish out of water seems to be the point, so i won't fault her casting on that score. a few details (such as the black & white dog chewing his enclosure) suggest that it's going to be a straight-up remake, but who knows. maybe it's just the dog that escapes at the end to complete the chain...

like the idea that it'll have a longer, slower build-up than the original, which pretty much hit the ground running.

was kidding about the Sound of Music, didn't really notice the music

I dunno if I wanna get into why all of those things are particularly bad. The mixed gender thing should be fairly obvious, I would think.

The Dawn of the Dead remake is a lot better than any of the recent horror remakes I can think of.

Yeah, DOD remake is pretty fun and it's quite unlike Snyder's subsequent films. Best opening credits sequence of modern times too.

yeah, the opening scene of the DOD remake is brilliant. don't think the rest of the movie really lives up to what the opening promises, though. failure to follow-through on zombie-baby chestbuster kind of broke my heart.

belly burster, w/e...

re the yodelling: eurovision, of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap3_USxKQ34

1:20 in

i really want to like this but.. there's a shaggy funkiness to carpenter's movie that goes beyond kurt russell and which seems.. well, not in evidence here. everybody has great hair, for god's sake! in an antarctic research station!!! in the 1982 movie there was this kind of crass bonhomie, pot smoking, everybody a little nutty, as you would be. it's funny how sequel peeps will architect everything down to the nth degree as far as plot and set continuities go but then just throw hairstyles out the window, and the look of the movie, too. why not match the cinematography as well as the plot? why's it all got to be this ultra-contrasty shiny wetness?

like, the research station looks positively tasteful. it would not be. it would be dirty and drafty and cold and the lighting would suck.

Man, no good will come of this. Why don't they ever remake bad movies and make them better? Why must they remake classic movies? I can name a million on-paper solid horror films that could be better.

I just find interesting how all these awful remakes (no wait, they're calling them reimaginings), for all their excess and ultra graphic violence, look like highly sanitized, disinfected versions of the original movies.

okay, so tracer OTM. especially about the "shaggy funkiness" and dirty, careless, human lived-in-ness of carpenter's research station. also the lack of oddball personality, both in the cast and the cinematic style.

lack of (apparent) personality in this new version, i mean.

yep. this movie is POINTLESS

you might even say it's lacking a certain.... SOMETHING

y'all should go and see the troll hunter instead, if you want quirky gritty original norwegian horror. well more comic fantasy than horror but anyway, it's good.

the original is playing in LA tomorrow on a double-bill w/ cronenberg's 'the fly'

trollhunter is fun

this trailer is like what happened to elaine's hair over the course of the seinfeld run.

seeing trollhunter on sunday. excited!

oooh I hadn't heard about trollhunter - i wanna see it!

It worries me that there's not a scene in the trailer (except for vehicle falling into crevice in the ice) that doesn't seem to be a lift from Carpenter's movie. And there seem to be very few Norwegians.

I don't think I even want to watch the trailer after these reactions.

The trailer itself isn't bad! It's just impossible not to be cynical about this movie.

a few details (such as the black & white dog chewing his enclosure) suggest that it's going to be a straight-up remake, but who knows. maybe it's just the dog that escapes at the end to complete the chain...

it's a direct prequel. but it's basically a remake anyway, i.e. the same basic events happen.

it's a pre-make!

surprised that term hasn't caught on yet

Bailed out on the trailer halfway through. First of all, can we FUCKING GET RID OF THE PSEUDO-GREGORIAN CHANTERS THAT INDICATE "UNKNOWN SCARY SHIT FROM THE ANCIENT PAST"

Zero suspense, no indication that this movie is even supposed to be scary.

Trailer for the original 100% better...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouZkkIsLiNg

The Fog has my favorite Carpenter trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XI559irkMQ

The Fog is the most underrated Carpenter. Scared the poop out of me when I was little.

did you get your poop back

John Carpenter stole my childhood poop, and now I will never get it back.

The Thing: "Man is the warmest place to hide."
The Fog: "What in the living hell is out there?"

Now these, my friends, are tag lines.

The Fog, the scene near the start with the guys on the boat. Fucking superb shit.

I guess i don't have very high expectations for this prequel, but that trailer looks alright.

i'm sure this will be terrible, but i still got chills in the first ~20 seconds of the trailer just because i love the original premise so much. show me an antarctic research base and i'm set, i'll watch you even if you're a prequel to alien vs predator.

whoa, this just seems masochistic (if true):

Annual viewing on "The Ice"

The Thing is typically viewed by members of the winter crew at the U.S. South Pole station after the last flight out (usually in a double-feature with The Shining). [31]

Might as well, otherwise people would be making inevitable requests/references to it for the next six months.

masochism kind of goes w/the territory

Just re-read Ebert's old review. He misses the point on a couple of fronts. One, he complains about the lack of characterization, but the fact that these characters remains so vivid to us today is surely because of the way Carpenter drew them; most films today, I leave not knowing half the characters' names. Two, he complains that the dudes would have benefited from the buddy system, but how so? If Ebert was paying attention, it's introduced way, way early that someone may have already been Thing-afied by way of the Norwegian dog wandering around. The buddy system would not have helped.

Anyway, re-watching again tonight, this movie is just tight.

With this and Blade Runner, 1982 seems like some kind of high point of special effects. It's essentially all been downhill since then.

I think it's spiritually significant that I was born in 1982. It's one of the best years for genre movies ever.