From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!sf-lovers Newsgroups: fa.sf-lovers Title: SF-LOVERS Digest V6 #4 Article-I.D.: ucbvax.7907 Posted: Mon Jul 5 07:44:12 1982 Received: Tue Jul 6 00:47:51 1982 >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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 McGrathSubject: 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 ------------------------------ 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-- ------------------------------ End of SF-LOVERS Digest ***********************