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Obligatory linking of this whenever The Thing is mentioned:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT7AH4JyuNs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT7AH4JyuNs)

So awesome.

Were those official John Carpenter's The Thing action figures?  Do want.

God, we all have our favorites, I guess. Mine would be Escape from NY. Been hunting for a door sized snake plissken poster for years.

Escape, The Thing, Big Trouble..


We can all agree that Kurt Russell was pretty awesome back in the day at least.

Yeah, those two were great together. I can't think of any other actor/director team ups that were so full of win.

I wonder if Prince of Darkness is on DvD. I didn't know that was a Carpenter movie. My main memories of that movie are Donald Pleasance and the weird vial of "evil" in the basement of the church.

OK, that I can't agree with.  :-)

I just finished rewatching Prince of Darkness 5 minutes ago. Weird ooze dripping upward and pooling on the ceiling, demon creature reaching through a mirror into a watery anti-world. Really creepy movie, gives me the willies more than any other carpenter film. Thanks God they gave Dennis Dunn all the homo jokes to lighten the mood.

Also "You will not be saved by the God Plutonium" is probably my favorite line from any movie, ever, and it's not even spoken.

The idea of God, Satan and science all sort of comingling is ripe territory.

Prince of Darkness has always been badass in my view, but... Holeee fuck?! I never realized that was Alice Cooper playing the maniacal homeless guy until reading the film credits just now.

This isn’t necessarily new news, but it does move recent rumors into the realm of official announcement.  Universal has hired Ronald Moore to write the big-budget “remake/re-imagining/prequel” of John Carpenter’s The Thing.  They’ve also hired on Matthijs Van Heijningen to direct.  Variety confirms the film will take place in the Norwegian camp that first discovered, housed, and was destroyed by the shape-shifting bastard from the nether regions of space.

This info has been floating around as rumor for a while, but now that it’s official the same comments, questions, and issues remain.  The best part of the announcement (the only good part actually) is the involvement of Moore.  The man has shown his brilliance for the past few years with his Battlestar Galactica reboot, so there’s a chance this could actually be interesting.  Van Heijningen is a wild card, as his previous credits consist solely of commercials.

Spoiler: They all die and the thing is frozen in ice.  :oh_i_see:

There is no way that this prequel film can live up to "The Thing". No way. It isn't needed to explain anything. Bad stuff happened at the Norwegian camp. That's it, end of story.

The world needs a good haunted house movie again.

I love how all these remakes are farmed out to McMovie directors and fucking scabs.  Who in their right mind would even want to try and better The Thing, Halloween, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre?  They're classics for a goddamned reason.

Remakes and sequels are where you separate actual directors from hacks.  Case in point:  David Fincher and Alien 3.  He didn't say, "Hey, I'm going to remake Aliens, but bigger and better!".  He's smart enough to know that you're not going to out-action Cameron, so he goes a different route.  You get some hack like Brett Ratner, though, and he'll reshoot Man Hunter with a higher budget and just call it Red Dragon.  Not an ounce of shame that he's taking sloppy seconds from Michael Mann, because again, he's a scab hack who's just in it for the paycheck.

Though Fincher wasn't the guy responsible for Fight Club and Seven then.  He was a music video director who Fox probably hoped wouldn't piss of Weaver and her giant fucking ego.

The thing is, Alien 3 was a piece of shit.  On its own its a passable movie with a bunch of bald guys who all look alike.  As a sequel to my favorite movie of all time its a giant pile of ass that basically tells the audience of Aliens "HEY FUCK YOU COCKSUCKER!" by stomping over the whole fucking POINT of it.

The thing is, Alien 3 was a piece of shit.  On its own its a passable movie with a bunch of bald guys who all look alike.  As a sequel to my favorite movie of all time its a giant pile of ass that basically tells the audience of Aliens "HEY FUCK YOU COCKSUCKER!" by stomping over the whole fucking POINT of it.

 Plus, whole thing was an allegorical piece about the early treatment of AIDS sufferers imo.

What ?

The big picture

Alien3
by David Fincher

Science fiction has always held a fascination for me. It has the potential to construct alternative worlds where you can create utopias, while actually talking about what concerns us today.

The Alien trilogy framed a whole genre of science fiction film with its three very different narratives linked by the character of Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver), a strong assertive female lead not prepared to submit to either the company or the Freudian monster that seeks to possess her.

If the first film, Alien, introduces the idea of body horror, of the boundaries of the body under threat, the second, Aliens, is a Vietnam war film with high tech guns aiding marines on a rescue mission. The third ­ Alien3, directed by David Fincher ­ is fundamentally different and worth watching. Written by Vincent Ward, who made the excellent film The Navigator, the film sees Ripley crash landing on an isolated prison planet.

From the beginning this instalment of the trilogy is very different from the others. The other two survivors from the previous film ­ Hicks, a soldier, and Newt, a young girl ­ turn out to be dead and so the neat nuclear family unit that is part of the right wing message of Aliens is shattered in the 1990s version.

The bleak, desolate planet on which Ripley finds herself is populated by a colony of male prisoners beyond the pale of even other prison populations. Its talk of contagion, viruses and the iconography of the prisoners all point to what the film is about for me ­ an allegory for Aids.

What the film turns on is the growing realisation amongst these men that they have no choice but to fight for their very existence because, along with Ripley, who carries an alien foetus inside her, an alien has also landed on the planet. Some of the prisoners seek to blame Ripley for unwittingly bringing the monster with her but she is defended by the leader of the group who sees her as much a victim as the rest of them and unites with her to try and destroy it.

Most effective in the film is the strength of resistance of Ripley and the prisoners who are fighting not just the monster but the corporation that wants it as a weapon. The parallel experience of gay men in America and Britain fighting not just a virus but state indifference and prejudice couldn't be clearer.

In one scene they gather to decide on their course of action. The company lackey says they should wait for it to rescue them and not do anything that might rock the boat, but Ripley argues they should remember that in the eyes of the corporation they are all expendable. Dillon, the leader of the prisoners, continues in the same vein, `You're all gonna die. The only question is how you check out, on your feet or on your knees begging. I ain't much for begging.

Nobody gave me nothing. So I say fuck that thing. Let's fight it.' This could be straight from the speech by Larry Kramer which launched Act Up (the militant gay activist group) in New York when he said, `If my speech tonight doesn't scare the shit out of you, we're in real trouble. If what you're hearing doesn't rouse you to anger, fury, rage and action, gay men have no future here on earth. How long does it take before you get angry and fight back?'

Ripley soon realises that she is carrying an alien foetus inside her and this makes her a valuable commodity to the company. She refuses to let them control her body and rather than allow herself to be taken alive to breed the alien, she throws herself into the fire. Some people might view this as a negative ending, but I think it's like the ending to Thelma and Louise where rather than let the state take away the freedom they have come to discover they carry on driving. Alien3 isn't a cheery film but then the experience of the last 15 years of Aids hasn't been either. However, it has been one where a group of people marginalised and considered expendable have learnt to fight back and not accept the status quo. The `fuck you' that the remaining survivor exclaims at the end of the film to the company thugs isn't the clearest declaration of socialist thinking, but the spirit of resistance is where socialists start.

John Lynch

Seems the popular trend nowadays is to mine movie / TV IP from the 80's in the hope that they can reignite them (Terminator, Transformers, GI Joe, The Thing, etc.). I imagine around 2020 we'll start seeing movies that take advantage of quality 90's movies.

...

Ok, probably just more sequels from extremely popular 80's flicks.

As for the Ron Moore doing a remake/whatever of "The Thing" - which part of this is news?  Ron Moore announced he was working on this in June 2007 (http://www.collider.com/entertainment/interviews/article.asp/aid/4581/tcid/1) - so it was hardly a rumour and definitely not new news.

Sometimes you're alright, but for the most part you're a jerkoff.

Now I think that review (from Socialist Review, 1996) takes it a step too far, and that that particular view is just one possible interpretation, or even just an indication of subconscious influences on Fincher, but I think the parallels are strong.

You should have known Newt was gonna be dead when they announced A3. She's not an integral part of the story, and the girl was 14 by then. Get over it already.  :awesome_for_real:

Hicks, a soldier, and Newt, a young girl ­ turn out to be dead and so the neat nuclear family unit that is part of the right wing message of Aliens is shattered in the 1990s version.

Now I think that review (from Socialist Review, 1996) takes it a step too far

Alien 3 was shit. If you like it, fuck you.

Oh, and how did I forget that the blond brother from Simon and Simon is in that movie?

Yes.

It would be interesting, at least, to watch all you assholes try to fuck my wife.

Wow, not touching that comment with a ten foot pole.

Quite possibly the best horror movie ever... How did the same person that made this masterpiece make Ghosts of Mars?  :ye_gods:

Hey, he said he wanted to watch.  :grin:

Ghosts of Mars is Citizen Kane compared to his remake of Village of the Damned.