'Feed Me, Seymour' vs 'Feed Me Seymour' (The Thing movie review)

The Thing (1982)

Disclaimer: DOGS DIE IN THIS MOVIE

My very first thought watching this movie was, “I hope the people shooting the dog die.” This just in, they did. I cheered.

However, the insistent hunting of the dog and the camera angles focusing on it foreshadowed it being infected. I watched this movie with my boyfriend and told him, “I'd get infected for that cute a dog and I don't even know what the infection does to you,” in which he responded, “I'm sure that'll change once I see what The Thing is.” He was wrong. The monstrous Dog Thing was adorable in a Cerberus way. Overall, The Thing aesthetically reminded me of both a demogorgon (Stranger Things) and Audrey II (Little Shop of Horrors). I especially like the half-changed forms, like when Bennings still had The Silence hands. However, when the Dog Thing changed and started spitting on and digesting the other pups I was done. One whimper/bark from the huskies and I hugged my own dog and took out my headphones until it was over.

Surprisingly though, I did like the gore in the movie, and I'm not normally a gore fan. The frozen body that cut his own throat was graphic and wonderful, and the melted together faces of The Thing found in the Norwegian’s camp was interesting (I liked the melty faces). You know the gore is good when you feel like you can smell everything during the autopsy through the screen. Impressive special effects makeup, and a scary movie given it was made in ‘82.

Now, I don’t know if it was done before or after this movie, but a lot of elements in this movie have become stereotypical by now. One of those is people ignoring the reactions of the animals. The dogs were clearly growling and whining, but the people didn't listen. Another is someone digging up something frozen they don’t know about and unleashing it upon humans. This reminded me heavily of an episode of X-files that gave me nightmares for a month as a child, called ‘Ice’:

“The episode shows FBI special agents investigating the death of an Alaskan research team. Isolated and alone, the agents and their accompanying team discover the existence of extraterrestrial parasitic organisms that drive their hosts into impulsive fits of rage.”

On the note of extraterrestrial, I found this movie more horror than sci-fi. There wasn’t enough explanation for me to consider this truly sci-fi. While it did talk about some, like how it mimics it’s hosts cells after digesting them, overall I was left still wondering some specifics, like how the cells could transfer or not (inconsistencies with cigarettes, knives, etc.). We could tell it was intelligent. It stayed as a dog until the humans trusted it, moved away from the fire as a head spider, and took out the generator to freeze itself. Yet, we don’t really know much besides that.

Overall, I was left liking and remembering the names of Mac and Blair. Both of them were the logical and entertaining ones. Blair smashes the computers and tools to escape, and in doing so he goes crazy and then gets infected. Mac is the main character, and is smart enough to make a tape for later while also fighting until the better end.

Now, about the bitter end.

It was a good ending. I love a good cliffhanger. Ambiguity has a special place in my heart. The writer and director in interviews even said they don't know the order of characters getting infected, or who was real or not at the end. That's one of the great things about this movie. But I read a thread online that Child's ended as a Thing because Mac was going to drink the bottle and then realized it was from the Molotov cocktails. So Child's drank straight gasoline.

But that's just a theory.

For threads on infection order:

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/95010/who-gets-infected-first-in-john-carpenters-the-thing

https://www.reddit.com/r/horror/comments/6bqh1z/the_thing_1982_an_infection_timeline/ 

Class Movies Overview: Monsters (11/8/19)

Reviews so far



Do Watch:

***** Alien (1979)
****  The Thing (1982)
***    The Blob (1988)
***    Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Don't Watch:

**      Godzilla (2014)
**     An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Book Reviews -->

An American Keeshond in MuchTooLong-don (An American Werewolf in London movie review)

Some Older Movies Should Stay in the Past

An American Werewolf in London (1981) was not worth 1 hour and 37 minutes of my time. It felt like nothing happened in this movie. For being described as a horror comedy, this movie was all humor and no horror. You’d think a bad B movie could at least deliver some suspense with its low-budget special effects, but all it did was bore me.

Now, not everything in this movie was bad. As I said, there was only humor in this movie, no horror, but there was some good jokes. Lines like, "Remain sane, at least until you are not our responsibility,” and “I will not be threatened by a walking meatloaf." I also loved the saltiness of Alex as a woman in an ‘80s movie. She’s no Sigourney Weaver, but she was at least more interesting than the leading male, David.

The movie seemed to get worse and worse as it went on. At the beginning it wasn’t so bad. The scene in the Slaughtered Lamb was excellent. Jack’s undead makeup and shredded flesh in the hospital was surprisingly unsettling. However, as the movie progressed, the decay makeup decayed in quality. Once David got to the hospital, the movie was no longer worth watching. The nightmares and hallucinations were a bit ridiculous. The cheesy transformation was mixed with music you'd slow dance to, which didn't make the werewolf scary. Then, when viewers finally get to see the werewolf for more than a half second lunge, he looks like a Keeshond dog. Maybe a Chow Chow.

The biggest horror of this horror movie was the softcore porn in the background. There were excessive sex scenes with close ups on navel the main ladies navel, lots of nudity and nipples that you could not get away with in America lightly nowadays (maybe in Britain), and 'a nonstop orgy movie' advertised and shown in the background of the entire movie theater scene.

This movie felt like more of a commentary on mental illness than on werewolves. The town as a hive mind keeping secrets, hallucinations disregarded by doctors and cops, and suicide talked about so casually. Then, when he couldn’t kill himself, the end left me unsatisfied. She told him she loved him, and rather than it resolving the plot, or tying back to when he had foreshadowed that werewolves can only be killed by those that loved them, the cops just shoot and kill David. Cut to black.

The only things I’ll take away from this movie is that the early 80’s punk rockers on the bus were great. They clearly reflected the music taste of the time, back when The Clash and Sex Pistols were huge. The songs such as Moondance, Blue Moon, and Bad Moon Rising were fitting titles, albeit a bit cliché, but what about this movie wasn’t cheesy. Finally, a big thanks to my past self playing MapCrunch, allowing me to guessing that this movie was filmed in either Northern Ireland or Wales. It was Wales.

Verdict: Leave this movie in the ‘80’s, and get yourself a Keeshond instead. 

Alien, My Chest Bursts For You (1979 Alien movie review)

Alien (1979) is a very good, old movie. I’m sure this may offend some people that aren’t my age, but I’m used to the special effects of now. My all-time favorite movie is The Princess Bride (1987), which means I’m not concerned about the special effects when it comes to movies such as Alien.

Now, in general my review of Alien is praise.

This movie set up for a great expanding franchise. When you Google ‘Alien’, the very first thing isn’t general info on Wikipedia or a Urban Dictionary definition, it is this movie. Everyone knows the Xenomorphs, and by extension, the Predators. Terrifying races at odds, one killing to infect the universe with it’s species, one hunting just for the thrill of the sport. The movie set up the perfect universe for new creations such as the video game Alien Isolation, which spins off the movie plot, but is much scarier than the original film.

However, rewatching Alien with the assignment of having a critical eye, I did think there were a few flaws.

“Now this may seem a little bit harsh, but that’s because you are viewing it through nostalgia goggles… I’m going to take those off your face and replace them with the pragmatic transition lenses of reality.” (Brian David Gilbert)

The beginning is slow. I’m not the first person to say it. We get a dull introduction to the crew, and then the ship crashes and everyone is fine with exploring and waiting for it to be fixed. The plot takes off when the explorers come back with a face-hugger attached to Kane and Ripley doesn’t want to let them inside. That’s where everything starts getting good.

The face huggers are interesting creatures. They mystery on why they are keeping Kane alive, the acid blood, the sudden disappearance and finding it dead and Kane fine, all of these are amazing story elements. And then the alien bursts, and everyone says they told you so.

Honestly, the only characters I remembered the names of were Ripley and Ash. That’s because of Ash’s plot twist and inevitable bleeding of what looked like curdled milk, and because Ripley is a key example of a powerful female lead. If there’s one thing I like, it’s a badass lady. And Jonesy. Jonesy is the best cat.

Now, a lot of this movie is predictable. Letting the alien into the ship is obviously going to go sideways. Ripley ‘escaping’ only to find the alien on the escape pod is expected. But that doesn’t take away from the amazing creature, monster, that has been created in this movie. The alien is terrifying, stealthy, and an evolutionary perfect killer and breeder. There isn’t a question of intent to do harm or not. The alien doesn’t think or have morals, it just kills.

While this movie’s plot may have been slow for modern day standards, it is still a classic science fiction movie with horror elements. I watched this movie for the first time way back when alongside Nightmare on Elm Street a week before Halloween. I made my best friend hold my hand through the whole movie, because while Alien isn’t a jump scare horror, the suspense kills you.

This has been the best monster movie we’ve watched so far, and I have a feeling it’ll stay that way.

Medical Anthropology! ...oh and I guess zombies too (World War Z)

First of all, let me say props to this small Youtuber I found trying to do voice acting. This playlist made the voices of the different chapters even more memorable.

The book, while being about zombies, was more so a story on humans, our ability to cope (and hide) tragedy, quell panic, how societies interact and how the government involves itself. And despite the zombies, this also wasn’t a horror book to me. This was a commentary on mankind being the monsters more than it was a terrifying undead book.

Here, we see people spanning multiple locations around the world, and how the cultures handle the pandemic differently. The bigger issue than the zombies in this book were the surviving humans undermining one another. The whole books was brimming with political and personal agendas of unreliable narrators, and yet that’s what made it so good. The story pieced into interviews worked for me. It helped break up the story into palatable chunks, and worked much better than telling everything from the biased POV of one character only. Needless to say though, this books is about human reaction and interaction, not the undead. This book actually gave me Jurassic Park vibes, as weird as that is to say. It felt like the world was ignoring the threat or assuming they could keep it contained.

Now, I don’t remember a single character name, but I remember stories. It may be because I listened to the book rather than read it, but the character voices were so distinct. Thos voices are what got me through the book. I clearly remember the doctor with patient zero, the man smuggling in organs across borders, the greedy guy making money off false vaccination hope, the woman in the hospital with the mental state of a young child. All of them were different, and (almost) all of them were interesting.

However, I have to agree with Sean that the story being told in the past tense did ruin the tension. We knew all the people being interviewed survived. these drawbacks in tense drew me back from really enjoying this story. And the fact that the zombies weren’t as prevalent as I wanted them to be. This book was about humans, and I was let down by that, going in expecting more. The book did eventually become monotonous with tales of everyone dying and then the survivors finding a way to live high above and survive. It’s about human resilience, and readers always eat that up because they like seeing the person they emphasize with win in the end. But I say again, I can’t remember a single character name, so it’s hard to relate to characters. Not only that, but a lot of the character I felt like we weren’t supposed to like, and that’s why I enjoyed them. A good bad villain is hard to not love.

In the end, I have already recommended this to my sister, who at one point wanted to be an epidemiologist, but is now a medical anthropologist.

CLASS BOOK OVERVIEW UPDATED

**** for World War Z by Max Brooks

Thoughts?

Night of the Living Dad Disagrees (Night of the Living Dead 1968)

I watched the black and white version of Night of the Living Dead (1968) with my dad.

When I first hit play, I thought I hadn’t seen this movie before, but I quickly realized that I had seen it, it just wasn’t memorable. This statement my dad disagreed with. He, like Alexis, said the characters learned as they went, and so did the viewers, and that’s how he remembered it, as the movie went on her remembered right before things happened.

Some people have reviewed this movie by going through the plot, others through the characters, and others still avoiding both and analyzing it for it’s ground laying for the zombie genre. I actually wrote a play by play of comments as I watched this one. Here’s the CliffsNotes version of my funniest comments:

"They're coming to get you Barbara." I KNOW THIS LINE. HAVE I SEEN THIS?

These zombies are fast and smart. Not quick moving, but they chase Barbara across an entire field, and have fast reflexes in punching glass (and knowing to do that) and moving objects with strength. They use tools like rocks and clubs and shovels. I find it interesting to learn that the initial baseline for zombies had them much smarter than we do now. Speaking of shovels, Karen stabbing her mom was more like Chucky than what I think of as modern zombies. Side note: I also loved that the majority of them were in suits like the recently buried.

The music and string instruments are excellent. As a classical musician for 13 years, those crescendos are amazing and well timed. The black and white also lends itself very nicely to dramatic lighting. While the plot may be slow, the cinematography is excellent. The radio is so much more interesting than the actual plot. It pulls me to snippets sampled from the movie in the song Aim for the Head by Creature Feature. I also didn’t find this movie scary. Yes, the zombies are ominous and lingering, but this movie was more a setup to what would later turn the ghouls into the zombies we know and love today.

My mom walked in here and there while my dad and I were watching, and she complained about the overacting and everything being heavy-handed. She also enlightened me to the radios obsession with radiation, it being attributed to worry from the Cold War.

This movie has such a misogynistic view of women. Barbara is useless, Judy is dumb, Helen is annoying. I understand trying to put all the different forms of coping and trauma into the plot, but they could have done the Barbara being in shock much better. I just wanted her to die at the start. The women were useless. But this movies was made back in the '60s, so it should be judged by the views of that time, not our modern ones. They could have shown the different stages of grief much better. My dad liked all the females except Barbara.

As for character, I loved Ben. Everyone loves Ben. However, I didn’t like Cooper. He was very necessary for conflict to move the plot along, but I still cheered when Ben shot him. Cooper was just annoying, especially after he says he’s never opening the basement door again, and then he uncovers it and emerges just a few minutes after.

I’m going to contradict everyone else here and say Ben isn’t the only likable character though. I also liked Tom and Judy even though they were incompetent. Even though Tom and Judy were an idiotic train wreck, I feel like they are the most relatable characters to how I would act in the situation: trying to keep the peace and worried about one another taking risks. However, I would not be an idiot and run out to the car like Judy. And the foreshadowing with her saying did it have to be him made it obvious he would die. I honestly found it funny when Tom’s gas pump use was like those commercials where someone smashes a hole in the wall trying to hammer a nail in.

The ending didn't do it for me. I liked that everyone died, but I would have liked it more if the zombies had gotten Ben. At least then he could have gone down in a blaze of glory. His death was anticlimactic. I left feeling unsatisfied after finishing the movie. Why didn’t he just call out? Zombies don’t talk, it’s the easiest way to show you are human. That reminded me of Train to Busan, where (SPOILERS) the little girls sings and that’s how she know she’s human.

My overall: I understandable why this movie is the baseline for all of the stereotypes of zombies, and it sets that stage very well, but the plot itself is much too slow and the ending is uneventful.

Dad: Not scary, but very good and ominous. I think you're too hard on it. And Johnnies car was my car when I was younger, so I like Johnnie. And I'm John. It's perfect.

My final recommendation: Watch Night of the Living Dead for studying the origin of the zombie genre, but watch Train to Busan to be entertained and scared.

Class Book Overview: Monsters (12/8/19)

Do Read:

***** The Call of Cthulhu (H.P. Lovecraft)
**** Snow (Ronald Malfi)
***  The Funeral (Richard Matheson)
*** Breeding Ground (Sarah Pinborough)
*** The Outsider (H.P. Lovecraft) 
*** Relic (Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child)
**   Pickman's Model (H.P. Lovecraft)
**   World War Z (Max Brooks)
**  The Yattering and Jack (Clive Barker)


Don't Read:

**    Rawhead Rex (Clive Barker)
**    30 Days of Night (Steve Niles)
**    Cycle of the Werewolf (Stephen King)
*      I Am Legend (Richard Matheson)

Movie Reviews -->

A Not-Very-Graphic Graphic Novel (The Yattering and Jack)

Now don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed this graphic novel. Yes, I read the graphic novel version of this story, not the just text version. The Yattering and Jack by Clive Barker is one of the few stories from this class, along with The Funeral and Breeding Ground, that I would recommend to friends to read. I found it an interesting take on a story, I found the characters interesting and well depicted, and at no point did I want to set the story down before I finished it. It was so short and funny. The artist did a beautiful job with this story, making a little demon I could see as a plushie on my bed, and Barker did a great job making a humorous little story about a demon who can't do the one thing he’s supposed to. I loved the idea that Jack was oblivious to everything, and I loved the twist at the end that he was doing that on purpose to infuriate the Yattering. I especially loved the ending, because I felt it was just the Yattering basically becoming Jack's pet in place of all the cats that he killed.

That being said, despite being a very entertaining train wreck, I don't think the story did what the author intended. I don't think that came across. I feel like we as the reader are supposed to sympathize with the poor, depressed, suicidal, horny demon trapped forever in Jack’s house. I didn't actually get that though. I figure that that's what the author tried for, but the whole time I was rooting for Jack. I feel like this story is a worse version of Paradise Lost, trying to make you sympathize with the bad guy. But one of the things I loved best about this story was not sympathizing with the Yattering, but laughing at his frustration.

I think this story, much like Rawhead Rex that we read previously by Barker, benefits from the addition of visual aids, such as being a graphic novel or a movie. I got much more pleasure out of the stories reading them in the visual form then the purely text forms. Let’s be real here, nothing really happened in the story, so the visuals are what we rely on for content. The author follows the normal try and fail over and over trope, and they are not very interesting attempts. For a graphic novel, this story wasn’t very graphic with the Yattering’s attempts to drive Jack insane. You would have thought they would have put their top notch demon on the job, but this demon falls flat because the toothpaste all over the bathroom didn’t work, boo hoo. This story should have skipped right to killing cats and began there, because even for a humor with horror story, nothing about this demon was horrifying.

Read the graphic novel, not just the text. You'll thank me later.