Well, just back from The Thing '11 and, sad to report, it was fucking dreadful.
Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful.
Where Carpenter's remake original (sic) was all about a gradual sense of creeping menace, paranoia and escalating levels of insanity, as bodies split apart and spider's legs sprouted from human heads before scuttling along the floor, this one is about as subtle as a friction burn.
See, we have the prelude (about ten minutes), then the 'getting the new bods to Antarctica' bit (about ten minutes), then the monster emerges, and everything goes fucking nuts. The volume cranks up to 12, people shout and scream a lot, a CGI monster wibbles about on screen a bit.
Then it ends.
Talking of the monster, gone are the super-cool prosthetics and stretchy rubber nastiness, to be replaced with pixel perfect graphics, that dreaded lack of gravity and the overriding sense that it's not really there.
Seriously, it looks shit.
The cast are as bland as potato flavour crisps and the whole experience was so crushingly dull I fell asleep several times, only to be awoken by a crashing thump of music as something 'scary' took place and, frankly, I'd preferred to have stayed asleep.
The only moment of pleasure came as the end credits rolled, and not for the obvious gag factor, but because it was at this point that Carpenter's majestic score kicked in, and the set-up for the opening sequences in the 80's version was played out.
Other than that, a total waste of space.
Bloody awful.
2 out of 5
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