The Thing [4K UHD]

John Carpenter’s classic remake of the thing is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. I love to catch this movie whenever it comes to theaters. My favorite scene is the interrogation when everyone is tied to chairs and they are testing each individual’s blood to see if they are part of the alien creature. It’s amazing to hear people scream in the audience because it may be their first time ever seeing the movie. I don’t know if any FILM has better practical effects that have held up over the years also, the performances in this movie are iconic, and the lines are very quotable. This is Kurt Russell’s best movie Halloween may be my favorite John Carpenter movie, but I have to admit that this is easily his crowning achievement. The 4K Blu-ray scan is very high-quality and I would recommend this to anybody.

Great movie. Looks great on 4k. Great price. Fast shipping.

Very good movie that just got a whole lot better with a 4k release. The audio is great as well. This movie holds up considering that it was feom the early 80's.

Here it is. The movie that has become my all-time favorite. It's John Carpenter's "The Thing".I've seen this movie so many times. I own it twice on DVD, I own it on Blu-Ray and I even have a copy on the now defunct HD-DVD format. I regret not seeing it in the theaters back in 1982. I don't know why I didn't go. I was certainly old enough to appreciate it. Instead, I saw "E.T.". I got swept up in happy little alien fever. I went with the crowd. All I had to do was wander over to a differnet screen and watch Carpenter's creation in all its paranoid glory. Sigh...As with all good movies, music, or books, I experience something new every time I view it. I keep trying to piece together how the Thing spread throughout the camp. I keep looking for clues. Like when Blair performs an autopsy on the recently roasted Thing. While he's presenting his thoughts on what the Thing is, he absent-mindedly taps his pencil eraser on the steaming carcass, crosses his arms and brings the pencil eraser perilously close to his mouth. Then he makes a talking point by waving the pencil in the air and ever so briefly...it touches his lip! Did he infect himself? Is it too late?!?!? Has the Thing spread itself to Blair?!?! These kinds of moments fill the movie. It so suspenseful and so paranoid. And the isolation is torture. You know they all have nowhere to go. All those nameless men. Well, they aren't nameless, it's just that it's hard to remember them all. And the strange thing about it is, we still seem to care about them. I think that's because Carpenter has done such a masterful job of building the suspense through threat and isolation that we can't help but subconciously put ourselves into their places.There are so many great scenes. The opening helicopter-chases-dog scene. The horror of finding the Thing in the dog pen. The death and subsequent transformation of Norris. Wow! Is it gory! And in this particular case, I think the gore is absolutely necessary. That's kind of the knock on this film. The gore has been classified as extreme. And it is. But this is a story about such a faceless, out-of-this-world beast that it all seems so appropriate. And those effects. I don't think I need to say anymore than others have already posited about the very special practical effects by Rob Bottin. They have to be the best I've ever seen.Then there's the "blood test" scene. All of the men at the Antarctic station volunteer to give a blood sample and then have it tested, while tied to chairs, to see if it reveals which of them are actually the "Thing". One by one, a heated copper wire is placed into a petri dish of blood from each one of the men. Seeing the smoke rise from the wire when its touched to the dish of blood brings some relief. Will the next dish be Thing-free? You'll have to watch it and see for yourself. The setup and execution of this scene is one of the most intense and frightening things I've ever watched.I am very happy that this film has found it's place thanks to Home Video. It's now considered a Horror/Sci-Fi classic. It is without a doubt my favorite Horror movie, perhaps my favorite monster flick and quite possibly my top SciFi feature. It's that good.I don't understand why this Blu-Ray doesn't contain all of the extra features that are on the Collector's edition DVD. I think the "Making of" documentary is added as a picture-in-picture offering, but there's plenty of room for all of the other extras as well.

Doesn't get better than 4k!

Classic Horror. Miss movies like this.

I love this movie from 1982. It's the best out of the thing series. If you watch anyone of the movies this one is the one to watch. 10 out of 10

My first encounter with John Carpenter's The Thing was back around November of 2001, where I only saw a snippet of the movie on TNT. Just my luck, I tuned in at one of the most gruesome scenes in the movie. Even at the age of 14, when I was more seasoned to creepy films, still found it too disturbing to follow through the rest of the movie, and just tuned in to something else (probably The Simpsons). I wouldn't come into contact with this movie for another eight years.In September of 2009, I went to the nearby Family Video to look for a good movie to watch. I found a copy of The Thing at the store, and looked at the description of it, and thought to myself "Hey, I remember watching a bit of this a while back." For a mere dollar, I rented The Thing and I don't regret it at all.STORYThe Thing is set in Antarctica 1982 (when this movie was released), and an American research team is shocked when a Norwegian scientist lands his helicopter nearby and starts shooting at a runaway dog. Due to a language barrier and overall panicked state the Norwegian is in, he can't properly communicate to the Americans, accidentally blows up his helicopter, and shoots one of the Americans in the leg. The Norwegian ends up getting shot and the American research team takes in the dog that was fleeing from the helicopter. Things start to turn awry when MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Doc Copper (Richard Dysart) investigate the charred remains of the Norwegian research facility and bring back a mutated, humanoid corpse to their facility.CHARACTERSWhat I think helps make The Thing such a great movie is that the characters feel like real people. The cast is a group of men stuck in a research outpost in the Antarctic, and they certainly act like people who've been stuck in a frozen, confined place for a long time. They're not really bad guys, but they're certainly not people that are totally likeable. A lot of them are cranky, probably from being stuck in the same place out in a frozen continent. Palmer (David Clennon) sticks out as the most awkward of the bunch, since you see him smoking marijuana and rambling about some government conspiracies. While MacReady steals the show, Childs (Keith David) is probably my favorite since David is such a great actor and does a great job a playing a man with a sense of reason and is a tad against MacReady when he claims authority in the group.My only real grip with them is that they seem pretty unprofessional for a group of government researchers in the Antarctic, but this could also be that they're in a bout of downtime allotted by the government.It's also worth noting that Wilford Brimley plays Blair, a medical scientist who loses his mind in the wake of these Things taking over the crew of the research outpost.HORROR/SPECIAL EFFECTSBecause The Thing is a sci-fi/horror hybrid, the horror element is extremely important. Thankfully, with director John Carpenter and special effects artist Rob Bottin working on this movie, The Thing has some of the best horror you can get in this genre.Thanks to excellent story and character development, a great location to set up the movie, and amazingly creepy monsters, this movie is replete with natural feelings of isolation, tension, and dread. Being stuck in a research center in the middle of Antarctica, not knowing that someone else in your research team might actually be a nefarious, invasive alien lifeform, this will certainly creep anyone out.Given the premise of alien lifeforms taking over other lifeforms with grizzly results, I can easily see how this movie was extremely influential to Visceral Games when they created the Dead Space series.Rob Bottin has to be one of the best special effects artists that ever worked in cinema. His animatronic monsters in this movie are some of the creepiest you'll ever see because aside from the fact that they look so disgusting, they look very realistic, too. It's crazy that this movie came out in 1982, yet the various Thing monsters in this movie look better than some of the best CGI effects available today.I don't want to give away too much of the scary parts in this movie, but one of the creepy scenes that sticks in my head the most has to be near the beginning, when that dog that escaped from the Norwegian scientists mutates in the dog pen and turns into a sheer abomination that doesn't look like any living creature of this Earth.It's funny to note that some of the materials used to bring these special effects to life, because according the documentary that came with the collector's edition DVD of this movie, Rob Bottin used a bunch of K-Y jelly to give the mutated creatures a slimy, greasy look.STORYTELLINGCarpenter was at the top of his game when directing this movie, and like any director worth his salt, relies on the "show, don't tell" principle of storytelling. Only the necessary amounts of dialogue are used to give background to certain things. What really struck out at me was the scene where Blair was researching the Thing cells, and you see a computer screen depicting highly-pixelated images of the Thing cells taking over the dog cells (taken from the mutated dog's corpse) and spreading to the others. Not a single word was used to explain how the Thing cells work in this scene, yet it gave us all the information we needed to understand the Things.SOUNDTRACKEnnio Morricone's compositions in this movie are some of the best music compositions for horror motion pictures you'll ever hear. Morricone departs from his background in using a whole orchestra and uses primarily electronic keyboards to create the music here. The minimal nature of most of the tracks in the movie's score is perfect for the chilling atmosphere here, since it enhances the said atmosphere and imagery instead of distracting you away from it. The music here is so great, I actually bought an MP3 copy of Morricone's score for this movie.MATURE CONTENTThis is not a movie for the kids to see. There's a good deal of profanity, some drug use, and intensely creepy monsters and gore. You see a dog mutate (with plenty of gore coming from the dog as it mutates) and attack other dogs after it mutates. There's also a scene where a man gets his arms bitten off by one of the Things and it mutates into something really ugly that I can't describe in words, you have to see it for yourself.There's also a scene of a slain dog with an ax embedded into its neck. I know that some people are pretty sensitive to seeing animals getting killed in movies, so if this is a concern for you, you may not like that scene or of the dogs getting attacked by one of the Things.FINAL WORDIn John Carpenter's filmography, I think The Thing is his crowning jewel. If you love horror movies, this is a mandatory movie to have in your library.I should close in saying that sometimes, there is justice in the movie world. The Thing was originally not received well when it first came out, but thankfully it became a hit on video and has now gotten the "classic" status it totally deserves.