Hogan Reviews

Time to end the mini-Halloween Thing with the reason for it in the first place: The Thing from 1982. It was a film I watched at some point in the 90s when I was an age that meant I shouldn’t have been watching it and due to that some of the scenes with the practical effects scared the hell out of me, and those are always the horror films that stick with you as an adult. I saw the 4K release of this pop up a while ago and here we are, in 2026, time to watch The Thing again safe in the knowledge that unlike a certain prequel we looked at yesterday, this one still stands the test of time even before re-watching it.

The film opens up with a helicopter pursuing a dog across the snowy wastes of Antarctica, the dog soon making it to a US research station and as the helicopter lands the Americans, not understanding the Norwegian man waving a gun at them, shoot him dead in self-defence, and the helicopter pilot soon explodes along with the chopper due to a grenade mishap, adding to the confusion. The US helicopter pilot, RJ MacReady (Kurt Russell), and a Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) head off to the Norwegian camp and find, among other things, the frozen remains of what looks like a human with two heads and generally malformed. They take it back to their base where the biologist, Blair (A. Wilford Brimley), discovers it has a set of regular human organs. As this is happening the newly arrived dog is kennelled with the other dogs, who immediately start growling in distrust at it, and with good cause as it’s revealed to be a Thing and starts producing tentacles and absorbing the other dogs into it. Everyone rushes to the kennels and MacReady torches the dog-blob, but as everyone begins to come to terms with everything they find the Norwegian data on the crashed spacecraft and pop over to have a look. As they do Blair runs a simulation that shows if The Thing were to reach a populated area it could spread across the globe in months.

Kurt Russell is a movie made in the 80s is a sure-fire win! … Going by the ones I’ve seen anyway. (Just thought I’d cover my back just in case there’s an infamously bad one or something…)

After a crew member called Bennings (Peter Maloney) gets Thinged and Blair sabotages all methods of escape for the betterment of mankind and gets locked in a tool shed for it, paranoid begins to run high. Copper suggests a blood test to determine who is a Thing and who isn’t but soon the blood storage is destroyed, leading to yet more paranoia. MacReady takes control but when his torn clothes are found away from him people begin to suspect him so he’s left out in a snow storm but not willing to accept his fate he soon breaks back into the building and starts brandishing dynamite as a threat. A crew member called Norris (Charles Hallahan) then suddenly dies to a heart attack but in an all-time classic scene that you’ve probably seen clipped somewhere Dr. Copper tries to defibrillate him only for Norris’ chest to turn into a giant mouth and bite his arms off. MacReady torches the Norris-Thing but it detaches its head and tries to flee before that is similarly destroyed. This shows that the Things are somehow sentient in each cell of whatever it assimilates, giving them an idea of a test that can ‘out’ any more Things that may be around…

MacReady burns something… Sorry, MacReady burns a Thing, that’s the one.

I can’t stress enough how great this film is at being both a tense look at humans mentally breaking and being a visual and practical effects horror showcase. The isolated setting, the direction from John Carpenter and the performances from all involved just add to it, it’s a classic “all things (no pun intended) just come together” films.

Overall Thoughts:

A decapitated head with fleshy spider legs. … Not really anything else to say there…

The Thing, often called “John Carpenter’s The Thing”, deserves every letter of every word of praise it gets. Tense atmosphere, great acting, directing and of course amazing practical effects that still stun and disturb in 2026 as much as they did in 1982. An easy recommendation to anyone looking for a horror movie, a sci-fi movie, or just a good movie in general (so long as they don’t mind disturbing imagery…)

Everyone gives blood samples and each sample is burned with a wire, and one sample of blood recoils from the heat, showing it came from a Thing, so the man in question is soon killed when he transforms and tries to escape. They realise that they need to test Blair as well so they leave a man called Childs (Keith David) in charge of guarding the base while they go to the tool shed but they find he has dug down and began to create some small version of the Thing flying saucer, which they destroy but upon returning to the surface they find Childs missing and that the power generator has been destroyed, meaning with no heat they’ll all freeze to death. MacReady theorises that The Thing is trying to hibernate by freezing itself, like how it survived all those millennia under the ice, so the remaining crew lay some explosives to try and destroy the entire base to make sure it doesn’t get back to civilisation.

“I think you’re a Thing!” “I’m not.” “Okay then.” … Man, classic dialogue! The tension!

Blair arrives and given the whole saucer building side project is unsurprisingly a Thing, and after killing another crew member he transforms into a giant blob-like Thing that breaks the chain of explosives they’d all laid but MacReady uses dynamite to trigger it anyway, destroying it and the base. MacReady survives and sits next to one of the burning remains for heat, during which Childs returns and claims he got lost in a snow storm chasing Blair. Each of them distrusts the other but MacReady breaks out a bottle of Scotch as they both acknowledge that they’re minutes away from freezing to death anyway, so it doesn’t really matter…