Critically panned at the time of its release, John Carpenter s The Thing has rightly gone on to become one of the most celebrated sci-fi horror efforts ever made now newly restored by Arrow Video in a stunning 4K transfer supervised by Carpenter and director of photography Dean Cundey. After two men in a Norwegian helicopter flew into their camp trying to kill a single dog, the crew of a U.S. Antarctic research station encounters something from beyond the stars. An alien creature capable of infecting and perfectly imitating any living breathing organism. With any number of their team infected by the creature, helicopter pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell) and the survivors of the station must find a way of identifying and killing each imitation before it’s too late. When John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing premiered in 1982 and was mostly rejected by both movie-going audiences and critics, an afterlife on home video was all but inevitable. Beginning with CED, Laserdisc, VHS, and DVD, the film, like several that John Carpenter made that weren’t fully appreciated upon their initial releases, built an avid following, with many in that following proclaiming it to be “the best film that John Carpenter ever made” and/or “the best monster movie ever made”. Wisely, this version aims to stake out its own corner of the story taking place mere days before MacReady and Copper find the burnt-out Norwegian outpost. The opening may borrow a bit too heavily from 2004's Alien vs Predator for my liking, but it's a serviceable setup. In a nice touch, some of the characters and story beats are practically lifted right from John Campbell’s original story Who Goes There - or Frozen Hell if you're in for the full manuscript version. Even Ulrich Thomsen’s Dr. Halvorson plays like an ode to Robert Cornthwaite’s Dr. Carrignton from Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World. There are new twists to the creature’s biology and methods for detection in human form that don’t repeat what Carpenter and his crew did so effectively in 1982.

Vintage Product Reel – Contains A Condensed Version Of The Film With Additional Footage Not In The Film (SD) As it freezes in the ice today, I find the 2011 The Thing to just be okay. I didn’t love it in 2011and I don’t feel much differently about it twelve years later. It’s distracting enough to be entertaining but not good enough to be something I pull off the shelf very often. I appreciate its ambition, I liked some of its ideas, and I liked the main cast of Winstead, Thomsen, and Joel Edgerton. I especially enjoyed this film’s suggestion that someone taken by the creature may not fully be aware they’re no longer human. There are a lot of other great elements in play but something failed to glue together to form a genuinely fitting prequel. Until we see anything officially official from Blumhouse about their adaptation of Frozen Hell, the 2002 PS2 and Xbox video game (and the Dark Horse comics if you can find them) remains the best follow-up to John Carpenter’s classic.

The Thing is technically not a remake in the sense of the word, but more of a re-imagining of the original short story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr., which Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World was based upon. That original film wound up having not much to do with the actual story, going so far as having the alien just being reminiscent of Frankenstein’s monster. While it worked in 1951 and is still heralded as a sci-fi horror classic, Carpenter’s update eclipses it.

It also deeply hurt John Carpenter, changing the trajectory of his career and, more or less, forcing him to do other types of films, but with less independence and less creative control from then on in. Today, it’s seen as a masterpiece, staying true the tagline framed atop its theatrical poster “The ultimate in alien terror.”John Carpenter’s The Thing arrives on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray with an excellent native 4K transfer with HDR10 grading. This is a film with a very passionate fanbase who needs to own this in every new and hopefully better version possible. I’m one of those, and with that devotion comes some heated discussion about benefits and detriments to any release. While few would argue that the 2008 disc lands anywhere near the top, the discussion between Scream Factory’s 2016 release and Arrow’s 2017 release certainly was tense, to say the least. Every release of this film has had some plusses and minuses often drawing some hard lines with fans. Over the years, star Kurt Russell and master of horror John Carpenter have teamed up on a multitude of films (Big Trouble in Little China and Escape from New York to name a few) but of all their collaborations, 1982 s horror/sci-fi amalgalm The Thing surely tops the list. Arrow Video has restored the celebrated sci-fi horror movie “The Thing” in stunning 4K quality and carefully wrapped it in this tantalizing SteelBook® edition. The icy details get an interesting play from the metal canvas and fits perfectly with the dark blue tones in the artwork. You can’t keep a good gory shape-shifting creature buried in the ice for long. Almost thirty years after John Carpenter unleashed his beast The Thing, Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. delivers an interesting and fairly entertaining prequel that is unfortunately undermined by too much source familiarity and rushed CGI work. To be fair there are some smart pieces to this film with strong performances from the cast and it dovetails into the 1982 original, but there’s some measure of authenticity missing.