It is my curse that the people who like me best are the ones who also hate horror movies. You would think that you'd need a solid basis in the horror classics and be fairly desensitized just to be in the same room as me, wouldn't you? Apparently not. It was my task to get Rob to watch this movie with me. He had never seen it and resisted my attempts to make him. The only reason he finally caved was because he saw that it was from the year we were born and (wrongly) figured the special effects would be laughable.
I didn't tell him that Rob Bottin was a fucking genius and ahead of his time. These creature effects are fantastic and they still hold up fairly well, which I attribute to them being practical (i.e. latex and foam) rather than CGI. You just can't get the depth of gore with CGI. Granted, some of the movement is a little mechanical but that's forgivable when the creature is trying to eat people. Honestly, without the FX, this is just a locked room mystery.
The guys at Antarctic Research Station #31 haven't had radio contact in a week before their boring ass sojourn at the world's end is interrupted by a helicopter filled with Norwegians chasing a dog across the ice. The helicopter blows up due to a grenade accident and the Americans are forced to shoot the remaining guy after he wings one of their crew. MacCready (Kurt Russell), the American pilot, and Copper (Richard Dysart) head over to the Norwegian camp and find it gutted and burning. Now completely creeped out, they head home and start piecing together the mystery. See, the Norwegians had dug up something out in the ice, which is why we should all leave Antarctica the fuck alone. When was the last time you heard of something awesome happening there? Never, that's when. Anyway, they put the dog in with the others and that's when shit gets real.
Alien. Shape-shifting alien, to be precise. It's able to perfectly mimic its host after assimilating it. In the movie, that means covering it with purple slime and stabbing it with a dozen tentacles. So, of course, it gets away and then comes an hour of suspense-building where the damn thing could be anyone and everyone goes a little stir-crazy and paranoid trying to figure out who.
Honestly, this is one of John Carpenter's best horror movies. (My personal favorite is his Vampires but I freely admit that one is craptacular.) The original Halloween, this one, and The Fog are definitely the top 3.
Rob was not a fan but I'm working on him. He'll come around.
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