- Director: John Carpenter
- Writers: Bill Lancaster, John W. Campbell Jr.
- Stars: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, Keith David
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 49 Minutes
- Link: https://amzn.to/35x2e2p
This week, we’re looking at the Horror Guys’ all-time favorite horror films, where each of the guys pick his top two favorite well-known horror films. This one is Brian’s #1 all-time horror favorite.
Synopsis
We begin with a shot set in space. A flying-saucer spins out of control, crashing on planet Earth as credits roll.
We then open in Antarctica, Winter, 1982. A Norwegian helicopter flies along, shooting at a dog that runs beneath it on the ground. The dog runs to the United States Science Base #4. The helicopter starts throwing grenades at the dog, which gets the men on the ground pretty excited. The helicopter explodes, and the Norwegian starts shooting at the dog, who is standing behind the men. Garry, the base commander, kills the Norwegian. No one has any explanation for what happened.
The radio isn’t getting through to anyone right now. Doc wants to fly to the Norwegian base to see what happened, and MacReady flies him there in their helicopter. As the base settles in and gets back to work, the dog roams the base.
Doc and Macready explore Norway’s base. They find bodies and remains of a fire. They find a block of ice with nothing inside. It looks like the Norwegians dug up something and let it out of the ice. Outside, they find a weird pile of bodies that have been burned, but they don’t look quite… right.
The dog watches as the two men bring back one of the bodies. Clark, who take care of the base dogs, lets the new dog, who is uninjured, in with theirs. Up until this point, the dog has had freedom to go through the whole base. The dog enters the cage and immediately starts scaring the other dogs, until it splits open and shoots tentacles everywhere. Clark goes to investigate the noise and finds a monster in the cage.
Niles comes in and kills it with the flame thrower. Blair examines the thing from the cage, and determines that it was trying to copy the other dogs. They were lucky enough to find it before it was able to finish. Blair starts looking at Clark funny, since Clark was alone with the dog for a couple of hours.
They watch the Norwegian’s video tapes and find out where they were digging. They fly there and see that there was a huge flying saucer buried under the ice. It’s been there for 100,000 years, at least. The creature the Norwegians found crashed there long ago, crawled out of the ship, and froze to death until it was dug up recently. Blair estimates that there’s a 75% chance that someone in their base has been infected. If this thing got back to civilization it would be world-ending.
Windows and Bennings put the remains in the storeroom. Windows goes to get something, and the thing starts moving, with Bennings alone in the room. Blair has locked himself in his lab, isolating himself from the others. Windows walks in as Bennings is halfway changed. They chase “Bennings” out into the snow and burn him. Then they burn all the rest of the remains.
Blair smashes the helicopter, tractor, dogs, and the radio so no one can leave; he wants to keep the thing from spreading. They lock Blair in the tool shed to keep him from hurting anyone else. Blair warns MacReady to “watch Clark. Watch him close.” Doc thinks he can come up with a blood test to see who’s human and who isn’t.
There’s lots of arguing and fighting as they start to panic. Doc, Garry, and Clark are the prime suspects, so they are sedated and tied up. Fuchs finds MacReady’s tattered long Johns outside and assumes he’s been changed. Meanwhile, Blair says he’s feeling much better now, and can he come back inside? They soon find Fuchs’s body burned outside.
Norris has a heart attack, and Doc starts working on him. When tries to use the shock paddles, Norris’s belly grows teeth and kills the doc. MacReady fries it, but the head separates, grows legs, and tries to crawl away. They fry it as well.
Finally, they draw everyone’s blood and try something. They burn the blood with a hot wire, assuming that the blood will react to heat. After testing some of the men, Palmer reveals himself to be one of them. Palmer kills Windows while the others mostly scream. MacReady shoots it with his flame thrower and finishes it off with dynamite. Everyone else passes the test.
They go out to the tool shed to give Blair the test. Blair’s been busy. Beneath the shed, they find a tunnel, and inside the tunnel they find a small spaceship under construction. Blair’s building a way home. “Where was he trying to go? Any place but here.”
Childs runs off into the night. MacReady says the thing just wants to freeze now. When the rescue team finds them in the spring, they’ll take it home. All it has to do is sleep in the snow until then. None of them are getting out of this alive. MacReady, Nauls, and Garry set fire to everything. Blair kills Garry and then attacks the other two, but they kill it with dynamite. We get to see the “big” creature, with the heads of dogs and men and lots of tentacles. MacReady blows up everything.
MacReady comes across Childs outside, who claims to have been chasing Blair. It’s just the two of them now. Are they both human? Probably not, but we don’t know. They’ve lost all shelter and supplies, so they’re both going to freeze to death very soon. At least until the rescue party comes in the spring…
Commentary
A big part of the atmosphere here are the sounds of the creature. It’s part howl, part scream, and part alien. The way the characters react to the dead bits of the creature, it must really smell terrible. It’s very effective. The soundtrack is excellent as well, as distinctive as any other John Carpenter movie. Much as in yesterday’s review of Alien, each of the characters has a known name and a very distinctive personality. We see enough of each character to get to know their personalities a little.
The scene where Norris kills Doc, almost immediately followed by the blood-test-on-the-couch scene is a really suspenseful thrill ride, and and these scenes just make the film for me.
The creature effects are really good, there are a lot of them, and after 38 years, they still hold up really, really well. The growing paranoia, the claustrophobia, the possible end-of-the-world scenario, and just the omnipresent danger of living in Antarctica makes this one of the most effective horror films ever.