John Carpenter can be hit or miss on some of the things he’s done in his career. Vampires may be a good case in point. In his version of The Thing, remade from Howard Hawks’ 1950’s classic, he doesn’t focus on the creature as much as the relationship between the men in the camp, and how the paranoia starts to creep in the group, as they try to figure out who may or may not be infected by the creature. I might have jumped ahead of some people who haven’t seen it, but just to briefly recap for those few w...o have missed this:

An American crew working in the Arctic circle encounter a Norwegian crew who are frantically shooting at a dog that is running to the camp. The Americans defends themselves as soon as one of the men is hit, and the Norwegians are killed. The Americans take the dog in, but they also go out to the Norwegian camp to find out just what exactly spooked them so much. They find a camp littered with bodies, along with something that was thawed out by the group before they were brutally killed. From that point, various members of the group get infected and plucked off one at a time. But what made this one maybe a bit scarier than most was Carpenter’s ability to create enough of a dynamic between the men, and that most of them were fleshed out enough to the point where you understand how they work together. And the cast is very able, from older members Blair and Copper (Wilford Brimley and Richard Dysart, respectively), to younger members Childs (Keith David, Armageddon) and Palmer (David Clennon, From the Earth to the Moon), all held together by the film’s star (and frequent Carpenter leading man) Kurt Russell (Dark Blue), who plays MacReady.