The Thing

Released: 1982
Horror
Starring: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, Keith David
Director: John Carpenter
Running Time: 109 terrifying minutes

The breakdown: My gosh this movie is soooooo good and sooooo scary.  Everything about is terrifying - the plot, the music, the idea of it.  I dare you to watch it alone in the dark if you've never seen it before.  A team of scientists in the Antarctic realize they are being killed off one by one by an ancient alien that becomes whoever it just killed.


I love this movie!  It took me a long long time to be able to have the guts to watch it, but it was worth it.
A large team of scientists that live at an isolated lab in Antarctica find a helicopter chasing after a sled dog outside their camp.  They watch as the people in the helicopter, who are Norwegian, and don't speak English, shoot after the dog, trying to kill it.  Instead of succeeding, the helicopter crashes, and the American team have no idea what was going on.  Soon the sled dog is taken in by the dog caretaker and put in where he has his team of dogs.  The new sled dog is suddenly revealed to be an alien and can take over whatever form it likes, human, or animal.
In a grizzly discovery in the dog kennel the team sees this was no ordinary dog and that they have to kill it.  The team sees that this Thing will take over all of them if they can't stop it and for most of the movie it does take most of the Americans.  Kurt Russell plays a helicopter pilot who leads the team on a small investigation mission to find out what they can about the alien.  They discover the Norwegians excavation site in the snow....It's a huge alien spaceship buried in deep snow.  They decide it's buried so deep it must've been there for a long long time.  They go to the Norwegians lab/camp site and try to find out as much as they can, but things are hazy.  They figure the team found the ship and was trying to learn about it.  They must've opened it up and found the body of what they thought was a dead alien species, but obviously it wasn't dead.
Wilford Brimley plays the pathologist who discovers that if they don't kill the Thing it will take over the entire planet within weeks.  He becomes paranoid that all the others have already been replaced with impostors and wants to kill all of them.  They have to isolate him in a separate room outside of the camp to protect themselves and him.
This was just such a well done film that stands up to even today's special effects and scary factor.  One of my all time scariest movies to watch, the mere idea of being trapped with a whole bunch of people that may or may not be who they were yesterday really messes with your mind and makes you question what would you do in that situation and who could you trust?

I only recently discovered that this film is a remake of another film which was an adaptation of a novella from 1938!
Clarify:
John W. Campbell Jr. wrote a science fiction novella titled Who Goes There? in 1938.
In 1973, it was voted as one of the best science fiction novellas ever written.
The first film adaptation (which really sounds like it changed up the story a bit) is
The Thing from Another World released in 1951.
The second film version (which sticks much closer to the original story) is this movie version I'm reviewing, The Thing, released in 1982.
Lastly, just released this year (2011) is a prequel to The Thing from 1982 confusingly also titled The Thing.  Why didn't they just call it The Beginning of the Thing? or The Thing: Begins?  Would've been better and less confusing.  Anyway, it is not a remake, it's a prequel.  I'm assuming it's the Norwegian team discovering the space ship and the alien and at some point it catches up to the beginning of The Thing where we see in this film I'm reviewing, the helicopter and the sled dog chase and crash.
According to what I've read the producers were smart enough to say that The Thing of 1982 is a classic and that there's no sense in remaking it.  For once, they got it right.  Like I say, the only complaint I have is that they should've titled it different than The Thing.

5 out of 5 movie stubs for this movie being one of the scariest ever made.  The music, acting, plot, special effects, and perfect little details make this movie be able to stand the test of time and it never looks cheesy, fake, or dated.  What an amazing job John Carpenter did to make sure he didn't put any elements in the film that make it look stuck in the 80's.  It's gotta be a real challenge to do this effectively.
Watch it if you haven't!