The Thing From Another World in Mothership

I don't think anyone has done this exactly, but I think it's time to do a series on adopting various famous monsters to the Mothership rules. Let's start with one of the greatest of all time: the Thing!

Love this Alt Poster!

The Thing's key traits:

An alien creature that is in fact a cell colony with the ability to absorb and replicated/replace the cells of any other creature, taking on their appearance, abilities and even their identity. 

The Thing's original appearance is difficult to discern, and it may have no consistent appearance (even the description of what it might have looked like, with three eyes, could just be the current form it was mimicking).

The Thing is intelligent, and presumably retains knowledge from prior assimilated victims. This includes the ability to craft and pilot something as sophisticated as a starship.

When absorbing a creature, it takes the Thing about 45 minutes to completely convert a human sized target into its own. 

The Thing exhibits a weakness to fire, though this could be better described as "it burns like anything else." But due to its malleable, ever-changing nature and ability to remember and mimic any life form it has previously absorbed, the Thing can sustain and recover from most damage with only modest initial impact. Fire and energy damage that can destroy it at the cellular level is most effective at destroying the Thing.

The Stats for a piece of the Thing depend heavily on what it is mimicking and/or what sort of amalgamation it forms in the moment. Several stat blocks will be provided to reflect different sized/focused forms of the Thing as a result. 

Special Qualities: The Thing has these traits in all forms:

Infectious. All Things have an infectious trait, and skin exposure to the Thing leads to assimilation when exposed. PCs who take any damage or come into any skin contact with some portion of the creature, even at the cellular level, must make a BODY[-] check or they are infected and have 45 minutes to assimilation into a Humanoid Thing.

Malleable and Resilient. The Thing takes damage from kinetic weaponry, but it rapidly heals, repairs and restores function. It regains 1 Wound and equivalent health every minute, and as a special feature may heal even sooner (per combat turn). It is unable to use this feature if it takes fire or energy damage for one minute, and is "dead" if it loses all wounds from such damage, with only a slight chance a portion of its mass survives.

Head Crab Thing: C: 25%, 1D10 DMG, I: 50%, AP 1D5-1, W1(10) - may have 1D5 additional appendage features (EX: 1-crab legs, 2-extendable tongue with a grasping feature, 3-eye stalks, 4-spits acid, 5-whip tail with poison barb)

Humanoid Thing: C 50%, 2D10 DMG, I: 60%, AP 1D5-1, W2(20) - may have 1D5 additional surprise features (EX: 1-claw arm, 2-head splits for attacking maw that does 4D10 DMG, 3-infecting tendrils, 4-chest maw (4D10 DMG), 5-exotic eyesight); Special: indistinguishable from the humanoid it mimics until exposed.

Monstrous Form Large Thing: C 75%, 4D10 DMG, I: 90%, AP 5+1D5, W3(30) - will have !D5 additional features (EX: 1-multiple limbs (1D4) for extra attacks, 2-infectious tentacles, 3-vomiting infectious attack, 4-wings (if local atmosphere and gravity support it), 5-spines (50% chance they shoot))

Exposing The Thing: In the film, it is revealed that the Thing's individual cells are engrained with a survival instinct, so jamming a hot wire into blood samples reveals what is real and what is imitation blood. Creative PCs may find other interesting ways to reveal imitations in their midst. For example, The Thing often has an exterior form that mimics the appearance of the human it just assimilated, but may have an internal morphology that hides appendages intended for attack or other special purposes. An x-ray may reveal these internal differences.

Thirty One Days of Horror: The Thing (1982)

Day Nine: The Thing (1982)

Yesterday I reviewed the newer movie that presented itself as an immediate prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing. Today, we return to the 1982 classic that stands out in my mind as the best horror/SF crossover (next to Alien) of all time.

What can be said about this movie that hasn't been said before? If you've somehow never seen The Thing go find it and watch it. Now. I'll wait, blog will be here when you return. You're in for a real treat: a film which managed to do poorly at the box office on release, but took off when it went to home video, and went from being a cult classic to a recognized top film in its special genre. Hell, it's just an awesome film all around.

Seen it? Okay, spoilers!

Rather than gush endlessly about it, saying things we all know about anyway (at least if you, like me, watch this film at least once a year religiously ...I'm going to list eleven reasons that The Thing deserves accolades for one of the best horror films of all time. We'll do this list countdown style (in no special order):

11. Ennio Morricone did the fantastically moody soundtrack. This was an exception to the norm for Carpenter, who usually did his own soundtracks.

10. It's based on the excellent John W. Campbell story "Who Goes There?" and is a better spiritual adaptation than the first effort (Thing from Another World, 1952).

9. John Carpenter knows how to do characters really well for this sort of genre. This is important; the building tension and mistrust is easy to follow in this film, easy to see as it percolates to the surface precisely because these characters take on a life of their own with just a few well-done establishing scenes. No, you don't "care" for any of them....but you know who they are, and you can see both how and why they go from comrades doing a job to a mess of paranoid individuals who don't know who to trust.

8. The special effects in this movie were outstanding, most by Rob Bottin. The FX still stand up to the test of time, and in fact when you watch the prequel and compare it is clear that the CGI effects, while very realistic, lack the raw, glistening, bloody reality of what the original film offers.



7. The film has a spiritual connection to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, for while it is not inherently aimed at Lovecraft, the principle of terrifying secrets and dangers to be unveiled beneath the Antarctic ice get their film realization here.

6. Adrienne Barbeau was in this film. She was! She voiced the chess computer.

5. Even watching this film 20+ times you can still have fun trying to figure out just when exactly the various victims of the thing were "changed."

4. Ask yourself why it was easier and more effective for the thing to design a small escape-saucer beneath the old shack, made from machine and helicopter parts. One might wonder why it didn't just...say....repair one of the helicopters, right? So what technology was next on the agenda for its creation? Loot the remnants of its ship? Or was the thing simply so advanced that simple helicopters were beyond its interest or understanding?

3. The Thing did get a prequel, of sorts. There was a video game in 2002 on the PS2 and Xbox. In the game sequel universe MacReady is alive and well and shows up at the very end to kill steal the super-thing boss. I suffered through this game being the Thing fan I am; it was a mixture of good ideas, poor implementation, and  crazy videogame logic, leaving one at once mildly satisfied to see a future take on what happened after the film and also disgusted that this sequel was delegated to a fair to middling computer game.

2. Childs is played by Keith David, who is of course known today as Mass Effect's Captain Anderson. Just about all the actors in this film are either known career actors or go on from here to develop a real career later on. There's almost no one in this film who isn't recognizable from other later works.

1. I loved that dog. How often anymore do you see such a disciplined dog on screen? It must have taken literally hours for them to get the dog/kennel/thing dog scene just right (the one where the Thing, disguised as a dog, is first put in the kennel). Seriously...it's pretty difficult to train a dog to squelch all the behavioral queues that come so naturally to canines in general. This extra bit made the dog that much more believable as being "something else."

So yeah, The Thing: A+++ from the Deathbat!

Thirty One Days of Horror: The Thing (2011)

Day Eight: The Thing (2011)

When The Thing premiered in theaters last year I was busy providing the husband-support role to my wife who was expected to give birth any second, and the idea of starting labor while in a theater or at a fine restaurant was always in the back of our minds. It was our first pregnancy, so we didn't know what to expect. As it turns out Marcus held out for a good month plus, but that did mean we avoided being out in public places for too long, especially theaters. Thus, I did not get to see the prequel to the movie that I generally regard as my favorite film of all time.

On the venn diagram* of horror and SF John Carpenter's The Thing is nestled square in the middle where horror and science fiction overlap. It is arguably the very definition of where these two meet, a sort of apex from which all other media cascades, and only Alien rightfully deserves a spot one step up from it. I, like many others who appreciate this genre, were skeptical that a new movie in the universe of The Thing, despite being something we've all wanted for going on thirty years now, was unlikely to be worthy. For one thing: Kurt Russell is a lot older than he was in 1982. For another thing, any sequel at this point wasn't going to have that special John Carpenter "something" that made so many fantastic movies in my youth.

The new film was written by Eric Heisserer and credits Jown W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" as its source, although technically the movie is an immediate prequel to the original film, and thus both movies are inspired by the same novella. Campbell's original story also inspired a 1951 film, "The Thing from another World," which was a bit looser in its interpretation of the story (though still worth watching for fans of vintage sci fi). The main protagonist of this film is Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a demure paleontologist with access to some very impressive fiber optic equipment for 1982 when she is first introduced. Kate is approached by Dr. Sander Halvorson, a rather righteous and indignant fellow who needs her to help extract something for him down in Antarctica. Yes, it seems the Norwegian research station in Antarctica got the word out that they have found something unusual.

The story moves from there to a fairly familiar retelling (or pre-telling) of the events that are hinted at in the original film, as we see just how the Norwegian station went from "find of the millennium" to dead Norwegians everywhere and a couple guys in a helicopter trying to kill a seemingly innocent dog.

In fact, the film does a remarkably good job of faithfully matching what happens in this film to the horrific detritus that is found in the original movie. I watched them back to back in chronological sequence, and it was actually very smooth, with only one "glitch" I was noticing, and even then it turns out that they had accounted for that. In fact they accounted for things I didn't even remember....and I've seen the original movie at least once a year for thirty years now (it's one of the few movies I watch every Halloween religiously).

Some examples of things that the prequel shows which are artifacts of the original film (spoiler alert, I guess? Has anyone not seen the original? So spoiler alert for the prequel...):

The axe buried in the wall and covered in blood.
The dead guy who slit his own throat (or was murdered).
The reason the storage area with the huge block of ice is in shambles (and how they extracted the Thing so neatly from the ice....or a least, how it got like that).
The twisted two-faced burned Thing body out front that MacReady and Doc haul back to their base in the original film.
The way that the space ship was exposed in its pit of ice (hint: it's not like the original implication that the Norwegians blew it up intentionally....this was the one bit I thought they messed up on, but when you watch the two in sequence it makes sense).
Exactly who the two guys in the helicopter were and of course why they were chasing the dog.



The movie does a competent job of building suspense and portaying the horrific events the Norwegians go through from start to finish. It's got a bounty of characters, most of whom are barely distinguishable from one another, unfortunately, although maybe if I was more in tune with Norwegian cinema I might be more familiar with some these actors. Unfortunately the film suffers for this a bit because while all the actors here are competent, there's no way they could hold up to the range of distinct actors that the original film showcased, and Carpenter's unique style with which he managed to portray the distinct personalities of each on film using subtle but effective "show don't tell" techniques.

The movie is also hampered a bit by the meticulous attention to detail that it engages in as a prequel. While it is fantastic to see every last gory inch of Norwegian base migrate from functional and healthy to frozen and gory exactly as it was in the original film, the transition necessarily means that they had to write a script which conformed to these boundaries. A useful exercise in highly structured storytelling, but of necessity limiting the creative freedom of the script writer. It also means that some of the tension so effective in the original film is simply missing here. These people trust each other a bit too much, through most of the film. Except Lars. Lars kicked ass.

The movie's creators did seem to realize that they needed some unique elements to their film beyond the faithful recreation of carnage. There's a few twists worth mentioning, which stand out (real spoilers here). Dr. Lloyd figures out an interesting way to detect a Thing which was not revealed in the original film but makes perfect sense here: when the thing replicates you, it remakes you perfectly, which means artificial imperfections (like tooth fillings) get pushed out. Later, the film indulges in a bit of exploration in the actual spacecraft itself, something that many of us wondered about from the original movie (which left the question unanswered on whether there was enough of the ship left to explore after it was blown up). I think the movie failed slightly here; for such a macabre quasi-Lovecraftian creature as the Thing, the ship was surprisingly mundane (even the Predator vessel from Predator 2 was more exotic). But hey, we get to find out exactly how they blew it up. Hint: the scene in the original from the Nordic video tapes of them planting charges....those were likely charges used to free up the ice block which contained the Thing itself, and not (as was originally intended) the charges used to free the ship from the ice.

One Fridge Logic moment: if the ship was functional enough to fire up and potentially even take off, then why was the Thing stranded in the first place? Maybe it was pilfering parts from the base to fix the vessel? What on earth could be useful to it to repair a starship, anyway? Probably the same stuff it was using to make the escape craft in the original, I guess (which I'll talk more about next review).

Watching these two movies back to back worked well, and made me appreciate how seamless the transition from one film to the next was. You feel a bit like you're watching one complete story, in which somewhere out there is Kate Lloyd, all by herself in a tractor, trying to make it to the nearest safe spot (and probably failing, unless they make a sequel) in a universe where a young Kurt Russel and Keith David could actually meet with her to make a third Thing movie.

Fun Fact! This was Keith David's third movie and the one which I think kickstarted his career. You may know him better as Captain Anderson in Mass Effect.

I really did enjoy this movie even if it lacked that extra special touch that made the original so staggeringly good. I'll give this one a big fat A. I watched on the same night as Pandorum...it was a good night for horror sci fi!



*On Blogtopia and forumland these days I noticed it is important and very hip, apparently, to refer to venn diagrams without ever demonstrating them.