CINEMISSES! The Thing (1982)

In this episode, Matt and Tug delve into the blood and goo-soaked details of John Carpenter's  1982 gorefest, The Thing, focusing on the film's practical effects, the influences behind its creation, and the themes of paranoia and transformation that shine through this shapeshifting tale. They discuss the artistry of practical effects versus CGI, the film's unique approach to horror, and the pivotal moments that heighten tension and suspense. The conversation also touches on the sheer number of flamethrowers we see, while raising a collective eyebrow at the amount of assumptions these "scientists" make about the nature of the evil they are up against. Oh and Jed – you're a good dog buddy. 

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Transcript

Matt Loehrer (00:00)
hey buddy.

Tug McTighe (00:01)
Hello, sir.

Matt Loehrer (00:02)
If you had told me that this week's movie was going to be a remake of a 1950 sci-fi monster movie that was itself inspired by a 1930s pulp magazine story and which went on to spawn a 2011 prequel, you might think I was some kind of shape shifting alien in disguise to suggest such an unbelievable premise, but it's true. I am Matt.

Tug McTighe (00:24)
I am tug.

Matt Loehrer (00:26)
And today, Cinemass is travels to the bleak frozen continent of Antarctica to defrost the thing. So as always, we jump in and I want to know what you know or what you think you know about this movie.

Tug McTighe (00:38)
Yeah, so this is a classic, like, peak tug miss. This is a true cinemass. Because this is very much in my wheelhouse of what kind of movie I would like. Adore John Carpenter, adore Stranger Things, which there would be no Stranger Things without John Carpenter. I'm sure we'll talk about that a little bit later. Horror, gore, practical effects, the whole schmear, it just...

I never got around, like literally the reason we started this podcast was just I never got around to seeing it. And then I would see clips and like, gosh, I got it. Watch this. And finally we decided since it was my turn on one of my true sin and missus, we decided this was going to be the time we did the thing. So I'm very pumped up about it. Here's what I think I know. The thing is a gory practical effects driven. said maybe by Tom Savini.

But it's not Tom Savini. We'll talk about that later. Tom Savini did a lot of a lot of slasher films like Friday the 13th. But I knew this was a again, gory practical effects driven horror film by the inimitable John Carpenter. I knew that or I believed I knew that John likely wrote it, directed it and wrote the music. He is famous for his music too. If you don't know Halloween that is him because he's also cheap.

So he would write it himself. also, Joe, God, so high 80s synths. As you mentioned it, I knew it was a remake of a fifties schlocky horror film called The Thing. The Thing from Another World, I think there's a subhead which I have seen because my father is a huge schlocky fifties horror film guide. We watched him when I was kid and that movie started

Matt Loehrer (01:56)
And he loves synthesizers too.

Yeah.

Tug McTighe (02:19)
James Arness, who was a big star from Gunsmoke. Got my dad, he did. I'm just thinking back. He loved those shitty movies. where the nuclear bomb went off and turned the ants giant. And there's a very famous one where it's just really cute fuzzy rabbits that are supposed to be menacing, but they're just rabbits. We'll dig that one up and see what that one is. But I did not know it was a 30s novella or a sort of a of pulp fiction, which even makes me like it more. And of course it was now that you look at it.

I knew it starred Kurt Russell. I didn't realize that his hair was also a character. and then I knew that somehow a dog is either the alien or not an alien at the end. There is a lot of internet chatter about this dog and a lot of theories about the dogs and what this movie is all about. So that's really it. I knew it took place in it somewhere cold and that a monster got loose and they had to deal with it.

Matt Loehrer (03:12)
Alright,

well you got a couple of these things right and this was one of those that we've talked about this before. It was so far back that I've seen it that it was almost like I hadn't seen it. So this was this was fun for me to revisit it as an adult. Cause last time I would have seen it. I bet I was in junior higher high school.

Tug McTighe (03:23)
Correct, correct.

Right. And, this is a little bit now no one's ever compared 1982's The Thing to The Godfather. But that's what Cinemass is does folks breaks new fucking ground. But because of the kinds of things I consume and love and go back to over and over again and this being it right in that band, people around me have not stopped talking about this movie. Like the things I consume, the things I look at, the things I follow.

Matt Loehrer (03:41)
Right.

Tug McTighe (03:57)
people that are friends with me, kept not stop talking about this movie since 1982. So it, a lot of it was sort of, I knew, I knew of it. So, so I knew so much of it. just didn't know it.

Matt Loehrer (04:09)
I kind of feel like it's the big star of horror movies where it influenced so many other directors and another generation.

Tug McTighe (04:15)
You're right of this kind

of yeah, this is very specific kind of thing Yeah, yeah

Matt Loehrer (04:18)
Sure, and not even just in the genre. mean, influence Tarantino and influence

Edgar Wright and so forth. OK, without further ado, the log line for this movie is pretty cut and dried. A research team in Antarctica is hunted by a shape shifting alien that assumes the appearance of its victims. OK. This was a 1982 film. It was directed by John Carpenter. The screenplay, I think a bunch of people worked on it, but is at least co credited to Bill Lancaster.

Tug McTighe (04:35)
I'm in.

Matt Loehrer (04:46)
who was the son of actor Burt Lancaster and who also wrote the screenplay for the Bad News Bears. Carpenter had liked Bad News Bears, so he wanted to get this guy. But they also, they had talked to like Richard Matheson who wrote I Am Legend and Omega Man was in the running for this too. It was based on a 1938 novella by John W. Campbell Jr. who I

Tug McTighe (04:54)
Hahaha!

Matt Loehrer (05:07)
had not heard of, but this appeared in Amazing Stories, which was the first kind of pulp sci-fi magazine, very influential for generations of, you know, Isaac Asimov and Ben Bova and all these guys.

Tug McTighe (05:19)
And so much so that Spielberg

made that Amazing Stories television show. Right. This was, this is a really important, Amazing Stories, was a really, Amazing Stories is really important in this whole world.

Matt Loehrer (05:24)
Right based, it was the inspiration.

Yeah, this is kind

of too cool to in 2018 there was a you know, we have like pop culture people with PhDs in pop culture. There was a guy researching. Kind of the origins of this individual and this magazine, and he found that this was actually just a part of a full novel that this guy Campbell had submitted and they said, yeah, we don't want that. We just want part of it. So they did a Kickstarter and they raised $150,000.

to get this entire novel that Campbell had written back in 1938. And all sorts of people got to enjoy that. It was pretty cool.

Tug McTighe (06:08)
hashtag the internet.

Matt Loehrer (06:09)
Right, so by the time the 80s came around, universals had the rights. We'd already seen Alien. We'd seen slasher movies. We'd seen Star Wars. had science fiction. And Carpenter had had success with Halloween the year before. So he seemed like the guy to bring the thing to life.

So the cast was pretty great. And you had mentioned it's that guy. And I didn't quite get what you meant by that, but go ahead and kind of explain it.

Tug McTighe (06:34)
Yeah,

Kurt Russell is a star and everybody else is a character actor. Legitimately, first of all, there's only like 15 people in the whole movie. Maybe not even.

the top five or six of these guys are catastrophically successful character actors, right? Wilford Brimley as Blair the biologist, TK Carter as Nolz, David Clennon as Palmer, Keith David who went on to work with

Carpenter several other times most deliciously and they live. Richard Dizer, Charles Hallahan, who I didn't know his name, I knew his face, I didn't know his name until we... He's that guy. And then Richard Mazur, who was... I first saw on One Day at a Time as Bonnie Franklin's love interest. But yeah, just the second you start seeing him like...

Matt Loehrer (07:05)
Yep, that was awesome.

Yeah, because he's that guy, right? You're like, oh, he's I've seen him in 25 things.

Tug McTighe (07:26)
holy shit, Kurt Russell's a star and they're like, let's get a bunch of great guys to do this But a lot of TV guys, a lot of bit part guys, a lot of working actors, but the whole cast is Russell and that guy.

Matt Loehrer (07:36)
brain.

It was pretty great. Kurt Russell was they'd also they also considered Christopher Walken, Nick Nolte and Jeff Bridges for this. Jeff Bridges would later work with Carpentarian Starman, but none of those guys had any interest in this movie and he had worked previously worked with Kurt Russell in Escape from New York like a year before. So. Yeah, Wilford Brimley was Blair. He was then unknown and he was I think 48 years old 40.

Tug McTighe (07:48)
I like Starman.

No

Yeah, right before this.

Yeah, Wilford

Brimley, I think was born looking 60.

Matt Loehrer (08:06)
Six or 48.

Right, they wanted somebody that was unrecognizable and who could be gone for a long time. He wouldn't be like, hey, where is that guy? Because you don't, didn't know who he is. He actually was close friends with Robert Duvall and that's who got him into stunting and then acting. Pretty cool, TK Carter. I recognized him as Milo from the first season of What Turned Into Save by the Bell.

Tug McTighe (08:14)
What happened to that guy?

Okay, there you go.

Yeah, that's

Matt Loehrer (08:32)
this was when it was still a what's her name from Parent Trap, Haley Mills, that she yeah, she did what they did one season and he was on that as the fast, fast talking guy. David Clennon, they wanted somebody funny and they had Jay Leno and Gary Shanley both come in, but they also wanted somebody that could do drama. I know crazy Keith David. This had done some acting on Broadway, I think he'd been

Tug McTighe (08:35)
good morning, Mrs. Bliss.

Wow, okay.

Wow. Jeez.

Matt Loehrer (08:56)
you know, plays, but this was his first movie. Ernie Hudson pretty much had it in the bag. then they met Keith David and said, that's the guy. Powers Booth for Gary, the station commander, were looking at Powers Booth, Lee Van Cleef and Jerry Orbach, of all people. Yeah, and Law and Order is what I remember from. and there, you know, there were a couple of guys that I think if this movie suffers, it's that it's all dudes and a lot of them have beards.

Tug McTighe (09:04)
Wow.

booth. Jerry Orbach from Putting Baby in a Corner.

Yeah, well, they're all working at a frozen tundra research station They're all hanging out. It's more like a play really there's only like four rooms Yeah, and and it's just they're all named Fuchs or Norris or Bennings or Clark you don't really get to know Yeah, it's it's it's real cut and dry and again part of that works because they're not getting in the way of any of the awesome alien shit

Matt Loehrer (09:28)
Sure.

It's all last names. Yeah.

Tug McTighe (09:51)
right? But but it's but it can be difficult to go. Who is that? Which one was he? And then you're like you look it up. It doesn't matter. There's gonna be a there's gonna be there's gonna be a body explosion here shortly.

Matt Loehrer (09:52)
Right.

Right, it really didn't. We need bodies to be slaughtered.

Right, so this would not pass the Bechdel test. was, there were no women in this movie. There was a voice of a woman in this movie. Do you remember that part?

Tug McTighe (10:12)
the chess computer.

Matt Loehrer (10:14)
Yes, do you know who voiced that?

Tug McTighe (10:15)
I don't know, but I'm gonna say Goldie Hawn.

Matt Loehrer (10:18)
No, that's a good guess, but it was Carpenter's then wife, Adrienne Barbot. He had.

Tug McTighe (10:23)
Okay, Adrienne Barbeau, who would later be in

a similar film made by Stephen King called Creepshow. Just a couple years later. She sure was.

Matt Loehrer (10:30)
Yes, she was. She was also in Swamp Thing, which I loved, and

she had actually worked with Carpenter in The Fog and also in Escape from New York. She was in that too. So Carpenter's an interesting dude. He grew up in New York and was making movies with an 8mm camera, probably the same way Spielberg was, like from birth.

Tug McTighe (10:46)
Yeah, he's one of those guys.

He's one of those guys. It just it was in his blood for whatever reason. And he just started when he was a kid.

Matt Loehrer (10:53)
Yeah,

he I think was in Kentucky for a while. They didn't have a film program. He went to USC, moved out to California, studied filmmaking at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and then dropped out before he graduated to start making movies. He gained the attention of guys like George Lucas and Dan O'Bannon. wrote the first movie he made was called Dark Star. And Dan O'Bannon wrote Alien and was retained as special effects supervisor for a movie that you.

And John January talked about Yodorowsky's Dune. Did I pronounce that wrong?

Tug McTighe (11:22)
That's right.

Yeah, no, doesn't. No one knows. But yeah, your worst case dune was the first feeble first failed attempt to make the movie dune by Alejandro, your worst key, the avant-garde filmmaker and Dan O'Bannon figured largely in that process and kind of only left the dune project because he got alien on the off the ground.

Matt Loehrer (11:25)
Ha ha ha!

Well, that's part of it. Part of it is the Dune project fell apart and he was broke. He didn't have any money at all. Right. But there was a he wrote an entire kind of graphic novel within that big book they put together. Yeah. And now Mobius illustrated it. So I would kill to get my hands on that. So he was he had talked to George Lucas. I think they were all kind of rubbing elbows at that time. He was became known for making

Tug McTighe (11:46)
Well, it sure did. needed a job,

Inside of the Giant Dune book, yeah.

Yes, yes. No kidding.

Matt Loehrer (12:11)
Movies on a really shoestring budget. doing what best he can with what he's got, which usually wasn't a lot.

Tug McTighe (12:17)
Yeah, this doesn't rate now because it's not the same now, this was, Carpenter was at least peripherally connected to that. Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, where they were the first independent filmmakers, they were rejecting the studio system and these guys were going out on their own and raising money and self-financing. So yeah, Carpenter was connected to that sort of movement, I would say.

Matt Loehrer (12:45)
Yeah, and he made some successful movies. Escape from New York, think was successful. Star Man was really successful with Karen Allen and Jeff Bridges. That was a great movie. A lot of his movies were not critically or commercially successful at the time. And then with the passage of time, now they're considered at least cult classics and critically acclaimed in a way that they weren't.

Tug McTighe (12:55)
Yep. Yep.

Yeah, because they've just become copied

and they influence so many things. And it's still fair to say like per capita, he made Halloween for about 12 bucks and it made a shit ton of money in 78. And just if you extract what it's made over the, that, it's funny, right? So sometimes we talk about you need one thing. That one thing created the John Carpenter verse. Let him do and let him steadily work.

Matt Loehrer (13:15)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Correct.

Tug McTighe (13:31)
we won't get into it but you mentioned a bunch of but I mean from 74 through 2010 or 15 he was banging out a movie every couple years again like you said some of them like they live is that rowdy Roddy Piper glorious weirdo escaped from LA was the second movie in the escape from new universe right big trouble little china which we've talked about

Matt Loehrer (13:52)
goofy sequel to Escape from New York.

Tug McTighe (13:57)
But you know,

he's John Carpenter and he keeps working.

Matt Loehrer (14:00)
So he was pretty steadily employed even for a period, I think, where they said, we're not going to nobody wants this guy. He still found something to do. I included in 1992, he directed Memoirs of an Invisible Man, which you remember that movie at all. It starred Chevy Chase.

Tug McTighe (14:07)
Doesn't matter, he can figure out how to do it.

Is that Chevy

Chase? Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (14:17)
who was trying

to get into something more serious, dramatic. And people said, well, it's not funny. So why is Chevy chasing it? And if Chevy chases in it, why isn't it funny? So the only thing I would say is Carpenter's quote in 2023, he's regarding that movie. It wasn't pleasant at all. It was a horror show. I really wanted to quit the business after that movie. God, I don't want to talk about why, but let's say there were personalities on that film. He shall not be named. Who needs to be killed? No, no, that's terrible.

Tug McTighe (14:21)
Wow.

Right.

Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (14:45)
He needs to be set on fire. Anyway, it's all fine. I survived it. I'm 98 % sure he was talking about chubby chitz.

Tug McTighe (14:48)
God, heavy. Yeah, you hear me

both. Yeah, for sure.

Matt Loehrer (14:54)
Okay, tomato meter, how did it do?

Tug McTighe (14:56)
I did well. 85 % critically rated. Be like coming up on B plus and 92 % a nice holiday for the for the fans. So yeah, this one has this one has stood the test of time I think and to your point was more of a more of a slow up and to the right after its release.

Matt Loehrer (15:06)
Pretty good.

Right. And it's worth mentioning. So the original budget was 10 million when the dust settled. It was 15 million. That would be 43 million dollars in 2024 money. So not Avengers money, but a big market film. And it earned almost 20 million then. So not a flop, not a hit. But other movies that were in the theaters in 1982 included Tron, Star Trek, True the Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner came out the same day.

Tug McTighe (15:37)
Wow.

Matt Loehrer (15:40)
Conan the Barbarian pulled your guys in ET came out two weeks later and

Tug McTighe (15:43)
Yeah, right. Exploding

like the opposite alien movie. Right.

Matt Loehrer (15:48)
Right.

Universal had expectations of how this was going to do and that was not successful. So let's jump into the movie.

Tug McTighe (15:56)
Yeah, so before we jump into the actual plot, I want to talk about the titles. I'm about 91 % sure, and you would tell me as the designer in the room, the text, the typeface for the thing looks very similar to the typeface from 1984 is Dune. I just put that out there for the world to see. Let's just look at, we'll take it offline. Maybe we'll make an Instagram post about it. That's one.

Matt Loehrer (16:02)
Okay.

Tug McTighe (16:25)
Also, one thing I immediately realized I was wrong about and that blew me away. He did not do the music for this absolute film legend. Ennio Morricone did. Ennio Morricone Morricone includes more than 70 award-winning films. All of Sergio Leone's films since A Fistful of Dollars. All of Giuseppe Tornatore's movies, which is set in a parody. So,

Matt Loehrer (16:25)
Okay.

Tug McTighe (16:49)
Le Cajafal, Le Profesional, The Thing, The Key. this, for him to not do the music and then hire this abject legend is such a just John Carpenter moment for me. So I was blown away by that. All right.

Matt Loehrer (17:04)
Yeah, that

was kind of funny because he brought him in and said, by the way, I have all the synthesizer music that I made myself. And the guy's like, why did you hire me? Like if you were going to do the music yourself.

Tug McTighe (17:09)
Right, Of course, it's that

now that sounds like something John Carpenter would do.

Matt Loehrer (17:15)
It is. he ended up kind of creating a lot of music that got used in other places in the movie. So that was good. All right. So the film, actually the film opens in space and we see a spaceship like a flying saucer kind of hurtling to Earth, entering the atmosphere, kind of catching on fire. And then we get the thing, the graphic title, which actually is the same title. It's exactly the same title graphics.

Tug McTighe (17:22)
Interesting.

Yes. Yes.

And then, then we see the thing, right.

Matt Loehrer (17:42)
as we're used in the 1951 film. So how it kind of burns through the thing and it burns through the screen. Yeah. So this opens in Antarctica. It was actually filmed in Alaska. They were there for three months and they had no beer. So they said that was bad.

Tug McTighe (17:44)
nice.

Yeah, it burns through the text.

Oof. Sounds

tough.

Matt Loehrer (18:00)
So we see a Norwegian helicopter pursuing a sled dog and this scene goes on a while so

Tug McTighe (18:04)
It

does, I may have cut it a little, but yes.

Matt Loehrer (18:07)
It's just white snow and here's this helicopter.

Tug McTighe (18:09)
helicopter and beautiful,

you know, husky running through the snow.

Matt Loehrer (18:15)
getting fired at. So they're firing at it with a rifle from the helicopter.

Tug McTighe (18:17)
Yes.

And they are like a stormtrooper. are unable to hit this dog. And at one point they're about three feet up above him. They could jump. They probably could have jumped out of the car and thrown a backpack at him. Right.

Matt Loehrer (18:22)
Right. Right.

Right.

then I think we cut back to McCready. We see him at first. He's playing chess, computer chess, and he loses and he takes his Jane B. Scotch, which shows up a lot in this movie, product placement, and he just, he throws it into the hard drive. So you kind of get a sense from the very start that he's had enough of being in Antarctica. Maybe he's at the end of his rope here.

Tug McTighe (18:34)
He's playing chess.

Yes it does.

Yeah, pours in the computer.

Yes, this is this is this whole

movie is from the get-go is close. So that so there's shooting at this dog, this helicopter and the Americans like what's that commotion and they go outside the dog jumps up on the guy and starts looking his face and then the Norwegian gets a grenade and he's going to throw it at them and the dog and a little bit like

Matt Loehrer (19:12)
Mm-hmm.

Tug McTighe (19:18)
you when you're playing with a dog, when you pretend to throw the ball and drop it behind you, he just drops the grenade like a foot from the helicopter and then he goes, shit, dives on it and then everything blows up. So they're all dead. sorry, I did miss. One guy's dead. Sorry. I wanted to get to the dropped grenade made me laugh out loud, but yes, the Norwegian guy shoots, is shooting at the dog when it's right by the Americans and one of our guys, I can't remember who.

Matt Loehrer (19:32)
Well, one guy's dead. So the, yeah, no, no, it's fine.

Gary, he's the kind of commander of the station.

Tug McTighe (19:49)
Gary gets

Well, he's, yeah, one of the guys gets shot in the leg and Gary shoots the guys, shoots him right through the eye and kills the Norwegian.

Matt Loehrer (19:59)
Right,

you know, and he's yelling in Norwegian, so they don't know what he's saying. And he pulls out a gun and shoots one of their guys. he's dead. The crew heads, yeah.

Tug McTighe (20:03)
Yeah, they have no idea.

Yeah, great, great, great. Like

you said, great opening scene here long, but first of all, Jed, the dog's name was Jed. Jed, the dog was amazing. He was running through the snow. He looks so tired by the end of like, you see him like running across the frame and his mouth wide open. But again, like I said, this was already a cavalcade when they all run out. You're like, Holy shit. It's everyone is that guy. super, super fun opening scene though. So like,

You know, I talk about Save the Cat a lot. It's like you need a strong opening image to let you know what this movie's about. And you know this movie's about violence. And you know this movie's about they are in the middle of nowhere.

Matt Loehrer (20:51)
Right. So Richard Mazer, the dog, jumps up on him and he kind of handles, he's the dog handler. He chose that role. there was another role he was gonna audition for and he said, no, I want that one. Cause he just really likes dogs. So he spent so much time with the dog that they became friends. So when they had to film scenes, the dog would go right to him. Yeah, so that was kind of cool.

Tug McTighe (20:58)
You learn that later. Yeah, he manages the kennels.

Okay.

gotcha.

Matt Loehrer (21:19)
Cause dogs are great. So they all head inside and the dog goes with them. McCready and Dr. Copper, who's the physician there. So Wilford Gremley is a biologist, but this guy's the doctor. They decide they're going to leave and investigate the Norwegian base, which is they get there and it's just destroyed. It's burned to the ground.

Tug McTighe (21:35)
Yeah, it's burned

to the ground. There's corpses everywhere,

Matt Loehrer (21:39)
and they find,

right. so frozen corpses, everything's blown up. And then they find a burnt corpse of a, they don't even know what some kind of a humanoid, but distorted and warped and not like a person.

Tug McTighe (21:49)
Yeah

Yeah, the doctor, the

doctor takes these videotapes. There's a couple instances of like a giant old eighties video camera, video cassette player. They take some tapes, they take some notebooks, and then they find this human humanoid deformed corpse that is about, you're about to really see it here in a minute, but it looks horrible. And they're like, well, we got to take this back and, and, and see what the hell's going on.

Matt Loehrer (22:20)
So they bring this, for whatever reason, they bring this corpse back to the base because what could happen? But as you noticed, it's like steaming and wet. It's not like it's... They assume it's dead.

Tug McTighe (22:24)
Right.

They, they,

well, it's laying in the snow in this charred state. They bring it in and they take the tarp off of it and it's still steaming and it's, and it's wet. And I learned by watching some videos that it was like a combination of Vaseline and KY jelly and fucking honey. And yeah, just all the, yes, all this stuff, right. That's bubbling and all. So I'm like, you know, and I go, well, that's as soon as I saw my glistens, a terrible mistake.

Matt Loehrer (22:34)
Right.

creamed corn, melted bubblegum, yeah.

Tug McTighe (22:59)
No, even if I hadn't seen anything, it's a terrible mistake, but it is a cool as shit prop. And this is your first moment where you're like, this is going to be gross and awesome and weird and real looking, even though it's this, fantastical thing.

Matt Loehrer (23:20)
I'm kind of getting ahead of myself on this, but that was something that the original novella from 1938 is a lot like this movie. The 1951 movie, is not a lot like this. Like in that movie, it was just a guy in a big, well, was Arness.

Tug McTighe (23:34)
No, it's just a-

James Arness, looked,

yeah, he looked a little bit like Frankenstein. Like he had like a forehead, right.

Matt Loehrer (23:42)
He did, and he was in a suit.

And he was walking around just killing people and he was part plant and who knows what else, but it wasn't any of this stuff. So Carpenter didn't want that he didn't want. It's the monster to just be out. It's a guy in a suit. That's been done to death so.

Tug McTighe (23:58)
I want it to be something

that no one's ever seen before.

Matt Loehrer (24:01)
So what you get is this stuff. So they bring the corpse to the base and Wilfred Grimley is the biologist. So he's going to do an autopsy and starts pulling stuff out of it. And it's just like a, what did he say?

Tug McTighe (24:03)
Yeah.

And he says, it looks like human

heart and human liver, but this is like gore porn. Like they talked about it years later with Eli Roth and that sort of thing. But this is like they are, he has got his hands in this, they're pulling apart, which is clearly real stuff, pulling it apart and pulling out a thing and it's there on it and they're tight on it. And I just, I just like how they hunt. They're sort of relishing in the, in the goriness of it, which you just isn't.

Slasher films are different, but this was like, we're just gonna hang on it and look at it.

Matt Loehrer (24:48)
and I don't think CGI lets you do that Not really. Not like this. Not in a visceral way where it's a physical thing. I was being... No.

Tug McTighe (24:50)
Not necessarily, no, no. Because when, sorry, Matt, when he pulls

something out, because it's covered in honey and glue, like, this tendrils, like, it's sticking together like skin does.

Matt Loehrer (25:07)
Yeah, like he's got to physically pull on it to get it out.

Tug McTighe (25:09)
Yeah, and it and

the the breath the other part tries to stick, you know, it tries to stay together So it's just really it's really well done,

Matt Loehrer (25:18)
I was a fan of David Cronenberg. So I don't know how much Cronenberg you've seen, but that body horror and that kind of dripping stuff and gross stuff, I don't know, The Fly was great.

Tug McTighe (25:21)
Sure, very similar kind of, yes. Yes. Very, yeah,

very similar aesthetic, I would say.

Matt Loehrer (25:33)
Absolutely. I don't know, I assume they influenced each other back and forth. So Rob Botton was the makeup and visual effects coordinator for this movie. And he was how old? 23?

Tug McTighe (25:37)
I would think.

23 years old. Some reports that I saw said he could peg him at 21. So let's just call it 22 or 23 years old. And he's in charge of this thing. And it's like make go make this thing.

Matt Loehrer (25:59)
Yeah, that's amazing. a

fun fact. So when he was 14 years old, he wrote a letter to legendary Hollywood visual effects master Rick Baker, who has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and asked for an autograph and included a detailed picture that he'd made of a monster. And Rick Baker called about and said, hey, come over and let's talk about monsters. And before you know it, he's apprenticing under Rick Baker.

Tug McTighe (26:12)
course.

That's

amazing.

Matt Loehrer (26:27)
And they'd

work together in the future on Verhoeven films and they did like Robocop. They did that kind of creation. So.

Tug McTighe (26:31)
That's amazing. And sorry, folks,

aside a non-cinemass way, all it takes is one person to take an interest, one professional to take an interest in a kid, and you can change the whole trajectory of their life. So that's my PSA. And now the star map comes across. The more you know. Right? So here.

Matt Loehrer (26:50)
Yeah, that's a great one.

That's right.

Tug McTighe (26:56)
I want to talk about this next part because this is when they tell Clark the dog's just hanging around their rec room. They say, we get that thing out of here. So he goes and they puts them in the kennel with the other dogs, like a big chicken wire enclosure. And there's four or five other huskies. And that's super weird because the dog sits there. The real dog, such a good actor, frozen, Jed, and then it explodes open and these tendrils start coming out of it. It starts grabbing the other dogs and spraying.

Viscous fluid at the dogs and then it turns into this disgusting blob creature Mouths everywhere eyes everywhere tendrils and what I loved about this was it's such a good idea to make the alien decidedly not humanoid That way it can look like whatever you want it to look like and you can do whatever you want. You're not now limited

by your limitations. You're like, well, we got this fucking eye. Okay, stick it in the ass. Okay. And then the ass can have an eye because it, it you've created a thing that lets you do what you want to do. and there's five part mouth. So again, really important. There's no chance that the Demogorgon in stranger things was not highly influenced by this.

the Demogorgon clearly is connected to this clearly. It's so clear. If you didn't say it was clear, it's fucking clear. But the Duffer Brothers, they know they mentioned look, John Carpenter was a huge influence on us. But just as soon as I saw this line, there's the goddamn Demogorgon.

Matt Loehrer (28:34)
Oh yeah, and I know the scene you're talking about, a kind of a stalk comes out of this thing that's bloody and gross and it just splits four ways and it's got teeth on all four of them and it looks exactly like it. So it's neat to see that callback.

Tug McTighe (28:38)
That's right. It's exactly. it's right. Right. So again,

Matt, you and I worked together for many years in advertising on in the pet world for a pet food brands and pet treats. And I just want to mention how hard it is to get a dog to do what this dog did. And when you have a great dog actor,

Matt Loehrer (28:56)
Yes, we did.

Tug McTighe (29:05)
It makes everybody's days better. And I just want to shout out to old Jed, who I thought was awesome in this.

Matt Loehrer (29:10)
Yeah, he was a good boy. I agree with you about not making it humanoid in that I think it's more terrifying. Like you don't know what this thing is going to do or what it's going to look like.

Tug McTighe (29:17)
Yeah, this is

it is other right. It is other like we said about.

Matt Loehrer (29:21)
Yeah. You can feel what it, how

terrifying it would be for the creatures to be in proximity to this thing. So, and I hadn't seen anything like it kind of the tendrils whipping around and they lash out and they grab a dog and they pull it in and start absorbing it. And that's kind of how this thing works to it. It just absorbs, I think, mass and muscle and all these.

Tug McTighe (29:26)
Yeah, yeah, it's incredible.

That's awful.

And then,

right, and then works. It's also like, not like, so I read a lot of fantasy novels and anybody can throw out the word changeling. And she took her hawk form. Well, this is like, it's like getting torn apart to recreate and to replicate the form it's taking.

Matt Loehrer (29:43)
create something else out of it.

Yeah, it's a violent process. There's a lot of anxiety in it.

Tug McTighe (30:00)
Yeah, a little bit.

what might have been two years before this, think it's 1980 that American will in London instead of just it's a dude that turns into a wolf, a werewolf. They showed the painful process that was Rick Baker showing the incredibly horrifying process of. A human body turning into a wolf body. So I love that about this.

Matt Loehrer (30:16)
That was your Quicker.

Right, that was Baker and

Bodice, I believe, worked on the Howling. he did some transformative stuff there too. So this alerts everybody. They all come running. This is the first use of a flame thrower in this movie. won't be long. So they burn this thing and just to a crisp. And Blair later does an autopsy and he realizes that it

Tug McTighe (30:29)
a couple years later. Yep. Yep. Yep.

It won't be the, I'll mention it later, it will not be the last.

Matt Loehrer (30:50)
Somehow he realizes that this is something, right? He says, you know, it seems to me like this is an organism that can just replicate other life forms perfectly and look just like them. So, right. There's a lot of assuming in this movie.

Tug McTighe (30:52)
Yeah.

you think so doc? What the fuck? So this is this. is

our first instance of flamethrower and also our first instance of we need to advance the plot and we got to do it fast. So it is a little bit of exposition, but we'll talk about that as we go. It sort of becomes charming by the end.

so again, camera is reveling in the disgusting nature of that here in autopsy scene two or 30 minutes that we've seen two autopsies. good red bear, good red herring here with Brimley and Mazer. Hey, watch out for him. He's hanging around the dogs the most, worried about the weather. The creature did something, did something to him already. And I also want to shout out, I watched this on Amazon prime. and I love the Amazon prime X-ray feature.

So when you pause on a scene, pops up and it has who's in the scene, has a modern picture of them. Then there's some stuff on the side sometimes that you can lead you to a trivia. So thank you for that, Prime.

Matt Loehrer (31:55)
Yeah, the trivia is really cool. I know people assume that you and I have done such extensive research that we just know all the people and things involved in all these little fun facts. But in fact, we find them all over the place. Great.

Tug McTighe (32:03)
These these yeah, these these tools really help

so They they remember we mentioned that they've pulled some log books and some tapes From the Norwegian site and then they're watching some video when they realize hey the Norwegians found something over there We're not sure what it is. So this they get they all get in the helicopter again. They fly over there they see there's this gigantic excavation site

that contains from earlier, from the very first scene, this saucer that's in the ice that's kind of partially excavated. And then.

Matt Loehrer (32:42)
Yeah, I think they had

tried to use explosives to bring it up or something, so. So they caused this. It's the Norwegians fault.

Tug McTighe (32:45)
Yeah, yeah, they try to bring it up and and and then there's They right correct

fucking norwegian norwich so they they See the site and mccready had seen in the camp This big like eight foot long coffin looking block of ice That there was a hole in that was something and and they see a Exactly the same shape

the ice so they know that there was something in the ice. That was then in there in this block of ice in their camp that they're now starting to put it again. They're starting to surmise. Something is amiss now I want to stop you here, Matt.

sweet matte painting alert when it's MacCready and Norris standing in the foreground and they see the spaceship and it's an awesome matte painting and if you guys don't know what a matte painting but many of you probably do it's where you shoot the actors in the foreground and in the background you either project or you have on the frame or you insert later this beautiful painting of the scene and it they sort of stand still because you don't want to kind of get in way of it it's an early it was an early trick used

to great effect in Star Wars, A New Hope, and Empire Strikes Back. And if anybody out there has seen the black hole, that black hole was a sort of animation of a matte painting in that film. So matte painting alert.

Matt Loehrer (34:01)
Yeah, if you want to show

something, show something that's enormous in scale, you draw, you paint it, you put it really close to the camera and have a cutout and then your actors are way far away and they just look really small. So that did that in Dune.

Tug McTighe (34:13)
That's correct. That's what they did.

And they did a lot of, yeah, holy. And they did it. They did that with the actors in Lord of the Rings to make the hobbits seem small. They'd be closer to the right. Yeah, however that works. But you get the idea. Foreshortening.

Matt Loehrer (34:27)
Right, it's kind of trickery. And they say

the title here.

Tug McTighe (34:32)
Yes, they do. uh, they, goes, this thing gets through, gets thrown out or okay, good. So I like it when they say the name of the movie now they're about to say it 200 more times, but that was the first time it was like, so this, I don't know what this thing gets thrown out or crawls out. Now it's here. Right. So good job.

Matt Loehrer (34:51)
So yeah, that was a nod to the movie. The creature escaped the ship. You saw this, froze. He was frozen in a block of ice and then they threw, in the 1950s film, somebody threw a blanket over it. Like I can't stand to look at it. So he throws a working electric blanket.

Tug McTighe (35:00)
One of the guys got creeped out. Yeah, an electric blanket. Electric blanket.

he's like, I didn't know it was plugged in.

Matt Loehrer (35:09)
Yeah,

that was one of my favorite Scooby Doo episodes where they thought the caveman Scooby's night with a frozen fright. That was a good one.

Tug McTighe (35:13)
Yeah, right, of

Matt Loehrer (35:17)
So Blair now, Wilford Brimley runs a computer simulation, which I'm sure was really high tech stuff back in 1982.

Tug McTighe (35:24)
buddy, you

bet it was.

Matt Loehrer (35:27)
that indicated the creature would be able to take over all life on Earth and assimilate it in just a matter of years.

Tug McTighe (35:34)
Yeah. Once again, a highly assumptive plot device that I guess they needed to raise the stakes because we're heading towards act two, which again is fine to raise the stakes, but it was he's making a lot of assumptions.

Matt Loehrer (35:53)
He is, this is a pet peeve of mine, but this movie, Superman 3 and Jurassic Park are good examples of movies where people use computers to do things that computers can't do. Remember Superman 3 where the woman got, like the supercomputer turned her into some kind of a horrifying robot? Yeah, I'm willing to suspend disbelief a while.

Tug McTighe (36:04)
Mm-hmm.

Right, right, well-

Matt Loehrer (36:16)
But I've worked on computers my whole life and they don't do that.

Tug McTighe (36:17)
Yeah, right.

Hey, by the way, they're still called computers because they compute stuff. And again, you have to have what's the data that Wilford Brimley was putting in? He's only known about this thing for 12 hours.

Matt Loehrer (36:23)
Yeah, it's basically what they do.

I don't know. Yeah,

so it does. It does its thing. It kind of has a orange blob that goes to a blue blob and it turns it orange and then it says assimilation complete or fear threat of just stuff that they don't do. Remember the girl Jurassic Park that like I'm a hacker and she was. It wasn't a unique system. Alright, so that's a pet peeve of mine, but at the time I'm sure it was good.

Tug McTighe (36:39)
Right, right, right. I know this system, it's a Unix system. It wasn't the Unix system, was faked up computer animation.

All right, well, hey on a pet peeve,

hey on a pet peeve, let's take a break and talk about our sponsor, Little Bear Graphics. If you're trapped in a freezing cold science base being pursued and murdered by hideous alien life form, marketing may not be on the top of your list of things to do. That being said, if you are a regular person looking for a great marketing partner that is not a gooey blood covered morphing creature, then check it with Matt Lohr.

Matt Loehrer (36:57)
Yeah.

Tug McTighe (37:20)
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We now learn that the remains that they brought from the Norwegian base of the malformed humanoid that were steaming and gooey Shit starts dripping off of it and you see it start to move

little bit. It is in fact alive. Fuchs reads some notes to McReady from Bullets Seed All the Names, but they read some notes that suggest there is still cellular activity in the creature. So again, it starts to assimilate Bennings. It's one of the guys, but he's interrupted in the process by Windows and they chase down Bennings. It's fully assimilated at this point.

And they they his hands are weird

so they chased Bennings down Bennings thing and He's got his weirdo hands and they burn him up kill him with the with the blowtorch and meanwhile Blair is

just completely lost his shit because of he read that he was looking at the computer simulation and he's destroying the helicopter. He's destroying the computer systems. He's getting rid of the radio because he's like we are if this we have to trap this thing here. So this is the like sail to the and burn the ships. He's like none of us are leaving here because if we do this thing is going to get out and infect the world. So they they grab him put him in a tool shed.

he always killed the sled dogs, right? All this shit is bad. so they, put him in the tool shed and this is where he kind of does like a bond villain thing. And he's like, suddenly he really knows what the aliens want. And he says, they're going to their whole point was to get to earth and they probably been doing it for centuries. And I'm doing a Wilford Brimley. They've probably been doing it for centuries because they all have diabetes and, and, but then it's good if we let it get out, it's going to take over the world. So

Matt Loehrer (39:16)
Ha ha.

Tug McTighe (39:21)
Anyway, so he tells us the story And I did want to note again because I too love dogs the axe left in the head of the dead dog Was a decidedly grim detail That maybe they didn't need to put in And then I love this part Matt Suddenly we have a test for this because they say well the doctor copper says if we test for infection by comparing the

cruise blood against the uncontaminated cruise blood because we have to have a bunch of our blood on hand. Maybe that will tell us who's the thing and who isn't the thing.

Matt Loehrer (39:57)
Right, so they're pointed at this point. The movie is trying to make it so you don't know who's what's what like where says it's Clark. Now we know there's a test.

Tug McTighe (40:02)
That's correct. is every... Right. This

is everybody pointing at everybody.

Matt Loehrer (40:08)
Right, but the blood stores, when they go to check, have all been destroyed. Yeah, so now we have to wonder if it's somebody else that would have access to, it's just misdirection.

Tug McTighe (40:11)
Guess what? They've all been destroyed. So.

Right.

So,

yeah, so it's all misdirection, all paranoia, all creating stakes and creating, kind of like a murder mystery, right? Who done it? but again, like I was thinking about this. I'm like, it's a little bit like the pseudo science in Jurassic park where you're like, okay, a mosquito bit of brontosaurus and then got frozen in amber and there's brontosaurus blood in them, but Z sorry, broccoli source blood in the mosquito. And if we'd get the blood out, we you're like that.

Sounds logical enough, but I'm like why do the blood okay? And then they they bring it back because I did I did call you and say if they don't fucking bring back the blood I'm gonna be pissed. They did bring back the blood. We'll talk about here in a minute. Yeah, everybody's losing their shit now Mac is sort of the calming force McCready And after all he's Kurt Russell, so he's the only known actor so he's got to be that he's got to be the leader here

Matt Loehrer (40:55)
Great.

I think he got paid 400 grand for this movie and everybody else got 50 grand. Yep.

Tug McTighe (41:12)
That seems about right.

So, yeah, so this is about the midpoint of movie. This is Mac addressing the crew outside. They're burning all that blood. Again, they're burning everything. Again, blow torches. He also says he introduces the idea of a ticking clock that never resolves. He says there's a big storm hitting us in six hours. A lot of these movies will have a ticking clock. Like, we have to solve this problem in six hours. It makes the tension. It makes the plot go faster.

Anyway, nothing really happens with the ticking clock because about 40 minutes later he goes this storm is sitting this in six hours when he should have said five hours, but nonetheless He makes a tape of what's going on He brings back some torn up clothes. There's this torn up clothes thing that kind of Not comes out of nowhere, but is kind of coming out of nowhere. It gets resolved later But the idea here is that when the people change into the when they get When they shape shift

their clothes get torn off. So everybody clothes also have names on them, which is helpful, but they're trying to, again, they're trying to find out who's the bad guy. And they're like, the clothes, don't you see? Also, I want to mention Carpenter's continual dips to black. So he'll dip to black in between scenes a lot. And it's a really old fashioned editing move that just isn't much done today, but it's just a

John Carpenter thing and he did do one moment of deep focus where someone's in the foreground doing something, the camera's focused on him and then someone comes in the background and what you would normally do is you would do a rack, they it a rack focus where it's focused on me in the foreground and then you come in the door and then it rack focuses to you but then they just, they do double exposure so the guy's looking at the camera real close to the camera and then Russell comes in and can see both of them in focus. So that's called deep focus everyone if you don't know.

Matt Loehrer (43:06)
Nice. He was a big Howard Hawks fan too. So I would not be surprised if he used a lot of these kind of rhetorical video flourishes.

Tug McTighe (43:07)
But there, you yeah, so there's a, yeah, you just, yeah, exactly,

exactly. So,

The remaining men have lost faith in Gary's leadership, even though he's a sharpshooter. So they kind of vote and give it to McCready.

They go see Blair who wants to come back in. He says, I'm fine now, but how do know he's not fine, Matt?

Matt Loehrer (43:26)
Yay.

Cause he had a noose hanging next to his chair. So it's like he was gonna kill himself and then for whatever reason he didn't and decided that he's perfectly fine. And he's not gonna hurt anybody.

Tug McTighe (43:42)
That's right.

That's right. So, yeah, so he's not okay.

Matt Loehrer (43:47)
So they've all split up, which I think is nuts, but McCready and Knowles are looking for Fuchs and they find him and he's been burned to a crisp, but he's still human. So they assume that he committed suicide, but that seems like quite an assumption.

Tug McTighe (43:51)
Right.

Yeah,

self-immolation is, yeah. And they even ask, why would he burn himself? Or why would it burn him? Why would it? Anyway, a lot of weird assumptions.

Matt Loehrer (44:11)
Right. It didn't make any sense.

Windows goes back to base. Well, McCready and Nolz investigate McCready's shack because the lights are on and he said he shut them off. And then, yeah, and then Nolz comes back by himself and they said, where's McCready? And he said, I found his torn clothes. I think he's been assimilated. So I left him outside.

Tug McTighe (44:20)
I left them off, I didn't leave right.

Right.

So I cut the rope, right, that we're all attached to the rope.

Matt Loehrer (44:34)
Right, but then who shows up at McCready pounding on the door? Right, so they're not sure if they're going to let him in or not, and actually childs takes out an axe and he's trying to. cut down the door so he can get in and. When they do get the door open, they see that there's McCready and he's got a flamethrower again and dynamite so. Right, so if.

Tug McTighe (44:36)
He's frozen, right? Because it's like 40 below. He's got ice all over him.

Yes, and a big thing of dynamite.

So

again, this may be the moment that I bring it up. I'm neither an expert in Antarctic science outposts, nor am I an expert in flamethrowers. But I don't know why on the manifest of equipment for a scientific outpost, there are at least 10 flamethrowers. And also, apparently, a healthy box of dynamite.

Matt Loehrer (45:00)
You know.

Me neither.

Right.

Right and barrels of fuel that they just leave lying around. Yep. So he's holding him at Bay. He says it's not me. And then during this encounter, Norris.

Tug McTighe (45:28)
I guess you got to blow the ice and barrels and barrels of fuel. Yeah. So again,

Right now they're all

really pointing the finger at each other. Nobody knows who's, yeah.

Matt Loehrer (45:44)
yeah, it's back and

forth and it must be Gary because he had the keys to the blood. But Copper was the one that suggested it, right? So in the midst of all this, Norris has a heart attack. So they get him up on the table. describe what happens next.

Tug McTighe (45:49)
you had the keys and maybe someone took them from me and right.

Yes.

and you're about to see some shit.

So

he defibrillate, he's defibrillating him and he's doing chest compressions and on the shock, the body, the torso of Norris opens up into a mouth and bites both of his arms off and then he pulls back. Yeah. And, their blood is spraying everywhere and it's a genius fucking visual.

Matt Loehrer (46:20)
Yeah, at the elbow.

It was very cool and the way that they did this was they got a double amputee with with no lower arms and he he played that role of Norris from the arms down and they just kind of created these forearms and stuck him onto him with fake bones and fake sinew and all this stuff and he just pulled his stumps out of him. Yeah, pretty amazing. And good.

Tug McTighe (46:34)
incredible.

Incredible, incredible. And now you're really

starting to, if you thought you had seen everything from a gore and a special effects standpoint that this film had to offer, you haven't seen anything yet, because now we're about to continue to double and triple down on this disgusting creature.

Matt Loehrer (47:10)
Yeah, this scene was amazing. So they're freaking out. Coppers lost his arms and I'm pretty sure he dies. And this Norris creature, the Norris thing just starts to evolve and stretch and freak out and he's got stuff sticking out of him and now he's on the he's got spider legs on the ceiling. And of course.

Tug McTighe (47:29)
and that his head

stretches off of his neck.

Matt Loehrer (47:33)
Yeah, well, they start they start. They get the flamethrower on him, so they had that handy again. So they start burning the torso. yeah, they're like after this flamethrower and that flamethrower, they only have five flamethrowers left. But the head. As the rest of the body is getting burned, the head stretches itself and snaps off and hits the floor and grows.

Tug McTighe (47:37)
Yeah, flamethrower. Everybody's got a flamethrower backpack.

Mmm. Mmm.

Detaches, yeah.

Matt Loehrer (48:00)
these weird spider legs and now the head's upside down.

Tug McTighe (48:02)
upside down and eyes

come out, right? And the mouth is still the mouth. And this is one of the, if not the like seminal special effects scene that everybody talks about this just craziness.

Matt Loehrer (48:13)
Yeah, this is pretty amazing. So this

gross thing is, they just kind of stop and watch it walking out the door before they turn their flamethrower on it. Right. The head spider. So that was pretty classic. I think McFarland Toys made a thing set and it had a two part, one was the head and one was the rest of the body.

Tug McTighe (48:20)
Right. I think MacReady says, no way or something like that. Yeah.

Of course.

Of course. Well, and

now you get another moment of where the helicopter pilot is now a scientist, which they also could have explained away had they explained it away. But he's like, I think that every part of this thing is an individual life form. So it's just trying to maintain, you know, survival. And so when we killed the body and that piece of the head blew away, it it was also, and they're all like, well, it sounds good to me. Get your flamethrower juiced up.

Matt Loehrer (48:42)
Right.

Right.

Tug McTighe (49:02)
And he says, yeah, right back to the blood. He says,

Matt Loehrer (49:03)
He is a pilot after all, so why wouldn't you know this?

Tug McTighe (49:07)
if all of us, if you're, if you get cut and you bleed, it's just tissue. It's not an organism. Therefore, well, hold on there. Helicopter pilot RJ. Therefore, if I put a hot wire into the blood, it will just be blood. If you're human.

But it will cause a  if you're a thing and everybody's like I was like sounds good enough for me. I'm just a cook. So so yeah, and this part they have a doctor's tools and let me tell you something about it back to diabetes before the you know continuous glucose monitor my friend my Chanka who was diabetic

Matt Loehrer (49:35)
it will try to defend itself. And they're like, good enough.

Right. So then they give blood.

Tug McTighe (49:56)
He would he had the little machine that pricked your finger and he tested his butt. It just pricked your finger. They grab a scalpel and they go to town and it's like a fucking six inch. It's not a six inch tug. It's like a five stitch cut one. It's like all you have to you just have to just poke it. So anyway, I

Matt Loehrer (50:11)
It's, it's deep.

Yeah, no windows

windows puts that scalpel in his thumb and I'm like dude, you don't you're gonna. You kind of need some stitches after that one.

Tug McTighe (50:19)
Yeah, Jesus Christ. So,

so they test the blood, they test, no, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

Matt Loehrer (50:29)
And they're all tied up together on the couch. Yeah, yeah, child's Gary, child's Gary windows, I think, okay.

Tug McTighe (50:31)
Yeah, because they're restraining each other, right? Because McCready is still holding the dynamite. He's still on the dynamite. Yeah. So,

so everyone passes the test except Palmer. And his blood does recoil and then they burn his blood again, the flame throwers, they burn his blood and then he starts having a fucking freak out like like a almost like a seizure. Please. I'd like to stop you here. There's one actor on the planet.

who if they remade this film right now, you would have to cast this actor as Palmer and that actor is Walton Goggins. I'll fight you over this. The second I saw that guy, I'm like, man, Walton Goggins would be that guy today.

Matt Loehrer (51:08)
I do not disagree. No, I think you're right.

he's having the seizure and freaking out and his, again, another amazing transformation. His head turns inside out, his eyeballs fall out, he's doubled in size and the guys that are tied to him are just freaking out like, let me go, let me go, let me go. But of course, McCready can't get his flamethrower to work now. At the one time he needs it, he can't get it to go.

Tug McTighe (51:26)
It's incredible, yeah.

Get us loose, get us loose.

Now, it's, it's, yeah, right, right.

Matt Loehrer (51:41)
So they're freaking out and trying to get off the couch and recoiling from him. The Palmer thing gets loose. Windows has another flamethrower that he's just too shell shocked to use. So he doesn't and he ends up getting killed too. So they're dead.

Tug McTighe (51:50)
Yes.

Right.

Correct.

All right. Talking about death be another great time to talk about our sponsor, Little Bear Graphics. There's nothing worse than an impending deadline. Like when you have some advertising or marketing you need to create and you're behind schedule. Man, when that clock is ticking.

gets more more stressful every minute. Sort of like when you're being picked off one by one by an alien creature bent on assimilating you into its cellular structure. We all hate when that happens, right? If this sounds like a problem you're facing, give Matt at Little Bear Graphics a shout. He can help you with all kinds of marketing materials, from websites and emails to stickers and trade show booths. He is not, unfortunately, a flamethrower wielding helicopter pilot, but you can see his work and get in contact with Little Bear at littlebear.graphics today. So no flamethrower for Matt.

Matt Loehrer (52:24)
Ha

Tug McTighe (52:44)
Only great marketing ideas.

Matt Loehrer (52:46)
No flamethrower yet. Christmas is coming. So at this point, everybody's just losing it. They leave Childs here to go check on Blair, but when they get to the shack where they tied him up or had imprisoned him rather, they find that he's escaped. He dug a tunnel underneath it. And he's been using vehicle components to assemble a flying saucer of his own. So here's where I have a problem.

Tug McTighe (52:48)
Yet!

Yeah.

Yeah, right. He dug a big tunnel.

Let's hear it.

Matt Loehrer (53:19)
If this thing is like the xenomorph in, is that right? in Alien and Aliens and Aliens 3 and Aliens 4. It's a creature. It's kind of an animal.

Tug McTighe (53:23)
Yep, an alien. Yep.

Correct?

It's parasite,

it's an animal, it's a virus. The only thing the xenomorph does is hunt and kill and eat and impregnate and procreate. That's all it does, right? You actually don't even see it eating. It just finds a host, impregnates a host and makes another alien. That's exactly right.

Matt Loehrer (53:46)
Right. It's a biological imperative, it's like if you have,

it's like if you had a bear, right? That, and then the bear is building a spaceship. You'd be like, what the hell is this? don't build spaceships.

Tug McTighe (53:56)
That's exactly right. Yeah. Well,

it's actually even worse because a bear can find a cave for shelter. But this is not need shelter. This is a parasite or this is a virus. This is like you said, this is a creature. And all of sudden, they've never given you any indication that it has intelligence. And so now it's

Matt Loehrer (54:17)
Right. I could see

one explanation you could say, well, it uses it's got this survival instinct. So it uses its host's intelligence. Except I don't think Wilfrid Brimley knows how to build a spaceship either. Maybe he does, but I doubt it.

Tug McTighe (54:26)
Yes, yes, yes.

I think he does either. You're right. Yeah. Yeah. So

again, and they don't like there are to the point we make a lot. There's a hundred ways to write around this. Well, it's a hive mind. They've already given a hundred assumptions. So you can might as well give another one. Hey, look, there looks like there's 10 more of these that are dead or whatever. Maybe they're all connected somehow and maybe, but no, this thing is a monster. And, now they now it's, and by the way, it's yeah, no, not a spaceship building monster. Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (54:41)
Right.

Yeah, it's a monster. Not a spaceship building monster, just a murderous monster.

Tug McTighe (54:59)
So so they're like well we better blow this up and by the way, there's a fucking great dynamite throwing scene Where he he tosses mccready. He must have been a pitcher too He tosses the dynamite it goes directly down the hallway and like rolls into the spaceship like it's an incredible shot

Matt Loehrer (55:12)
Yeah.

Yeah, I believe Kurt Russell did play baseball. So, right. So they blow that up.

Tug McTighe (55:20)
Yes, he's an athlete for sure.

They go back. Now everything's fucked. The generators destroyed. There's no heat. The lights are off. They're clearly being sabotaged. They don't know by who because everybody's just at the storm is still coming theoretically. Now McCready baseball playing flame thrower wielding helicopter flying scientist speculates that with no escape left.

Matt Loehrer (55:34)
Storm's coming, maybe.

Tug McTighe (55:50)
The thing intends to return into hibernation until there's a lot of talking. Again, intelligence and the creature suggested here, which we didn't get before. They all agree that the thing, they make a suicide pact basically. Look, man, we can't let this thing get out of here. So they decide they're gonna destroy the station. And again, there's just so much speculation and postulation in this whole film.

Matt Loehrer (56:00)
Mm-hmm.

Tug McTighe (56:15)
that it gets a little tiresome because what you've got to do is you've got to write it in, you've got to write around it, you've got to give us clues, you've got to show us something or tell us, at least tell us something like in a mystery, right? Like the best mysteries you should have been able to see, you should have been able to figure out the best written mysteries. You should be able to figure out who the bad guy was. But anyway.

Matt Loehrer (56:34)
Right. But in this case,

we only know because Kurt Russell says something because he says, well, I think it must be this.

Tug McTighe (56:39)
That's correct. All right.

He wrote a re-girder of the third side triangle is equivalent to the thing. So Blair, right, who built the spaceship, we know he's the thing. He comes in like it. Yeah, he comes in and a great cut like a jump scare. And then he puts his hands in one of the guy's faces. Oh, Gary, think it's Gary, the leader.

Matt Loehrer (56:44)
Right.

And he's sneaking around.

Tug McTighe (57:05)
And then Nulls just leaves. He's had enough.

Matt Loehrer (57:09)
He did. Well, so we presume that, so this is after we see Blair kill Gary. And I thought, well, he just sticks his hand in his mouth, but you can see his fingers like underneath his skin. But I also assume that he's like spewing like matter into his. Yeah. So he's killing him that way. And yeah, Nolz and McCready are kind of together and Nolz does one of these. Hey, what's down that?

Tug McTighe (57:12)
Presume death.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the tendrils and all that, right? Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (57:33)
and he just leaves. We don't see him again. I think they had big plans for him, like an ending to show it, and then they just ran out of money. Or wanted to wrap it up.

Tug McTighe (57:34)
It just walks away. Yeah.

Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, think,

yeah, gotta just wrap it up.

McCready's about to trigger the explosives and the Blair thing transforms into just an enormous creature under the floor. Giant tentacles grabs that, you know, it's the old TNT. It's that little T thing. It pulls it into the hole. So he doesn't have the detonator anymore. And,

It breaks free and it's gigantic and horrifying and everything it's absorbed so far. see the dog a little bit. You see the people in it. She heads and faces and mouths and teeth and all this and blood and sinew and guts and gore And it's really amazing. It's a giant creature and he just disgusting and so much goo pouring off of it.

Matt Loehrer (58:20)
it was terrifying and gross. Yeah. If you don't question

like I kind of questioned a conservation conservation of mass thing like.

Tug McTighe (58:31)
How much could it possibly weigh?

Matt Loehrer (58:33)
Yeah, and how would it get back into one person? Like, how could that be all that be inside Blair? Was he just holding it inside? Who knows? But it doesn't matter because it's fake.

Tug McTighe (58:36)
Right.

Right, right, right, right. Yeah, because the

dog weighs 80 pounds and it's got 540 pounds of people in it right now.

Matt Loehrer (58:48)
Yeah,

so their initial ending scene had a monster that I think was an entire wall and it required 50 people to operate it at the same time. And they just did not, they did not have the money. So this is what we got.

Tug McTighe (58:58)
gotcha. Just couldn't do it.

Oh well don't forget we

have a great action film one-liner. Yeah, fuck you too! He throws the-

Matt Loehrer (59:07)
We do. Fuck you too. And he throws the

pitches, the the TNT, the dynamite that he's carrying, which he could have done the whole time. I don't know why they need to wire up the whole place, but maybe they needed to to get a blow up. So he runs outside and there's an explosion and you hear a howling scream, which was something that the studio insisted they insert over the top of it so people would know that the aliens dead. Right.

Tug McTighe (59:13)
The dynamite. The F.

No.

So we know the thing is dead, yeah, right.

So McCready sits down. Yep.

Matt Loehrer (59:39)
And then McCready heads back, yeah,

heads back to camp. Things are on fire. He's got a bottle of JB again. There's no heat. There's no place to live. And then who shows up?

Tug McTighe (59:42)
Has this bottle of JB.

That's right, they're dead.

Childs, baby. He said I got lost in this storm while pursuing Blair They're both like well they sit down they don't know if each other is the thing They go. Well, here's the bottle. Here's a bottle of booze. There's not much we can do We're gonna it's gonna be 150 below in two hours and that storm is coming And so he child says what should we do now and the creedie just says let's sit here sit here while and see what happens and They they drink they drink the bottle and that's it

Matt Loehrer (1:00:03)
They're exhausted anyway. They're like, there's not much we could do anyway.

Right.

So I had a thought about that.

Yeah, if we see the devastated camp and then we fade to the title card and the credits. By the way, John Carpenter saved $250,000 by using the destroyed camp as the Norwegian camp that they saw at the beginning of the movie. They just filmed out of order.

Tug McTighe (1:00:34)
same

set. So they just shot that at the end. The Norwegian scenes. Smart.

Matt Loehrer (1:00:37)
They yeah,

they just shot that scene after. So I wondered about this.

Tug McTighe (1:00:40)
Yeah, he's the notorious. Yeah,

he's good for sorting out how to figure this, how to do this for a nickel, you know.

Matt Loehrer (1:00:45)
Yeah.

He needed to save some money, but when Child says or when McCready says, let's just sit here while and wait what happens earlier, he said that he believed the alien just wants to hibernate. So maybe it's him, maybe he wants that to happen.

Tug McTighe (1:00:58)
he did.

Right, maybe

he does because he he that's why they wanted to burn it because they didn't want it to get cold Right child says it won't last that long though. It's

Matt Loehrer (1:01:08)
Right.

interesting.

IMDB has some cool stuff on it. Like they will take you through a director and how they work and how they operate. And for John Carpenter, there are new words like lynchian and Kubrickian that have been added to the dictionary, but not Carpenter esque, which they thought it should be. So per IMDB, their definition of Carpenter esque is long takes through long confined worlds like

Tug McTighe (1:01:23)
Sure.

Yep.

Matt Loehrer (1:01:37)
corridors and hallways and cramped spaces. Bleak stories in bleaker surroundings.

Tug McTighe (1:01:40)
Yep.

Check and check.

Matt Loehrer (1:01:45)
reluctant sarcastic heroes.

Tug McTighe (1:01:47)
Double check.

Matt Loehrer (1:01:49)
brooding electronic scores, possibly written by Carpenter himself. now he had a lot, the whole do, do, do, do, do, that kind of, that was him. And a sense of dread. So I think they hit all the, you know, hit them all on this one.

Tug McTighe (1:01:52)
Right? Maybe not this time, but certainly.

Yeah, it's him.

Matt Loehrer (1:02:08)
Alright, so I will ask the question I always ask. Was this a sin a hit or a sin a miss?

Tug McTighe (1:02:14)
Well,

it was definitely a sin to hit all the all the amazing effects. All the

Paranoia the dread all that carpenter esque stuff you mentioned. I mean, that's why it's Yeah, It's Third act problems like a lot of movies like this do but the script is interesting. The storyline is interesting The creatures interesting You know the save the cat I talk about that all the time So I'll keep doing it the genre for this kind of movie is called monster in the house. So like jaws is monster in the house

Aliens monster in the house and again, uh the the sort there's three elements that they that they That they call out that make it monster in the house. One is a monster that is supernatural in its powers Right or or it's evil at its core. It's you know, you know, like that's jaws was just evil at its core it's just wants to kill a house meaning an enclosed space that can't get out of it concluded at town or a family unit or

in this case, a military base, and then it needs a sin or some kind of neglect. Someone is guilty of bringing the monster in, whether that was on purpose or ignorant, it doesn't matter, but somebody brought it here, right? So this is definitely Monster in the House, definitely a city hit. It's got story problems, but so what? A lot of stuff does. It's well worth the hour and 40 minutes I spent on it. And again, for somebody like you and I who...

likes monster movies and like supernatural stuff and likes practical effects. got it. You've got to have seen it.

Matt Loehrer (1:03:44)
I know that Carpenter did talk to fans after the trailer was screened.

and said, hey, you're to see my movie. And they said, what's about like, who's the monster at the end? And he said, well, you have to decide for themselves. And they said, yeah, I hate that kind of movie. I'm not going to watch that. Yeah. So the thing is free to watch with a subscription to MGM Plus, which I did not know was a thing, but apparently everything's streaming. Or you can rent it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, or you can.

Tug McTighe (1:03:58)
Right and I love that kind of Yeah

Who knows?

That's where I saw it as I mentioned.

Matt Loehrer (1:04:12)
You can probably buy it for not a whole lot of money. Actually, if you're willing to watch a DVD, you can get for like 12 bucks. You can get the original 1950s movie, the 1982 movie and the 2011 prequel. So that'd be cheap. All right. Hey, if you like what we're doing here, email us ideas and feedback at cinemuses at gmail.com. And we might give you a shout out like this one to one of our now dozens.

Tug McTighe (1:04:26)
There you go. See, there you go. Triple win.

Matt Loehrer (1:04:39)
dedicated listeners and my friend and coworker Amy Dement. Hi Amy, thank you for listening. Tug, what are we gonna do next?

Tug McTighe (1:04:46)
We're gonna do a great movie that I love the I'm so glad you haven't seen because I can't wait to talk with you about it. It's Matt Damon's Not really sci-fi. course, there's science and it's fiction, but it's more of a space NASA realism sigh realism How about that movie the Martian based on the book by Andy Weir, which is a terrific novel about Problem-solving in the most difficult place to solve problems, which is the middle of space

Mass never... Yeah, that's the second hardest in ad agency. But yeah, I'm looking forward to The Martian. I love that book and I love that movie and I can't wait to break it down with you.

Matt Loehrer (1:05:13)
I thought you were going to say an ad agency.

I'm looking forward to it. Meanwhile, I'm Matt.

Tug McTighe (1:05:27)
I am Tug.

Matt Loehrer (1:05:27)
and we'll see you next time.

Tug McTighe (1:05:29)
Peace.