Blank Check with Griffin & David - The Thing with Emily St. James

Episode Date: September 12, 2021

Here’s the thing about THE THING - it might be the best movie we’ve ever covered? Emily St. James joins us (and joins the five-timers club!) to discuss Carpenter’s Arctic paranoia classic, which was unfairly maligned upon release. Topics covered include the “Brimley COCOON Line,” the film as a trans allegory, and dogs getting their faces peeled back like bananas. Checkout Emily’s podcast What to Watch on the Vox Quick Hits feed or the scripted series Arden! Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! Buy some real nerdy merch at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com

I know you gentlemen have been through a lot, but when you find the time, I'd rather not spend the rest of this winter tied to this fucking podcast. That guy's got great eyebrows. I love it. Donald Moffat, right? That's Donald Moffat? Yeah.

I love his eyebrows. That guy's, I could ride him all the way home you what you want to go on an eyebrow ride i would would happily go on an eyebrow is he the president in clear and present danger i think he is or is he the secretary of defense or something let's see he's the president he's the president it's at the end harrison ford's like you've you've been a bad man mr and he's like how dare you and then he's like you're bad and he's like fine i'll resign he's also he's he's linda b johnson in the right stuff yeah yes i i feel like he is always perpetually playing an evil old man who also possesses a lot of power which is like a very specific type

casting but also one where there's a surprising number of times you can pop up as evil old man with a lot of power well let's acknowledge his single most evil character the tax man and robert altman's popeye do you remember what tax you know what you what? I'm glad Carpenter won March Madness, but if Altman had won March Madness, I truly was going to have a renewal of vows to my wife at Popeye Village and fly all the blank check folks out, do a wedding episode.

Emily. But Carpenter won. I know, I know. Well, next year, maybe. Do you remember his bit in Popeye? He's really good. Because his bit is he just keeps on coming in and telling people that there's a new tax that they have to pay for. It's funny.

Like he's like, oh, baby on a dinner table tax, five cents. The thing about fucking Popeye is it captures the spirit of a newspaper comic strip. It does. It is a perfect adaptation of a newspaper comic strip. It does. It is a perfect adaptation of a newspaper comic strip, and people didn't appreciate it, and there needs to be a blank check wedding episode at the Popeye Village in Malta. Absolutely.

It's going to happen. One week on the George Lucas talk show, we set a stretch goal for one of our fundraisers that was the boys go to Popeye Village in Malta. And I believe the crew who we had signed on to do it as of that moment which is probably like 2 a.m we've been streaming for like 13 hours and we were like here we go if we reach 200 000 the boys are gonna go to the popeye village in malta and i believe it was Steven Weber. That'd be fun.

He's probably a good hang. Nate Corddry, of course, George Lucas, Watto. Those guys, yeah, we know them. I think there was another actor we had roped into doing it. Anyway, this is not an episode on Popeye, unfortunately. We will get there eventually, if it's the last thing

I do, we will get there. And Watto's gonna officiate the wedding. Oh, boy. This is, I mean, God. Watto officiates the renewal of vows at Popeye's Village in Malta. It's a pretty incredible event. It really is. I'm trying to figure out how far Popeye Village is from the Malta airport.

Let's find out. Oh, I did this math pretty recently. I'm glad this is all on our minds independently. It's not a big island, Malta. I believe it's the densest populated place on earth, Malta. Really? Because it's so small.

There's a lot of people there. I've never been. The other reason I looked into it is because Malta now has, I think, one of only four remaining open Planet Hollywood locations. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Is it because Bruce Willis is too lazy to fly there and close it down so they just keep on going?

He's like, I don't want to go there. Yeah, here it is yeah it's open right now yeah yes it is i can book a table what a double episode that would be writing wedding renewal at popeye village and then you do like a ben's choice from planet hollywood i feel like hell yeah that yeah i hope the malta planet holly Hollywood is just Popeye stuff. Gotta say, the food doesn't look great. It doesn't look great. Nope.

It looks okay. You realize the Times Square Planet Hollywood stayed open until the pandemic. Uh-huh. And that was that. At a certain point, half the real estate became a buca di beppo. But it still was half planet hollywood on like 48th street and broadway and i i had always i don't know i always thought we'd go someday i've never been how did they not become like a outlet for a ghost kitchen that's what like all the chains stood around here i know yeah i know it's it should have become like a outlet for a ghost kitchen that's what like all the chains did around here i know yeah i know it should have become like uh uh slides sliders or something you know they should

have had like three there should have been a ghost kitchen each for stallone willis and schwarzenegger this of course is uh blank check with griffin and david i'm griffin i'm david here's the thing about the planet hollywood in malta griffin here's the thing people are confused i just said it was blank check and now people are gonna think it's alec baldwin on npr of course it opened in 2019 so they can't close it they just opened the damn thing it's fresh it's too fresh it's fresh um but but you did kind of spoil david here is the thing okay wow oh yeah that's true wow that's true this week on blank check we say here's the thing do you think people get invited on to here's the thing with alec baldwin and then he's like so

what's your take on trump and they're like i thought i was here to talk about the thing the hit movie i was sad to be invited on that show and be asked about Trump and not John Carpenter's 1982 classic, The Thing, one of the great films ever made. Emily, were you on Here's the Thing with Alec Baldwin? I was not on Here's the Thing with Alec Baldwin. I have a friend who was.

I mean, it happens, right? I've heard that when Alec Baldwin invites guests on Here's the Thing before he starts recording, he just goes, oh, one second. And he slices open their hand, takes a petri dish of their blood, and puts a heated up bronze copper wire in it to see if it acts up. And then he goes, great, now I can speak to Patti Smith. He did tie me to a chair. Yeah. Right.

This is a podcast about filmographies. Sometimes it's about Planet Hollywood. Sometimes it's about Popeye Village. Sometimes it's about Alec Baldwin retiring from public life. These are three subjects that come up a fair amount on the show. But primarily at its heart, this show is about filmographies directors who have massive success early on in their career and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want. And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they mutate into a monster win wilford brimley baby and this is a mini series on the films of john carpenter johnny boy carpenter john john john john carpenter john john john john carpenter uh today we're talking

but what i think many people consider to be his masterpiece, but this is a guy I think more so than a lot of directors we've covered who has like five or six movies that people argue are the masterpiece. And like conventionally argue are the masterpiece. Not like outro picks, you know?

This is his blank check, right? This is the one where they're like, take what you want. I think it's the most this is his blank check right this is the one where they're like yes take what you want this i think it's it's the most conventional like when we're talking about blank checks it's the one that you most conventionally could say like yes that is the blank check i do think escape from la is weirdly his biggest blank check but we i think we talked about this a lot of that is russell russell's kind of the cosigner on it um but i mean

that movie cost 50 million dollars which is we'll talk about it uh but but yeah no this is the sort of look he said he made halloween he's at the height of his success he's moving to the studio system he has money for the first time this is the blank check he's refrigerating sets he's flying to alaska it's it's the blank check he's minted a movie star kurt's his guy now he's not an unconventional kick kurt's helping him like uh get this uh glow up and it is at the time uh undeniably a bounce i knew this film had seriously uh flopped at the box office i did not realize until i was digging into this last night to what extent this movie was met with like vitriol oh god people hated it people were furious furious everyone like audiences critics everyone fucking hated this thing

this thing do you think it's because a dog's face gets peeled apart like a banana 20 minutes in, and then after that, things get a lot worse? Do you think that's why? Like this, David? Yes. Griffin has a banana. Griffin, what is your... Is this from a thing video game

or something, your background? Correct. I don't recognize it. This is the thing video game that came out in like the early 2000s i think for pc primarily but then maybe was also on yeah i remember i remember it right i mean like a pretty well reviewed not like great review like at the time yeah yeah and it was sort of like uh ahead of the curve now of like cult movies getting remade into modern video games i uh i know it has like a trust system it tried to build in like yeah like some sort of uh thematic elements i think that's what this picture is because my um let me just see uh so my my background is there's like a thing like torso hung on the wall right monster remnant yes right but it's like he's

like hung like in a noose and then his chest and his lower arms are all like thingy and then the you're i guess this guy in the lower corner you're like his pov and there's a guy standing next to the corpse with a gun to his head and then there's a green square above his head with a question mark. And I think that's the trust feature. I just think this is such a bleak image for a video game, especially one with graphics that are like not that far beyond like golden eye. Like that's the level of detail we're looking at here is like a pretty

spare room, a horribly mutilated corpse hanging from the wall. And then a guy with a gun to his head and there's a box going like do you trust him everybody in that image looks like big pussy from the sopranos and max kane had a baby like that's just absolutely like that absolutely well put well said oh i miss i miss that era of video games but um i'm surprised no one has taken another swing at the thing. Another thing swing. There's a lot of tabletop games. I know that.

Yeah. And tabletop is kind of where it belongs. There have been a fair amount of comics, I think, as well. Makes sense for a tabletop game because it's good to have things where it's like, do I trust you? That's always a good mechanic in a tabletop game. in a in a tabletop game i i do think a big part of it david is that like the the 2011 film which uh god it flips me out that that was a decade ago that's that's a prime example of a movie from the 2010s that i could have sworn came out three years ago um but that movie i think had been in the works for like a long time i I feel like from the early 2000s, Universal was like, oh, this thing's considered a classic

now. We should do something with it. And there was maybe 10 years of development hell of trying to figure out something to do with the thing. And then, right, the video game is sort of at the beginning of that. And then I think there's a period where they maybe like didn't want to do more shit because they were waiting to put all their chips on the new movie and try to revitalize it that way but now it's been 10 years they should make a new fucking game they should do shit like that well aren't they

planning another remake of this yes they are yes yes the thing i remember about the thing the thing i remember about the 2011 uh prequel is uh ron moore ends battlestar Galactica and there's like a lot of hoopla about he's moving into the movies the first thing he's going to write is the new version of the thing and it's a prequel and it's going to be great and he turns in a script that apparently just nobody liked and like knowing Ron Moore's love

of bleakness his crossover with the thing could have been truly dark and despairing and I would have liked it yeah you would have liked it. You might have liked it, although I will say I love Ronald Moore. I love the man. He's made things that I love. But sometimes I do think he can outthink himself a little bit. He'll go like five

layers deep and I'm like, Ron, just write a thriller. It's okay. People enjoy entertainment. You don't have to subvert the genre three times in 40 minutes or whatever but anyway david have you watched for all mankind no i need you would love it i knew the question was coming i know we've been talking recently david and i about the fact that both of us are like we got to watch that fucking thing right i i know i gotta watch it i assume i'm

gonna like it here's my bigger take i think i want to be an Apple TV plus hoe. I think I want to do that. I think I'm going to watch C. Why not? Well, David, come on. I'm going to watch C. Why shouldn't someone should watch C? Shouldn't they? I'm imagining trying to tell a friend at a dinner party,

I love that show C. And they're like, are you saying a letter to me? What is this? Is it the letter C? Is it the body of water? dinner party i love that show c and they're like are you saying a letter to me what are you what is this right is is it the letter c is it is it the body of water i'm like no c because the no it's set in a world where everyone is blind okay it's terrible but you should watch it okay great um no apple apple tv good that's one of the surprises of the last year. They are doing the FX AMC thing of only greenlighting stuff they're passionate about. And sometimes it's terrible,

but generally it's pretty good. And I watch so much stuff there. It's limited enough that there's like, you can actually develop a standard of quality because you're like, well, they're not making everything. Yeah, right. It's kind of right. They're trying to be HBO back in the day or whatever.

Is that a good strategy? I don't know. Who cares? Yeah. I'm an Apple TV plus ho, okay? Yeah. It's very hard for me to say that. It's just sort of like a lot of words that don't really work.

Yeah, I mean, you don't have to say it, and you certainly don't have to phrase it that way. Our guest today is Emily Vanderwerf, of course. Hi. Our dear friend here to talk about the thing um a movie i feel like you emailed me about something else and then ended the email with by the way just putting it out there the thing is a very important trans text and then i texted david and went well i guess emily's on the thing that's my trump card text. And then I texted David and went, well, I guess Emily's on the thing. That's my Trump card. That sounds good.

I know. You've pulled that card twice, and both times we go, yeah, sure, yeah, the episode's yours. But Christmas Carol, you just pulled the, it's about Christmas, which is even better. Right, you pulled the Christmas card, yeah. That's how you get on this show five times. You just keep saying, oh, I'm going to,

this is the fiver, right? Look, Emily, you're one of our favorite people. You're one of our favorite guests. We need no convincing to have you on the show, but I just admire that this and Silence of the Lambs, you picked the two biggest movies in each filmography. In both cases, people you would sort of bang the drum for pretty hard in March Madness, and just went like, i'm throwing it out there here's my take try telling me i'm

not on this episode well i uh you know um i uh uh i wrote a very nice email to you guys i was just like hey you're you're my friends and i love you and i'm in your corner. And by the way, I should be on the thing. And it worked. It worked. So don't reward my behavior. No, look, everyone is rewarded every time you come on the show. That's exactly true. That doesn't mean that anyone

should ever write me an email though. No, never. I want to get clear. And we're not even saying don't write us that kind of email. We're saying no one ever write any email to either of the two of us. If you want to write me an email,

you just better think long and hard about that email yeah just be very very sure you want to do it the thing the thing that i the thing that i have backed myself into with this show is that i alternate one of my favorite movies of all time with one of my least favorite movies of all time and that happened because i was on munich and i was like i don't really think i i think that's my weakest episode to rank myself i was like i don't really think i nailed that and then i was having lunch with david when i was in new york sometime and he was like i think we're gonna do michael bay and i was like i will come on and do transformers uh what's the second one revenge of the fallen yeah this is one of the worst movies yeah it's revenge of the fallen correct one of the worst movies i've's revenge of the fallen correct one of the

worst movies i've ever seen yeah we've talked about this the the the legendary cancelled michael bay series where we had booked every episode where we literally had the whole schedule figured out and then we got pretty much scared by the internet yeah everyone was wrangling for the island though that was the one everyone wanted but i wouldn't thought they were being cute asking for the island though that was the one everyone wanted but everyone thought they were being cute asking for the island but they didn't realize everyone wanted the island i want to say arp had called dibs on it first but everyone else was asking arp called dibs on it in his way of like well that's my episode because it's sort of his most forgotten project or whatever like that was sort of he was just identified which is it i don't know i don't know uh but yeah then i i david was like uh david like dm'd me one day and like what felt like a panic being like you hate alice in wonderland

right and that was my second time on and since then i've just been like i'm gonna keep this going so right love hate love hate that makes sense you're you're yeah now i have to do another total piece of shit so you either gotta do finally do bay or you gotta do tom hooper those are kind of the two where i'm like i know what i'm doing we're not doing tom hooper for crying out what's the which one i will do the danish girl it will be everybody wants the longest episode in blank check history i want the shortest episode yeah it's gonna be the Danish girl. It's me talking for five minutes. Then there's five minutes of box office game.

There's like 15 minutes of ad reads. That's it. I don't know. Can't I like read some like Wikipedia facts from like the page for Denmark maybe? I don't know. Ethnic groups, 86% Danish, stuff like that, right? Gross domestic product. It seems to be about $370 billion.

Yeah, we could get into some Denmark facts, maybe. I don't know. I mean, if we have to pad the episode, we could just have pastries. Yeah, have some Danish. Exactly. We just sort of go on Danish tangents. Various Danish tangents.

Yeah, because, I mean, Emily, you're saying I only want to talk about this movie for five minutes. You're forgetting that we did an episode on a master builder that featured a straight hour of talk about playmobil that's true this is true yes yes but uh yeah i always find a way to make it too long i appreciate that anyway uh we're never doing tom hooper i mean danish girl is probably the biggest argument for never fucking doing Tom Hooper. There it is.

It'd be funny to have a Cats episode, and I'm like, but at what cost? There's some interesting stuff in there. Like, Les Mis is like a very fucking weird movie. No, no, every episode would be funny, I think. The Damned United is actually a good movie. The King's Speech, you know, everyone can do the bit. Look, the saving grace of the hypothetical Tom Hooper series is that it's not long.

It's not long unless he puts out two movies a year starting next year. I don't know. I don't know what Tom Hooper's working on now. If he starts going Soderbergh, we're fucked. Yeah, right. He goes full speed. He's just doing iPhone shit. Yeah, he was a very yeah right he goes full he's just doing iphone shit yeah um

yeah he was a lovely interview i gotta say he was a nice man uh yeah you interviewed him like like two days before cats came out right i interviewed him right it was like a day or two after the premiere which i had been at and right like the week yeah it was the week of the movies coming out yeah yeah and he was clearly someone who was hours removed from finishing visual effects. Well, he wasn't even removed. It was still happening, right? Because they were still fucking fixing the movie after it came out.

Yeah. The Cyberpunk 2077 of movies. Seriously? Why are we talking about Top? The thing! This is a miniser series on the films of john carpenter it is called they podcast because i was overruled and today we're talking about the thing his 1982 colossal flop reviled i i it wasn't a colossal flop it was okay a flop it was a flop it it disappointed on it completely disappointed.

There's no doubt about it. And it came out, you know, obviously famously pretty much in the same month as E.T. Yes. And Universal

released both movies and thought E.T. would be like a dumb kid's movie that no one wanted to see and that the thing was going to be a big deal and they were wrong.

I know that's often cited as like one of the real causes of this film's negative reception is that this film was sort of like so uh antithetical to et and its spirit and its relationship to aliens it was so bleak after everyone saw this life affirming movie but like the level of vitriol cannot be explained solely by that. I mean, Cinefantastique, which was like a classic horror, sci-fi, fantasy nerd magazine, did an issue. Called it, right, the most hated film of all time. The cover was the thing with the headline, is this the most hated movie of all time? That was a valid question in the aftermath of this film's release.

And it's like, what are some of these quotes here vincent can be called it the quintessential moron movie of the 80s instant junk hell yeah that sounds great yeah this is the thing sounds good right i keep saying this is the thing jesus uh i know i say that all the time but still right uh well the reason that people uh thought that, Griffin, is because the thing is really gross. It's a gross movie, which, again, rules. It is good. But I just think people were completely unprepared because everyone who's ever seen this movie without fair warning or whatever is completely unprepared for what's going to happen right yes you just don't yeah you don't know uh my wife uh had had seen this movie before

and re-watched it with me last night and was just like so grossed out by it don't mean she loved it but she was just like i forgot how gross this is i've seen it i watch it every year and forget how gross it is it seems like an austere movie until it very much is not an austere movie well we should also point out it does start off with just someone trying to murder a dog which rules why would you want to kill this this better be a bad dog and that guy really doesn't like that dog well yeah right because like uh first timer you're like you don't know what's about to happen so you're just like are these guys just killing dogs and that's like kind of their deal you know clearly you make the connection later no of course but no that was

forky's reaction she's like they're gonna kill a dog and i'm like you don't get it this is not a good dog this is this is a bad news dog heard of good dog. This is a bad news dog. Heard of bad news bears. This is a bad news dog. Bad news dog. This is Ebert's review ends with, the thing is basically then just a geek show, which he's using in the like carny term of geek,

which is a show where you watch people bite chickens heads off and shit. Right. He was actually, he was okay on it though. He gives it a mixed review he gives it two and a half stars he says it's basically a geek show a gross out movie in which teenagers can dare one another to watch the screen there's nothing wrong with that i like being

scared and i was scared by many scenes in the thing but it seems clear that carpenter made his choice early on to concentrate on the special effects and the technology and to allow the story and the people to become secondary that's maybe the most positive review it got from a major critic and that one is saying it's good if you were not expecting any depth or intelligence out of this material whatsoever but i understand it i think this movie just scandalized people it's too violent like i i i i just they wish they were like i know you can't do that like i really think they're walking out of there being like too much too much this is a studio movie i get seeing this at one press screening and being like okay no no no way and then like

it sits well like this this movie like is very bleak and nihilistic and dark and that often bombs in theaters and then it when it comes home to all the like weirdo shut-ins like us people are like fuck yeah that's what i need look i mean i don't want to be rude about vincent canby who i'm sure was a nice man he may maybe he was a mean man but you know at the time he's reviewing the thing he is near the end of his uh tenure you know he basically wrapped up in the in the late 80s as a film critic but i just i really just don't think i think that like that there was just a certain kind of critic who was seeing this movie and was like the minute everything goes hog wild is turning their brain off to the darker theme like to to the sort of thematic stuff they're just like that's just the movie where tentacles come out of people's faces and stuff

i can't think about it anymore i just find it fascinating that it was such an immediate and dramatic and total turnoff for people like i understand this movie is very gory but it was just like there's an opposite of this which is cisco and ebert's toy story review i find really fascinating because they only talk about the graphics but you're not that interested in toy story it's very strange that you find that fascinating yeah it's weird that i've watched that 87 times but it's one of those things where it's like it's because i'm such a fucking persnickety toy story nerd that i'm like you guys seriously don't have anything to say about the meat of the movie and their whole review is eight minutes of them being like and the wood on the floor it looks like real wood and you do look at

right but you look at a lot of toy story reviews from the time and it's the opposite thing where people are so positive on the movie but they can only talk about like you won't believe it it looks like plastic and then this it's just every review is just like what is this fucking shit i'm having to look at i mean this is star log magazine every review is just like, what is this fucking shit I'm having to look at? I mean, this is Starlog magazine, right? Which is arguably like the prominent sci-fi horror magazine of its day. So this is not like hoity-toity, elite, snobby critics. Alan Spencer of Starlog magazine called it cold and sterile. A cold and sterile attempt to cash in on the genre audience.

Weird, weird take. Again, I'll say about starlog and i don't want to be mean about alan spencer i don't want to be but like those fucking nerds like star trek where no tentacles ever emerged from anybody's face that's what he said i love star trek too but he's like what's this gross shit where's the you know deep ideas it's a cold and sterile horror movie attempting to cash in on the sci-fi audience against quote the optimism of et the reassuring return of star trek 2 the technical perfection of tron and the sheer integrity of blade runner which blade runner comes out the same weekend as this i believe we'll get to that well i don't want to be rude about uh tron either because i

love tron but i do too i don't know about technical i agree i agree i agree even at the time i think that's not really a thing you can throw out at it but but this is like beyond this okay so you look at that and it's like that's him saying reflecting what we're all talking about which is like this movie's too bleak it's too gory it's just so mean and rotten at its core right it's just this visceral visceral visual effects showcase but then he goes even further in his review and says uh a carpenter was not meant to direct science fiction, but was instead suited to, quote, direct traffic accidents, train wrecks and public floggings. That's kind of funny. Kind of a funny line. But isn't that just wild?

Here's the other thing, though. And I did say here's the thing again. And I understand that I did that. And I will cop to that. Yeah. It's like, you know, when Psycho came out and the sort of early reaction to Psycho from a lot of these fuddy-duddy critics, and I say that as a fuddy-duddy critic, was kind of unease and very mixed and sort of, ooh. But then, of course, Psycho becomes this phenomenon. Right.

And people are checking it out so much that I think it very quickly gets reassessed. People are sort of like, well, geez, that thing kind of took over the world. Bonnie and Clyde is a similar thing. I mean, there are examples of this. But the thing is sort of a bomb. And so it's kind of like, yeah, we were right. The audience rejected that.

It was too gross. And so that's what's funny about its now canonical status, that it survived all that. It's also funny that it was so roundly rejected by both the fan genre press and the mainstream press and flopped and has been reclaimed by both. Like I feel like it is one of the rare genre movies of the last 40 years that is sort of put on like a great American movies pedestal. Not this is a good popcorn movie.

a great American movies pedestal, not this is a good popcorn movie. And it's also within sci-fi and horror circles, I think thrown up as one of the 10 best ever. I was not paying attention to the critical reception in 1982 for some reason. But when I was a. An Alan Spencer fan. I wasn't.

No, I wasn't. I didn't subscribe to Starlog at the time. When I was a little kid, kid there was I loved horror stuff horror has always been my favorite genre and there was this book in the school library called Movie Monsters that had uh you know it was about Frankenstein and the Wolfman and Godzilla and Jaws and Gremlins and then The Thing and like the whole chapter on The Thing was just like dunking on how bad the movie was but we have to include it because the special effects are so impressive so that was

my first impression and then i feel like kind of the film geek world of the early 2000s internet reclaimed it so then i watched it for the first time in college it was like this movie rules this movie is great yeah griffin there's an argument and forgetting patreon because i never remember what we covered on patreon sure there's an argument that this is the best film we've ever covered on the podcast i'm not saying you know obviously it's all in the eye of the beholder yada yada yada but there's an argument it's it's reasonably in that 10 yeah you know i would say so right it's it's in that echelon yes absolutely thing assassin's creed those two obviously under siege two probably coming in at number three right

clifford joe dirt uh right the man who knew too little dirt's more in the back half of the top yeah right it's six through ten uh i i just i kind of can't get over like i was just digging to find anyone defending this movie at the time on any level it doesn't really seem like no the level of rejection is uh fascinating to me and yes like the timeline of sort of it being reclaimed because i think i see it about the same time i see this when i'm maybe 13 or 14 in like the early 2000s i'm seeing it probably because like this video game is coming out you know i'm seeing it starting to get regurgitated into other mediums and i'm very much like a dutiful nerd kid who's like oh what are the things that are part of the canon you know anytime anything's getting canonized reclaimed and a cult

is building off of it i immediately uh rent it um i i don't think i had seen it in full since then which is odd but it also is a movie where where every second of it was burned into my brain. Can I share the first time I saw this movie? I remember it really clearly because it was one of the first times I ever smoked a bong. And this movie, man, wow, did it blow my mind in just the best way possible. And just to complete the image here for our listeners,

Ben is wearing his own congratulations ball cap and his virtual background is the dog. The dog post banana peel. The bloody dog. It's a bloody dog when it's got sort of the worm face.

This is when Forky just held her iPad in front of her face and was just like, just tell me when it's over and then like a minute later was like it's not over and i was like now there's like two more minutes of this talk just fucking going nuts it's also one of these things where like i the the budget botine was given rob botine who's the genius behind all the creature effects in this movie was given given, I think, $1.5 million out of a 15 budget? Yes, that is correct. And initially he was given less, but it made it all the way up to about $1.5 million.

Right. I think Universal offered like a quarter of a million, $300,000. And they were like, that's a lot. Right. They were like, that's the most we've... This was far and away the most they had ever paid – spent on the monster element of a monster movie. And that was Carpenter's whole thing is like, why do we always skimp out on that?

That's like the thing that everyone cares about. And 1.5 was seen as exorbitant. exorbitant and it is i i know you know factoring in inflation 1.5 went a lot further back then than it does today but it remains astounding that they were able to get that much out of that amount of money well this is one of those movies where you don't know how they did it i still i know that's the hackiest thing to say but it's true like i'm like how the fuck are they doing this yes like when when it's all like writhing around all those they i think here's my here's my theory i think they got a real thing i think you got a real one you think they got a real thing a real thing i think they brought in a real thing and it that it did all that stuff and they just covered

it up and that's those those perverts in hollywood those lefty hypocrite liberals got a thing i think there's this thing and i'm sure david can there's there is this thing there's this thing i think that within criticism there is a lot of received wisdom and you become a critic and you're like here are the rules of a good movie and you can break maybe a couple of them but if you break them i'm going to be watching you and it takes a long time to break out of that mindset and i feel like that has become easier with the advent of the internet because you're exposed to a whole bunch of different viewpoints on what makes a good movie. But at this time, something like, oh, there's this much special effects automatically. People are on their guard and then it's that bleak. It's that, you know, the special effects are all poured into the monster. Like, I think there is an element of, it just broke a bunch of like

unstated rules and it did so brilliantly, but it was hard to see that because the rules are so prominent in your brain. Right. Yeah. I mean, David, I sent you, I mentioned this in an earlier episode, but what's it called? on film yes which was an internally produced universal promotional half-hour video that was directed by mick garris uh who's in the stable with these guys and later goes on to become a director himself um and it's him interviewing john landis john carpenter and david cronenberg because all three of them had just done universal movies uh it's it right it's being made i think before uh the thing has been released i think right fear on i'm sorry the name of it is fear on film of course of course it's a video video drone

and islandis's movie american werewolf or right and that's come out already. I think that one has come out and Videodrome and The Thing have not. But I think it's Mick Garris just as like a fan working in the Universal promotional department being like, here we have these three guys who are trying to like bring back horror at a major level. It, Universal, I mean there was this feeling I think sort of like this is Universal's roots. It's like these classic monster movies. Here you have these three guys, one guy who's sort of like a nasty genre guy who's made these really profitable indie movies. This kind of like avant-garde Canadian cerebral Freudian body horror dude who is like this arthouse favorite who's now making studio films. And then you have John Landis, who's this populist, like ribald comedy dude who's now getting back to and then you have john landis who's this populist like

ribald comedy dude who's now getting back to his sort of schlocky genre he's right that's the thing like landis has this vibe of like the schlocky showman carpenter is just the kind of like guy who's like look i do the work what can i tell you i make movies i'm a carpenter right i make a cap and then yeah and cronenberg whenever you ask whenever he's asked a question you're like is this guy about to like produce a gun and shoot someone like he's just sort of like you know he's david cronenberg you're just he's unsettling and right every answer of his also starts with not to get freudian about it it's pretty good and of course and the whole thing has the vibe of like a pbs you know it's incredible i mean i remember seeing it in high

school and stuck with me and i've watched a number of times i re-watched again today it's on the videodrome criterion but you can also find it on youtube in full um but it's very interesting the framing of these three guys where it's like universals making a big play for like big budget horror with like you know real directors and shit and uh american werewolf in london is like a fairly you know reasonable hit and videodrome is like too weird for the fucking public but it's like very well received by the critics and cronenberg fans it like helps uh you know build his reputation as no, right, into sort of like genuine art house. Yeah.

Right. And then the thing is just kind of there in the middle. And they're talking a lot about their theories about what you can and cannot do in horror. This is why I'm bringing it up, Emily. Your sort of thing about like the unwritten rules, right? And they're sort of comparing their notes on like, what do you think you can put in a movie?

What is a moral to put in a movie? What works with an audience? What doesn't? And Carpenter is so unpretentious about everything. He's far and away the guy who talks the least out of the three because, I mean. You want him to talk more because you're sort of sitting there. Right. I mean, Landis is a fucking ham.

Shut up. Right. And Cronenberg is like, just anytime they ask him a question he gives a griffin newman length answer he just can't concisely put any of his thoughts into words in less than eight minutes but uh carpenter they ask him they're like what do you find scary in movies and he goes nothing and they go movies don't scare you they go you don't get scared he goes by movies and they go yeah and he goes no no not since I was a child. Yeah, he does have, he has the term for, what is it, like a chair raiser, right?

A seat lifter. A seat lifter, that's what it is, right. Right. He was saying, what is it? It's the thing from, it's not the movie that he's remaking here. It's a thing with a similar title, though. It came from another world or something like that? Oh yeah it came from outer space it came from outer space right that's the movie that he was saying he saw when he was four in 3d and it made him want to be a filmmaker and he called it a seat lifter and then every time they ask him a question that's a little

more highfalutin he's like i don't know and then at one point landis is just like john i read your script i have no idea how you're gonna pull any of these things off and he's like yeah it's rough hard to do and he's like no but you don't understand like the things they describe in your script and he's like yeah yeah yeah no it's real difficult i think universal had been wanting to remake the thing from another world for a while dot thing uh i had never seen the original until today today i i watched the this movie last night and then i watched the original and i watched the prequel and i watched this uh a fright on film fear on film uh today this morning um and uh the original is this point of much contention whether hawks really

directed it or whether he's a very commandeering producer credit to christian nyby who was not you know it was his first movie and he never made a lot of big movies and hawks produced it and he probably you know whatever he he was involved uh which by the way nyby's review of carpenter's movie was if you want blood, go to the slaughterhouse. All in all, it's a terrific commercial for J&B scotch. Well, that is... Well, you know, he's actually right on the second.

It does kind of make you want a bottle of J&B. It makes you want a bottle of J&B. Go to the slaughterhouse? How am I gonna go to... What, am I gonna knock on the door and be like, hey, can I just watch today? You guys have listen you can do that that is allowed i was taken on a trip of a of a butcher shop as a kindergartner they were like come on kids it's very troy mcclure wonder that i it's a wonder

that i like horror uh my my dad's office used to be in the meatpacking district, which now is just a very hip nightclub, high-end clothing store neighborhood. But back then was, as its name suggests, a meatpacking district, a like 15-block stretch of Manhattan where the streets literally ran with blood and everything smelled like death uh and i just find it so funny that like decades of trying to make that neighborhood hit hip cannot correct the fact that like the rats it's like in their blood it's in their like their cells they'll never forget those streets um all these places are infested what i was gonna say is i had not seen the original film, which I think was a favorite of Carpenter's. He obviously spotlights it in Halloween.

Hawks is his main guy. It is based on a short story, which is called Who Goes There, a novella by John W. Campbell Jr. I knew this was a loose remake. I did not realize that, although the concept of the thing adapting W. Campbell Jr. I knew this was a loose remake. I did not realize that, although the concept of the thing adapting and replicating other forms,

and that sort of like, I don't know if the person next to me is who they say they are, sort of paranoia, is in the original story. It is not in the Nibe movie because they couldn't afford it. So it is just kind of a guy who looks

like frankenstein they joke about him being a giant vegetable yeah he looks like a big plant right it's black and white but i think uh they they talk it out like he's a big carrot and he's sort of like a vegetable frankenstein and there's just a thing they find in the ice and then they thaw him out and then he's sort of hiding and it's sort of closer to alien in that it's just like they're in this base and there's a group of people and there's one thing that's lurking in the shadows hiding out in the steam rooms and shit the boosters uh the monster is played by james arness right the it is gun smoke guy yeah correct correct big tall motherfucker he's a six foot six dude it's also funny that one of the humans in the skeleton crew

of the movie is also six foot six so there's like one of the good guys who's trying to like outwit the thing is as monstrous looking and and and even sort of in facial structure looks more like a frankenstein than james arness who is just wearing a lot of uh prosthetics but you know how james james arness got hired in Hollywood? I'm looking at his Wikipedia page. He hitchhiked there from Wisconsin. Yeah. And then he just started calling people up.

And said, I'm big. Yeah. And he probably walked in the room and they were like, hey, you really are big. Yeah, put this guy in a cowboy outfit. He got the job on Gunsmoke because they approached John Wayne and John Wayne thought about it and then was yeah put this guy in a cowboy outfit he got the he got the job on gun smoke because uh john they approached john wayne and john wayne thought about it and then was like no just hire this guy and so they hired him um and uh uh it's a very different like history of john wayne just goes

to tv in 1955 yeah but yeah that is uh fascinating to consider um. But yes, the milieu of the movie is there. It is the sort of tough man stuck in a cold base in the middle of nowhere trying to outwit this thing. But they had tried to develop this for a while with Tobey Hooper. Yep. to develop this for a while with toby hooper yep uh i want to pull this up if you give me a second i think there might have been some other people who worked on it at different points in time but the the hooper one was a big one william nolan is the big one there later they they think about bringing in walter hill and and uh the uh sam peckinpah and people because Carpenter briefly was like, thought he could go make El Diablo, which is his like, you know, his long gestating passion project.

It's just so, it's so funny to imagine him calling up Universal and being like, look, El Diablo, I gotta do it. Right. You know, like,

like John, we, we, we have a go picture over here. It's like, ah, but El Diablo though, uh,

poor El Diablo, John Carp carpenter says but uh so they called they called up walter hill at a but then whatever carpenter comes back right but yeah toby hooper is the guy they have for a while and they don't like his big concept for the movie they big whatever universal soured on it hooper and carpenter were in similar spots in their careers for a while and hooper never figured out how to sort of replicate the texas chainsaw magic outside of poltergeist which of course has its own thing from another world style did he really direct this kind of mystery behind it but uh this is what i found uh hooper's version would have been drastically different from the carpenter version featuring an alien that did not shapeshift or assimilate and following an Ahab-like character named

the Captain who goes on an epic quest to find and kill the thing. The film would have served as its own film and also as both a remake and a sequel to the 1951 film with little influence from the novella, which Hooper openly found to be boring. Hooper also wanted the film to be a horror comedy with slapstick humor. It was pitched as a swashbuckling action-adventure epic, a modern-day Moby Dick set not in the ocean, but at the bottom of the world, Antarctica.

It sounds like a good movie. I think it sounds like a lot of fun. He pitched it to them. They said, we avoided a disaster. It would have been one of the worst movies ever made. I don't know. Maybe it would have been good. I think that sounds like a lot of fun. He pitched it to them. They said, we avoided a disaster. It would have been one of the worst movies ever made. I don't know. Maybe it would have been good. I think that sounds fun.

I wish that existed. I'd like to see that type of movie. It feels like the kind of thing if, like, Guillermo del Toro told you he was making that, you'd be like, hell yeah. Come on, I want to see that. It sounds fun. Absolutely.

Absolutely. But it's weird that this was such a high-priority project for Universal. I mean mean i guess this film was was popular and well liked as a movie that's i'm sure just kind of replayed on like saturday afternoon movies for decades and built up a following in that way but it does feel like they were treating this like well we got to remake king kong we got to remake the thing you know it's also just that hollywood thing where i think they had like wrangled the rights away from some like wall street people who'd bought them right because it

was an rko movie exactly and so you know and then it's like okay we gotta fucking do it right like we we're so and you get carpenter attached and this is this is the hottest he'll ever be, right? Right around now. This is the most... It just seems so obvious at this moment. It's like, okay, this guy's about to make the jump. This is a guy whose name is in front of movies already. He made Halloween, which is like reinvented Hollywood, basically.

Of course we should make the thing with John Carpenter. He's essentially had three hits in a row, plus he had shepherded Halloween II, which was also successful. So it's like, look, this guy birthed the franchise. Now they're selling movies on his name. He made a new leading man in Kurt Russell. Like, yeah, it was obvious.

Do you want to read this quote, David? Which one? I saw you, because we both look at the Google Doc and I can see when you're highlighting something. Yeah, I do like to highlight shit. I mean, it is interesting what he's... Obviously, right, he was afraid to be lost in the giant factory is the quote.

But I like the matte painting quote. Oh, sure, read that. Yeah, because at first he's like yeah you know you said he had freedom but he was worried the universal would like swoop in at some point and fuck him over but which is exactly what happens on the 2011 movie is like they give this like norwegian director a lot of freedom and then they made him reshoot the ending and the beginning and cgi'd over all the practical effects and changed everything and the guy retired from movies for 10 years um but you know i like what he says here where he's like there's a lot of pluses to working here i'm 50 feet away from albert whitlock's office he's the all-time great matt greatest matt artist and i can

just wheel over there and be like all right al come do this for me you know like that's that's the sort of magic of this movie is he finally can ask for something and the answer is yes right like right after before it's sort of like okay how do I you know take this dollar and stretch it as far as I can you I mean you talked a lot in an earlier episode about how he just wrote the scores for his movies because you know it was a cost-saving measure and like this movie has a score by ennio morricone it's it's like a brilliant beautiful score but like he finally had the money to hire a composer and like uh who turned in a very carpenter-esque score if i do

say that's funny i mean i think carpenter demanded it he was like less notes apparently was his big thing he was like make it like me right like very synthy very muted right i also read that like morricone kind of studied his earlier scores i mean maybe it was at carpenter's behest but he was trying to make something of a piece carpenter also just said in an interview i mean yeah because he was like i think that he wanted them to hire jerry goldsmith goldsmith pass and then they went to morricone, which is like, nice work if you can get it, but... I guess we'll hire this Morricone guy. We'll settle for fucking Morricone. But Carpenter, someone asked him in some interview,

like, why didn't you do the score for this? And he was like, they never asked me to and I never asked to do it. Like, it just truly was never a discussion. I was excited that I finally had

the ability to hire someone better than me as incredible as he is in every movie we've covered so far when it comes to the score it's not like john carpenter was like i had this huge concept for it he obviously is a guy who never gives himself enough credit his scores are wonderful but he's always like well i'm the cheapest guy who can do it right so i went over there and i fiddled with the synth for an hour and out came the escape from new york score and that's how it worked you know he's always undercutting it uh i do love this quote this is from this is a recent quote from carpenter he's fabulous he's just a genius he didn't speak english i didn't speak italian but we spoke the language of music pause

oh god that's awful. He's like, ah, he's such a cornball now. But Carpenter showed Morricone the movie, but then didn't really talk to him about it afterwards. And Morricone was like, I don't really know what this guy wanted. So I just kind of sent him a bunch of stuff. And Carpenter picked the stuff he wanted. He actually even filled in some bunch of stuff and Carpenter picked like the stuff he wanted. He actually even filled in some gaps musically. Carpenter himself scored a little thing just to sort of string it together. And Marconi says like one of the things he sent Carpenter became like the Hateful Eight theme or whatever.

No, correct. It's just like music he had rattling around. He reused. There was such an excess of music created for this movie. Also, do you know that this film was written by Bill Lancaster? Yes, of course. The Bad News Bears guy. Exactly.

He was the son of Burt Lancaster, the grandson of Ernie Kovacs, and he wrote only three movies in his career. Because he died. But he doesn't die until 1997. I know. He did die young, though. But yeah, you're right. He wrote doesn't die until 1997. I know. He did die young, though. But yeah, no, you're right. He wrote Bad News Bears. Bad News Bears go to Japan.

The best of his three screenplays, yes. And The Thing. And The Thing. Yeah. And he was going to make Firestarter with John Carpenter. Right. And then they both got fired when this bombs. Yes.

Right. Yeah. I adore John Carpenter. I think he's a genius. And and i think he made you know uh like 12 straight great movies i think memoirs of an invisible man is the first movie where i'm like maybe not that's a good call right he he's he's pretty much bulletproof until then right but yeah like the thing um is i think my favorite of his films I think it's his best of his films. I think it is just an out-and-out masterpiece. And I think a lot of that is he was not doing a lot of the jobs

he was doing on these other movies. His attention was not as split, but he's a master storyteller, so he knows when the screenplay needs less. He knows what to do in post. He can trust the people he's working with and also trust his own instincts. So you see a lot of the stuff that's in his early films. Like he does a lot of just like when they're searching for the thing at the end, Gary's just going around like setting up detonators and you're like just watching this happen. And it's the actor doing all of that practical business. But like Carpenter is just focused on maintaining the tension, maintaining the pacing, maintaining everything about it. And like, I think I'm not going to say he's a bad screenwriter because he's a great screenwriter.

He's a great composer. But I love that he got to just focus on making this thing as tight and as taut as possible because it's there's not a bad scene in it. No, that's that's a really good point is this might be the only time he actually trusted this much entrusted this much of his movie to collaborators because so many of the interviews we read about why he chose to write the thing himself or do the score what yada yada yada he's like i don't know i'm cheap and i don't trust anyone else and i don't want anyone else to fuck it up and this feels like the time he got like high level collaborators he trusted them he worked with them which of course isn't to say that he wasn't very involved in the screenplay as we said very involved no but you know it's it's pretty interesting because like lancaster is kind of like wait like why are you hiring me like i'm

the bad dude like you think i got like he was like i had a take i i know why he hired like he liked my take but at the same time i was sort of amazed he was entrusting me because like i've never written a sci-fi movie i've never basically never written anything for bad news bears yeah i did write bad news bears and bad news bears goes to pain this is the movie where he's not having to stretch himself thin and he's a guy who's incredibly good at wearing multiple hats on one set at the same time but when he's doing very short low budget shoots where he has to occupy eight jobs or whatever it's kind of astounding that all the earlier films turn out as good as they do but

then this one you feel him having the space and i think that really comes to the forefront emily and just the focus of the thing this movie just feels so lean and focused in in every way it doesn't have it doesn't have a good scene it's all great scenes like that's it's not even just no bad scenes every scene i'm like what the fuck is going on here i like this even the boring connecting scenes i remember getting i remember we were watching and watching and watching this movie and i was like this is another good scene this is another good scene And then you get to like the defibrillator, which is the most famous scene in the movie, probably. And I was like, Oh, fuck, we haven't done the defibrillator yet. And I knew the blood test was coming. And I just was like, this is there's there's not an ounce of fat on this movie. No, there isn't. And I mean, I was reading about how Russell worked with Carpenter, developed this whole backstory for McCready and him, his past as a vet and how he was part of this sort of like atrocity, this mission gone wrong. And that's why he has PTSD and he can't sleep and he's an alcoholic. And then Carpenter was like, yeah, cool.

All of this is good. I'm not going to put any of it into the script. And there's something about the fact that like this movie does not waste its time with like the third act scene where the guy has the fourth glass and says like, you know, I never forget that day, you know, like I don't dislike, obviously, the Jaws Robert Shaw monologue, right? Like, Quint's monologue about the Indianapolis is incredible. But there's something even more incredible about watching a movie like this where all of it is just kind of inferred and the guys never open up. And they never really have those bonding scenes. scenes i think there's a thing carpenter fundamentally understands which is the more unreal the villain in a horror movie the less the carrot the less the humans can feel real

when you're doing a movie about a killer shark we all know sharks exist and they might eat us anytime they could be coming for us right now um so you have you have to have people who feel like people but the thing is probably i, unless they built a real thing, is probably not here. And therefore, we need the people to feel a little bit stripped down and a little bit unreal. And I think Carpenter's really good at walking that line in every one of his movies. Yeah. And just in terms of how they're written and also all the performances, it's like they're just kind of behavioral. They just sort of exist. You know, you don't have, there's even a lack of like comedic games

to each crew member where I feel like you watch any movie like this and it's like, well, that guy's got this bit. There's this thing that differentiates him from the other guys in the group. And it's like, no, all that's really differentiating them is the different actors.

You know, those differences in energy. I do too. Obviously, you know, we all love energy i do too obviously you know we all love wilford brimley we all love like donald moffat like keep david of course you know there are a few actors where you're like okay well i know that guy i've seen him in one million things and then there's the other guys and i like right that it's not like one of them has fingerless gloves and a graphic tee okay all right go ahead go a couple of them do like to smoke the weed and i do think that we should shout that out

the wacky tobacco ben you're just like he's got like he's got like a big ass like freaking cone man in that one scene baby ben is going full like mary jane on this episode i first time i watched the thing i was to big bong rips hey have you ever heard of kings what like uh one of the characters they cut it out of the movie he gives a tour of his like weed like grove like like situation so this has got a rich weed history we should also just mention that Ben's uh positioning in relation to his virtual background makes it look like the dog is about to eat him. It does. It's like the dog's mouth is open and Ben's head's positioned directly inside his jaw.

Ben, do you think that deleted scene, it's like the thing is in the weed garden and then they have to set it on fire and then they're all like, oh, shit, Ben. And they're all like, whoa, feeling kind of weird right now. Do you think that's how the scene goes? The thing starts doing the cabbage patch. Well, I think what happens is a guy's smoking it and then he passes it to his other head. Oh, shit. Wait, dude, you look like me.

What's going on? Oh, damn, dude. Studio's like, what the fuck is this? Sorry. You do have like roller skating chef and you have you know guy who hates stevie wonder like there are these little moments where you're like little moments yeah there's little these little like ok cupid profile like snippets of like i like to roller skate while i cook and right yeah sounds good i do like to roller skate when i

cook there's also something i mean you you already, David, but like he refrigerated the whole set. The set was like 40 to 50 degrees the entire time that they were filming indoors. There's obviously a lot of exterior stuff for this, which I believe they all shot first, which was actually freezing cold. Right. Well, that's where they're up in British Columbia, likeia like on the alaska border for that stuff all the way they also go to antarctica too like legit went and shot there for a week no that would be insane that would be crazy no that's what i read about it but i made that um in this book i got called the salt on the system by troy howarth i know that but no they they went all the way up north like way way up north and we're talking uh you know it's chilly up there

and that's why he hired kurt russell because he was like i need an actor who's not gonna whine and moan about this bitch of a shoot we've got coming up but uh that that's it that's that's all i'm aware of i just uh i want to interject that kurt russell's so fucking hot in this movie oh he's so good looking he he grew all his hair and the beard too for a year is the stat i read he didn't cut anything for a year he's i was ranting at forky about how hot he is and she was like he's all right like she was like on board but in a certain point she was like okay chill out yeah yeah and take her to popeye village and divorce her david do you think wait just like bluto do your divorce like yeah

um is and it's like i think we sort of talked about it a little bit in Escape from New York, but like it's his, I mean, the man's, he's very good looking. Yeah. He's got a big, nice beard and set of hair too. Uh-huh. Okay. He's got kind eyes. The eyes, we're going to spend 10 minutes on the eyes. We'll circle back to that um he's got a but then it's just that sort of like sense of humor but without

ever feeling cutesy right like that's sort of like come on you know that's sort of like like kind of harrison ford-y but a little more sort of i don't know how to put it like a little more sort of, I don't know how to put it, like a little saltier or, you know, or maybe a little less mean than Harrison Ford in a way. A little more sad and broken maybe. Yeah. Right. There's always a little twinkle in his eye and he can turn that up or turn it down.

I said, we're going to circle back to the eye, but I just want to say it is fascinating to think about this performance with Big Trouble and Escape bookending it because both of those are like satirical performances. Like they're like tongue in cheek. Big Trouble, obviously even more of a comedy, but he's sort of like parodying action stars. And then this he's doing like the most stripped down action star imaginable you know it's like he's sort of taking away all the the superficial trappings of it and is just playing this man as just like

uh i don't know that the as just as just nerves yeah wait i want there was something is it in the dossier of course we're always referring to our dossier dossier that's what we call it now that's what the discord fans apparently dubbed it the dossier and i think about that a lot but um i it was how bill lancaster yes okay this is i think this is on wikipedia uh bill lancaster writes the character 35 period helicopter pilot period likes chess period hates the cold period the pay is good period and like that's such good fucking screenplay shit right where you it's like that's all you need baby and kurt rossel takes one look at that and he's like i get it yeah i know what i you know this movie is masterful it's all

you need shit and just because i i failed to complete this thread but in that uh fear on film thing when they're asking Carpenter about his approach to remaking the thing, he was like, I love that movie. I thought remaking it was kind of stupid. You're not going to top it. So then I looked at it and I looked at the original story

and the movie doesn't retain a lot of stuff from the story. So I thought, well, that's my thing. I'll just do the original story. And the crux of that of course is that story is coming out of a cold war paranoia it's all about this sort of shape-shifting uh a creature that can take your identity uh they had cut that out of the budget he now can maybe revolutionize special effects forever by executing it for the first time right that's his whole thing

is like i'm not trying to compete with the Hawks movie. I'm doing the thing that Hawks couldn't do. But as you say, and then there's this script, and people are reading it being like, well, but wait, how are you going to do this? Right. This is impossible. He pulls it off with a budget that's far bigger

than he's ever had before, but not, you know, back-breakingly crazy. He saved them money. There's some quote, like, right right he saved them a million dollars the producer said john saved us a million dollars he's not interested in trappings trappings fancy offices limousines or fancy clothes apparently john carpenter does not demand fancy clothes but you know like so his sort of you know economical like you know background right like helps them probably to vote as much as they can to the special effects which is like all you need and then also they hire a bunch of nobodies i mean no offense to the cat but like you know

they hire a bunch of pretty unknown guys oh yeah yeah no other than russell right yeah right um i mean i I think they, Russell was a bigger star than they thought they were going to get for that part. They had sort of like, there was a period where they were like,

what if fucking Clint Eastwood is in the thing? Like, they went through all those like blue sky names, but then they got into the idea of like, we can just make this cheap and put all the money

into the creature. And then Russell was slightly bigger as a name than they thought they were going to get. Do you know how old Rob Bottin was when they made this film? I don't.

You're going to have to tell me. 22. Correct. Correct. Correct, Emily. 22? 22? I was fucking, you know, pooping in diapers when I was 22.

I wasn't doing groundbreaking special effects. He is born in 1959. I believe he is 23 by the time the movie came out but 22 during production and he had already been working since 1976 i believe his story is that he like uh in the way that rick baker was like obsessed with dick smith and like followed him or wrote him a letter or something and said like can I come to your garage and work with you uh Rob Bottin showed up on his doorstep when he was like 15 and was like you're Rick Baker can I live in your garage and work with you so he starts on the King Kong movie that was sort of Rick Baker's first big big solo job uh the De Laurentiis king kong but then he works on fucking doing cantina masks for star wars

incredible melting man the fury piranha mistress of the apes the fog maniac airplane tanya's island he does all of that between 76 and 1980 right rick baker getting him in the industry then the howling he is the special makeup effects creator. That's like his big solo job. He's 21. Has really cool werewolf transformation in the howling. Right. Very similar timing to American Werewolf, obviously.

They're the same time. And I believe Rick Baker was supposed to do the howling, gets offered American Werewolf, quits American Werewolf, recommends Botine, and that's what makes Botine sort of his own man uh and so this is his follow-up to the howling which was a big calling card movie but was also overshadowed by the other werewolf movie but you also you you love him because he did robocop griff he did a total recall i mean he's got a great career after this too so go ahead correct is

astonishing that this movie was not only has three awards nominations it was nominated for uh best horror film and best visual effects at the saturn awards and nominated for worst musical score at the razzies and like the the special effects the razzies used to do a worse score this is rude they like the special the special effects not getting an oscar nomination i looked up the nominations they're pretty good but like i would put this over i would put this over poltergeist which got nominated oh absolutely yes yeah it's not even i mean i'm looking it up it's not blade runner blade runner et perfectly great nominees like those you know yeah put the thing

in with those two yeah yeah were there only three nominees that year only three yeah okay and back then three was the max yeah but you're right emily like the way this was talked about for a while of just like well you have to acknowledge how good the makeup is but the movie is fucking diarrhea otherwise it's like how i as a child would see fucking heart beeps in like movie makeup books and I'd be like this thing looks incredible Andy Kaufman's a robot it was nominated for an Oscar how have I never heard of this thing and then you watch it you're like I understand exactly why no one ever talks about this this thing is unwatchable but the makeup's incredible anything you need to know

about this movie you can get from looking at still images. And then the fact that there's a decade plus of writing about the thing in that tone of just like, well, we have to acknowledge Rob Bottin broke some boundaries with this movie, but don't fucking watch it. Yeah, but I feel like the cult was already starting to form in the

mid-80s. Sorry, I'm just also seeing there was a makeup category with two nominees that year and the thing right now right no because the first the first year of makeup is the year before this american werewolf wins the first makeup award against heart beeps yeah and then this year it's gandhi and quest for fire i'm coming on griff don't come for quest for fire you don't know maybe it's good you don't know it is good it is good but ron perlman's in it the language is invented language i'm sorry this movie's in an invented language you don't know

it's a caveman movie i don don't know. Right. Right. Did Jean-Jacques Anod direct it? He did. He did. Yeah. Yeah. I know this. I've seen this. I know from Quest for Fire.

It's got good makeup, but come the fuck on. Yeah, I do. The question is right. When does the public come around on the thing? I'm not sure. Or what? Not the public, but like, yeah. When does the reputation flip on the thing it is definitely one of those one of those movies that became much bigger on home video was saved by

home video and again it's because when you take this movie home there's like an intimacy to it that really works there it is look i would love to see this movie in a theater i've always been meaning to and every time it gets screened in new y, I've had to miss it for one reason or another. I would love to see this film on a big screen with a silent audience and all of that. But there is something about watching this movie alone in your home at night in a dark room that really kind of spooks you.

I am so fucking mad about this. The night before LA started its COVID lockdown, the thing was screening at the theater right next to me. And I was like, I should go see it. And I was like, no, I'll die. Which is kind of the ideal way to see the thing in the theater, but I didn't go. Emily, it's how I feel about not seeing Bloodshot

on the big screen while I had the chance. I fucked that up too. Who knows when there's how I feel about not seeing Bloodshot on the big screen while I had the chance. I fucked that up too. Who knows when there's a repertory screening of Bloodshot? The Metrograph's going to open back up with Bloodshot. We all know that. David, what if we emailed the Metrograph and went, we would really like to host a screening of Bloodshot? That was our move.

That's okay. No, I mean, Emily, earlier, I think off off mic you said it's a good christmas movie it is it's about around the fire it is um even though it came out in the summer i watch it in at halloween for the scares and i watch it in december just because it got great great vibe great winter vibe like do you think part of the mistake actually was releasing this movie in the summer as much as i'm sure they figured it was going to be a blockbuster or whatever? But like this is a goddamn Thanksgiving weekend movie. This is a I am sick of my family and I'm sick of being inside and I'm going to watch a movie about those two things.

Yeah. Yeah. Because it's just I mean, I remember Empire Magazine had some big article about the thing and was trying to paint the picture of like imagine you're like a shitty multiplex you're seeing et and you can hear the thing bleeding through the wall right and you know you can just hear like screams coming through and you're like what is that over there like wait you know i'm trying to enjoy my uh my reese's pieces eating alien over here and like that's how i always thought of the thing is just this nasty little you know side thing going on next door which that was just everyone was walking out like you know barfing yeah yeah i i it's it's hard to imagine what this movie felt like to i the

the average cinema goer with no like um whatever warning right you know because like the the trailer doesn't really spoil the creature effects at all i think right like it's not it's not like it's trying to sort of you know be and coy about the the poster famously was like done in like three hours overnight with drew streusen knowing nothing about the movie right with this very vague it's a good tagline but with the ultimate in alien terror in it yeah yeah is you could connect you could say that about a lot of things right but the poster is also like a guy in a parka in the snow and like light is exploding out of his hood it's true it's not really a descriptive it's it's

a good poster he didn't know he didn't read the script no one told me he was given like no material they were like yeah yeah this feels like a poster you draw after you're like told you were given a basic summary of the opening credits of the movie and then like maybe and then there's snow like that's maybe all you know and it's a image. It's become iconic in its own right. But I think if you are expecting that, and then you get a fucking spider head and shit. Yeah. I forgot.

The trailer does have man is the warmest place to hide, which is a way better tagline. Way better? That's great. does have um man is the warmest place to hide which is a way better tagline way better that's great yeah yeah yeah yeah um but uh and it does have a little bit of the creature effects but it's definitely i think go ahead i think 1982 had this thing especially in the like film the thing the film geek circles yeah yeah yeah it had this thing i think 1982 there was this concept that attached itself to the summer of 1982 especially when like the film geek websites took over of like that was the best summer for movies ever and i think that the thing the movie specifically uh benefited from that and sort

of drafted off of that and then people actually started to watch it again and were like this is yeah this is pretty pretty fucking great. That's an interesting take. Yeah, because that is such a sort of legendary genre blockbuster summer that the thing might have gotten re-evaluated and re-appreciated faster than it otherwise would have because people were sort of think-piecing it into this movement. And Blade Runner runners right there already going through the same arc so you're like okay you know you're open to it already because like et poltergeist star trek 2 conan the barbarian rocky 3 like those are the ones that are totally succeeding right yeah pretty much and then you have like tron you have the thing you have the road warrior you have

these ones that are sort of at a cult level or underperforming or sort of like grow later um and then fast times at richmond high as well that is a wild summer yeah it's a good summer um so the the original story and the original film open with a more conventional, like you're seeing the thing crashing, you're seeing people discovering the ship, they're taking it in like all this sort of shit. Uh, and that was Lancaster's first move was just like, let's just start it in the middle. Yeah. Let's like totally disorient you.

Um, they wanted to do some crazy thing with like the the spaceship crashing into the universal logo for the opening of the movie and then that didn't get approved for some reason so he said like then no universal logo which is a really jarring thing i think this was only like the second or third time universal had ever done that where the movie just starts with a universal picture you don't see the globe then you have these opening credits that are kind of classic carpenter just sort of like black white text creeping dread but it's like an all-star opening credits except they only name one actor because they're just throwing down their fucking weight of all the people who worked on this movie where it's like a universal picture,

a John Carpenter film shot by Dean Cundey, special effects by Rob Booth. And they're just like, boom, boom, boom, starring Kurt Russell. And then you have your title reveal,

the thing, which is exactly the same as the title reveal in the original movie. And they replicated the exact same process do you know what it is david i don't but is it like them cutting holes in a you know sheet or something like what is it something that simple so they have like a whatever it's called like a loose site like transparent thing of the the title right the text in that weird handwriting the thing they put that on one side inside of a fish tank then they cover the fish tank with a garbage bag i love this and they fill it up is that how it works i think they fill it up but here's the better thing you're not there's a step here you're not gonna predict

right uh i think they put some light behind it so the light will shine through and the letters will glow, right? They have the camera on the other side and then they light the garbage bag on fire and start filming. That makes sense. The way that the letters slowly appear is a garbage bag melting away to reveal. Because it's flickering. That actually makes sense when you watch the title.

Right, that's really funny. But that's what they did for the original film. And then From Another World comes in underneath. And Carpenter was like, we're going to do the exact same thing. And we're going to do it the same way. How is that not the way you reveal the title of every movie? That it should just be the only way. You should always light a garbage bag on fire and then reveal My Best Friend's Wedding.

It's so good. But it's like, it is so creepy the way it happens and it speaks to just some kind of odd effect that you could never really, I think, intentionally design. You know, we were talking about this a lot in the Halloween episode

of just like the weird magic of that mask in that movie, which they have now spent eight or nine sequels trying to replicate and it's never worked as well as the time they just bought a thing and spray painted it yeah yeah yeah i just watched the opening credits for the remake and they stink they're bad they're bad and lame i saw the prequel one time in theaters and didn't hate it i don't remember a thing about it. So how is that, Griffin, having watched it today? Having watched it today, I think it's fine.

I think it's fine, but I'm also saying that with a decade distance from hearing from everyone that it sucks. hope as opposed to a lot of the other horror remakes and like 20 years later sequels that were happening around that time in the decade leading up to it uh i think there was a lot of hope of like oh this one might actually be good they got joel edgerton and mary elizabeth winston in it those are both good actors they got this cool sort of like commercial stylist dude uh they're doing a prequel it It feels respectful to the original. This is this interesting sort of story point to fill in. And then it's disappointing

in relation to The Thing, which is such like an unsparing masterpiece. Universal did kind of muck it up in the way that Carpenter was worried they would fuck up his original film. I think like if you watch it, it's clearly compromised.

We talked about this in our Fog you can watch the youtube cuts of all of studio adi's tests for the practical effects and they're amazing and then universal freaked out and cgi'd all of them over and also did not have uh was unwilling to commit to the bleakness of how the film was supposed to end and so it feels compromised in that way but it's like better than a lot of horror movies of that moment sure i'll watch i think i think one thing they got right that at the time they were kind of derided for is uh mary elizabeth winstead as the female kurt russell like i feel like that has borne out so yes yes absolutely absolutely um it's also just i mean you know stuff that's like completely predictable but if you're watching it now it's hard to get pissed off over because you just know that this is what

they did but like it's got a lot of jump scares It's got too much score that is too aggressive, you know? It's got too much panic. Like, a thing that really hit me watching the original The Carpenter, I have to make it very clear, the distinction between the remake, which is actually a prequel, the original, and then the remake, which is The Carpenter. But watching The Carpenter last night, a think that really hit me is like is this the only horror movie i've ever seen where no one screams yeah i mean apart from the line you did to open the which is yelling not even screaming but yeah yeah exactly and everyone's very brimley does smash a bunch of stuff with an axe and he's kind of screaming. He does that in every movie.

The characters have freakouts. Right. And there's the scene where Kurt Russell has the flamethrower and he's freaking out and trying to get them to release him and all that sort of shit. But this is a movie that does not... And I know a lot of it is like, well, it's a bunch of fucking emotionally closed off men

in the cold and they're dead inside and all of that. But even Alien, you think about the way that everyone reacts to the chestburster. emotionally closed off men in the cold and they're dead inside and all of that but even like alien you think about the way that everyone reacts to the chestburster versus this where most of the creature reveals played a stunned silence like people are just kind of like terrified but motionless and wordless you know absolutely i mean there's there's an awe and a reverence for the creature that is very interesting both on the part of the movie and of the characters also they can't run anywhere they can't yeah that's part of it they're stuck yeah but it's all yeah and else but then there's weird i like the little like the guy going for the dog like

trying to save that you know what I mean? Yeah. The weird little human stuff where it's like, I get why, like, they would just sort of have these kind of instinctual reactions that don't make sense. Like, because you're seeing something that doesn't make any sense. It's beyond, even the alien, like the alien in Alien, obviously, is crazy looking, but it is vaguely humanoid, and it's coming for you, so that's scary. This thing, it's like, I don't even know what to focus on. Well, that was Carpenter's, yes. And it's always going to look different, and it's going to change, and it's all of that shit.

That was Carpenter's single biggest mantra with this movie, is like, is it possible to make a horror movie without a man in a suit? You know, that was his whole thing. Like, not only are we going to use modern special effects and makeup and all of that, but we're going to free that from it needing to be grafted onto a humanoid form.

Because he's like, I loved Alien, but it kind of bums me out that he's got like two arms and two legs and walks upright like that was my one complaint about alien and i want to see if we can make it more abstract and harder to pin down and all of that i tend to not be one of those people who's like oh cgi is bad you know like there's good cgi there's bad cgi but i think there are certain topics that are better covered

practically and i think this is one of those things where you want to see the like organic gristle of what's happening and like doing that cgi inevitably strips that away just a little bit because your eye's always going to know it isn't real and here like i know it isn't real but also it might be you know it's that feeling of like they might have actually created something in a lab somewhere. Well, and we've already talked about they did and classic Hollywood scum. But Carpenter in that fear on film thing is talking with Landis about like they've both now done these movies where sometimes you only get one shot done per day. both now done these movies where sometimes you only get one shot done per day and in these big creature sequences there is that feeling of just like god the amount of shit they had to set up

for that one shot which is one shot in a three minute sequence and like botine is in many of these sequences is building a different prop for every shot you know it has to look a different prop for every shot. You know, it has to look a different way, it has to function a different way. It's like each shot is one gag and a build just for that gag. And then things like famously in the defibrillator scene, when his arms fall in

and then he rips them off, they hired a double amputee for that one shot. So it's really a guy without arms. And then the special effect is that he's wearing a mask to look more like the actor but as carpenter says no one looks at the mask because they're looking at the arms and the arms are real and no one can get past how we've hidden the arms i i i that i that sequence is just so damn audacious i think yeah i yeah i'm with emily that it's like annoying to bag on you know to make cg the sort of easy villain right like because

that's sort of what so much discourse about modern movies has become where it's like oh it's because of the cg but like it's just that thing of when you where you can see the limitation and how hard everything is being pushed. It does just it hits different. It's basic, maybe. But yeah, what's frustrating about the 2011 movie is like, I think their intent was to do something like what Guillermo del Toro often does, especially with his lower budget movies where it's like you put a guy in a suit and use cgi really really wisely and sparingly to make it more inhuman and to remove rods and to remove like the excess parts of it and whatever and then universal just went overboard and kept on wanting to tinker it more and more and more to the point where they fully painted over everything right the crimson

peak is the one where people were like oh i just hated those cg monsters and they're not cg monsters right but there's been like enough i don't know yeah enough tweaking done that it becomes sort of difficult to distinguish yeah i just think he tends to strike the right balance on his lower budget movies where it's like you put doug jones in a thing and you film that with a camera and you use cgi to like slim it out and carve things out and remove wires and rods and shit like that um but there is something to the viscer of this movie i mean like apparently but kirk russell would walk on set and be worried about the thing looking cheesy uh carpenter would just go like just just wait until we put the goo

on it you know and there's the the amount of fucking slime in this movie there's a lot of goo i mean oh man yeah this is like an incredible yeah the color too the color is so underrated it's like somehow grosser like and i feel like the remake from what I've seen of it, the, uh, it's more human, the, the, it's more blood and gutsy,

right? It's more reds and purples and blues. And like, it's wild when you, the guy's just fucking green, you know, like it's like weird green entrails are like spurting everywhere. Uh,

yeah. The only thing I can think of to compare it to is, um, placenta. That is the feel of it. It's like something being born. It looks like tumors to me. Like when you've seen footage of tumors being removed and shit. Right, where it's like this is not human, essentially.

This is something that grew that wasn't part of the body. Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, can I say, I've been on the record, I like snow crime. Man, do I love cold slime. Wow. What?

No, David, yes. David, yes. You can't just ignore the fact, right? We get room temperature slime. We get hot slime. Cold slime, though. Yep. David, you cannot just ignore that fact.

I hate room temperature slime. The worst. You know, Snow Crime and Cold Slime is a great title for something. I just want you to know that. For something. Have that ready. At the ready. Definitely for something.

Like Double Dare, you just know that set, that game show set was room temperature. Oh, for sure um yeah oh i'm just i i just do you got do you guys ever just watch clips of the thing because i do that a lot yeah you know like let me let me spend some time with the spider today the spider head i just want to see it yeah this is one of my go-to's Yeah. Yeah. It's at the time we're recording this, it's about to come out on 4k in a steel book. I've still not been able to preorder cause I keep on missing it, but I,

I'm so excited to have that fucking disc cause like total recall is the other one that I put on and just watch certain sequences over and over again, trying to figure them out. And this one, it's just like any two shots you can just frame by frame it and and just fucking live in it um yeah i mean just i i know we're jumping all around here but like the order of like that defibrillator scene is okay chest opens up eats his arms arms rip off right yep then like

the monster guys going well no so the chest is the chest has turned into a big mouth that's hungry and has eaten his arms no right then it eats him sorry yes then but then the head starts to just sort of stretch off the body right and you got a lot of green tendrils going and then the head finally pops off and grows legs and starts skittering around, but also coming out of the chest is another crazy head. Yes. And that head sort of like poking on the ceiling and going like, and meanwhile,

Kurt Russell is sort of looking at it going like, Ooh, which is my favorite part. Like Kurt Russell isn't like, Oh my God, burn that fucking thing right now. He's just looking at it like jesus like which maybe that's the reaction you have right where it's just sort of like your brain's

like you know what let's disable all higher i find it realistic i think everyone just goes into complete shock in this movie and it's like as you said emily there's a certain degree of awe for this thing but there also is just the like i can't process what is happening and weirdly that makes the horror more realistic than most films you've seen where people accept far too quickly oh there is a burn man who haunts your dreams yeah and you're like well i guess that's freddy's deal you know there's the um classic uh fight or flight reaction but there's also you know the freeze or fawn the four f's and like this is a movie about people who freeze yes freeze and they don't know what to do and then it's too late and kurt russell's the one who figures out what to do just quickly enough to set something on fire and these

guys are just like i mean you have all the early scenes where it's like these guys barely talk to each other anymore you know yes they're right they've all settled into their like antarctic they're sort of in hibernation right because it's like it's dark and what i love though like again like a whatever a fattier movie whatever the opposite of a lean movie it would have more scenes of power struggle like of like well you can't be in charge and instead this kind of boils it down to like one scene and mcgrady becoming the sort of you know like like there's the guy who's like i i can't do it right like he's like oh you should be in charge well i can't do it it's just sort of obvious that kurt russell's gonna be we

know kurt russell's the guy he's the movie star but also he's just fucking like wafting confidence like in the way the others are not ready yeah he is ready he do be ready he ready he ready um but like i just like that there's not like a lot of shoe leather over like well should the helicopter now come on like we get you know that's those that's

that stuff is great no and that power struggle scene like really happens pretty deep into the movie. Unless I'm misremembering leads directly into that defibrillator scene. Like you have that sort of standoff with him

with the flamethrower, which then like he's sort of wrestling control. Where he's got the dynamite. Yeah, where he's like, he's all snowed up. What do we think of Snowy Kurt, by the way?

Because he's also pretty cool. Oh my God. Want to warm that guy up. This do we think of snowy Kurt, by the way? Because he's also pretty cute. Oh, my God. I want to warm that guy up. This is the eye thing I want to say. We said that he's got very gentle, tender, pretty eyes, right? And he is a very pretty man. We're saying he has a twinkle dial somewhere on his body that he can turn up and down. But there's something to just his eyes being so goddamn icy blue, especially when he's just surrounded by brown hair.

Right. Like you have like this dark mane and this beard. There's so little flesh actually showing on his face. You're not really seeing his bone structure. So it's like this guy is just kind of like hidden. But then these eyes cut through in every single shot. And the colder he gets the more covered in snow he is the paler he is the more hypothermic he is the more his eyes pop and like it feels like he's turning down the twinkle but it just innately gives him a level of humanity in

any single scene because you like there's just there's an intrinsic vulnerability to the delicacy of his eyes right there's the you know what what do we do when we try to figure out if somebody's trustworthy the first place we look is their eyes so like you look in the eyes movie needs a fucking good eye actor at its center and like that that's so key to everything like i feel there's a lot of scenes where his eyes are kind of just lit slightly better within the scene just so we can see them more. I think that that's a huge part of why this movie works. Because he's so pretty.

He's so pretty. Oh, his goggles. His sombrero. Yeah. Oh, his look, the fashion in this. But I just love when he pops those goggles off and they're like on a chain, you know, like on a strap. Yeah, well, you said chain first though. You like it because they're like on a chain, you know, like on a strap. Yeah. Well, you said chain first, though. You like it because they're on a little chain.

You like it because they're on a chain. I also, I mean, also the introduction of him playing chess and then breaking the chess computer because it beats him by pouring bourbon in its guts. And he doesn't like to lose. It's Adrian Barbeau. Yeah. It's Adrian Barbeau. As the chess computer.

Yeah. But I just like that where it's like this, like no one's fixing this chess computer. Like this guy hates so much. The tech is so good. The scene where Wilford Brimley like figures out life on earth is doomed with what appears to be like an Atari is great. Yeah.

With like the weird sort of asteroids thing where it's like, I love that. It's like he's playing oregon trail yeah what program or like how you know what i mean like what was the fucking algorithm to lead him to that uh i mean uh coded in basic yeah sure thing dot dos yep that makes sense um brimley by the way, and this is like his fourth or fifth role or whatever. I feel like the China Syndrome is this big breakout. And this is one of those movies where you're like, actually, he's 14 years old. You have no idea.

He's so good in this movie. I love everyone in this. Everyone's good. And everyone's doing unshowy work, and that's part of the magic. I appreciate that but I'd love just a whole movie of him in his cabin mumbling to himself right like if we do like a thing one and a half a thing side equal a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern thing where it's just like him grumbling I I could I I just want to live in his grumbling well there's the wilford

brimley line thing of course which is when cocoon reached theaters wilford brimley was 50 years nine months and six days and he's playing a grandpa and everyone else in the movie is like 30 years older than him and you don't question it so like there are you know the brimley cocoon line is its own twitter account devoted to telling you which celebrity just passed the the brimley line any given day and it's always uh astounding martha plimpton just passed the brimley line uh kanya harding we love martha plimpton uh uh it was a little sad uh fred durst recently uh as he's rebranding into uh whatever it is he's rebranding into he sort of looks like the sheriff from longmire now um but uh yeah it was a little sad of course when brimley died yes and and uh and he wasn't even

that old i mean he was 85 it's not like he was a young man, but you want to read like, yeah, Wilford Brimley finally popped it at the age of 112. And you're like, yeah, of course he did. The guy was 100 when he started in movies. I get it. When you see that like a month ago, the lead singer of Bare Naked Ladies

crossed the Brimley cocoon line, that doesn't really process. Jeff Mangum from Neutral Milk Hotel. My point is, this movie is only three years before Cocoon. So he's like 47 in this movie. And it is incredible, the difference. He does not look young in this film,

but this movie, his hair still has some color in it, and he doesn't have that big old push broom mustache. And when he shows up in Cocoon three years later, you're like, this man is 100. Someone please put him on life support. I think I read there was that they cast him because they were like, well, he's a great everyman. People will forget about him because we have to have him off the board for a while. And I think one thing that you can't do now that they could do in 82 is you always remember Wilford.

Right. Now we're like, where's Wilford? Where's Wilford? Bring him back. Right. Back then they were like, yeah, there's like six guys in this movie who look like him. It's no big deal if we take him out of the rotation for a bit. But by the time I see this movie, I'm just like, how am I going to take the Quaker Oats guy seriously in a horror film?

You know, it felt like it was overpowering. Well, they did cut out the scene where he uses the computer program to diagnose everyone with diabetes. I don't know. We got to do some Brimley time. I mean, what's the next Brimley we're going to do, right? Are we going to do freaking In-N- i mean what's the next brimley we're gonna do right we're not we're gonna do freaking in and out anytime soon we should he's good in and out he is what's he bad he's always great in the firm he really is always i mean the last thing i remember seeing him in was uh did you hear about the morgans right right which i have to imagine was one of his last films

and he was fucking good in that and your brain short circuits when he shows up because it feels like uh fucking peter cushing showing up in rogue one where you're like but how does he still look like this he's like frozen in ember right he started at a certain age but he didn't really advance he just stayed right that was his genius right he looks exactly the same age in Did You Hear About the Morgans as he did in Cocoon. Yeah. And then, of course,

at the end of this movie, he turns into a gigantic monster that tries to eat everybody. Yeah, I also feel like Brimley is usually so gruff and sort of strapped down and everything. It's nice to watch him

have his fucking freakouts in his little timeout shed. Like, Brimley, Brimley going wild is, is fun. Oh, it's so fun. That was a very poor selling spinoff of girls gone wild though.

It's like full of Brimley gags. I have to stop. It's mostly him warning people about diabetes right now you girls be careful don't eat too many sweet snacks yeah it is wild to watch it right because it's like china syndrome's his first credited role and then it's like absence of malice. The thing, tender mercies. Yep. Good and tender mercies. Great performance.

The natural. Oh, he's so good in the natural. The natural is one of those funny ones where he's the grizzled old coach and Robert Redford is the young player. And they're like five years apart in age or whatever. Well, it's like when another guy who died more recently than you would think but uh the grandpa monster what was his name al lewis who played grandpa it was al lewis yes uh when when al lewis died i think his family realized that he was like 20 years younger than they thought he was and that al lewis faked his age in order to get hired as grandpa on the monsters he was like 35

and he told him he was 55 and so when he died people were like you're 98 and it turned out he was 78 uh yeah following his cremation his ashes were reportedly placed in his favorite cigar box hey hey hey perfect anyway al lewis rules he's not in the thing are we going to talk about the plot of the thing yeah cool here's the plot of the movie a spaceship crashes right then some indeterminate amount of time later bunch of men dead inside burnout tired of each other on an arctic base that is never defined we never know what these guys are doing what they're there for which i love yeah they're from the u.s we know they're from the u.s we know they're from the u.s but doesn't matter because there's this uh norwegian uh camp that we are introduced to

uh in a helicopter uh shooting at a dog. They crash near the American base. The one guy gets out, accidentally sets himself, and the helicopter on fire explodes it. The other guy won't stop shooting at the dog, shoots at them, they take him out. Now they have this dog. What the

fuck happened to those Norwegians? It's a pretty good setup. Yeah. When they go to the base to find out what happened there, the giant ice thing they dug the thing out of appears to be a gold belly order that someone has placed and had come.

It literally looks like one of those insulated coolers they send you frozen food in yeah absolutely yeah that's a good it's kind of like the same plot as alien same approach as alien where it's like a little preview of all the freaky stuff that's going to happen in a but everything's static where they're seeing a bunch of horrifying things but nothing's moving and it's kind of just a little intro to the aesthetic of the monster love that we've been talking a lot about how that scene with the dogs and the tentacles coming out of the dog like really just seems like it but like that that creation in the norwegian base the mute

mutated man the two-faced thing that sets you up pretty well for what's coming that is true i think there's something about the dog's face peeling so rapidly i mean yeah the way it pops rather than there's no warning yeah i rewound it three times and i've seen this movie before but i rewound it three times because i was like i know the gory coming. And when that shot starts with like five solid seconds of an animatronic dog head before it peels open, it's not like they cut to it right before the peel. You're watching an animatronic dog head with fur looking realistic. And then suddenly it peels open. You go, wait, that was the robot the whole time? Like this was the special effects shot?

It blows my fucking mind. But yes, this dog uh goes ham it does it goes ham turns into tentacle monster uh starts fucking with the other dogs the other dogs are fighting their way out to escape right and they eventually figure out that it can only be subdued with fire and then uh they realize they got a thing on their hands. Wilford Brimley's the one who figures it out. Which, like, God, the way he just sort of... These guys are worth their weight in gold. If you can get sort of a fucking crusty old character actor

to deliver your mumbo-jumbo exposition like they resent it, and just go like, I don't know what to tell you seems like an alien that would be a great career that would be a great career to just be the guy who comes in and says ah god I don't want to be here but alien David you and I

saw Shang-Chi this week and we were talking about how Tony Leung and that is like a fucking Vegas blackjack dealer every time they give him some marvel that was your metaphor and i can't stop thinking about it i mean it helps obviously he's seated in the scene you're talking about like sort of facing all of them like a blackjack dealer right but it really is the absolute calmness with which he explains how there was another character called the mandarin in the marvel cinematic universe tony lung maybe the best actor

alive is handed this sort of like ham-fisted kind of like look we kind of got a paper over a few choices that were made a decade ago can you kind of like you know deliver this with like you know adequate sort of soulfulness and he's like yeah no problem right let me think about my father and yeah exactly yeah but maybe this whole thing's gonna be about family and it's actually gonna kind of move you to tears i put it into words as the blackjack dealer but it's because you turned to me and you just did this motion with your hands like he's just like fucking like letting it just slide off him he was like exactly he's just serving this up and it's like the the there's no uh shame or

whatever in it right like he doesn't seem embarrassed by the material you're getting the same effect from brimley here which is so important that like the guy who now kind of sets the temperature of the movie saying like this is an alien that can replicate other human beings is able to do it with with just the right level of like not playing the camp of it but not being embarrassed by it either you know uh definitely yeah um yeah it's a thing and what the thing does is it uh looks exactly like you uh if you give it long enough basically yeah in between it doesn't look exactly like you if you give it long enough basically. Yeah. In between it doesn't look anything like you. In between it looks like the worst fucking shit you've ever seen

in your life. But given enough time it'll look like you. And it's magic. It's a magic premise. It's a premise obviously it's not like this movie invented it but obviously it's just like the pure simplicity of like yeah well you could be the thing

or i could be the thing now the classic debate here is do they know their things or don't they know their things and the answer of course is who cares yeah yeah right but it's never really talked about because everyone behaves like they're supposed to until the moment they turn into a crazy monster right right yeah which the fact that it's unexplored makes it scarier because that's almost the most terrifying concept in the movie is what if i'm the thing and i don't realize it it replicates you so perfectly that it replicates your mental state right before the thing takes over you it's kind of what it's i mean the ending is so perfect but it's not just that they're like well maybe you still are the thing it's like or maybe i am i don't know right yeah

right yeah yeah yeah um and that's why i think this movie's a trans text we got there everybody um i'm gonna i'm gonna do a couple i'm gonna do a couple readings on this and why i think it's a trans film um so there is this thing um that uh there is this there is this thing i resisted griffin if you couldn't i can't resist i'm gonna take it every time i'm gonna take i'm gonna take a d i'm gonna take a detour into ari astor's uh uh masterpiece mid samar um which is a movie about a woman who goes on a trip with a bunch of men. And famously, they just kind of act like dudes around her. They kind of act like they're hanging out with, they're cracking open a cold one with the boys to use a meme that's 10 years out of date.

Because it's also, they don't fucking want her there. They don't want her there. So they're obnoxiously behaving in the way they want to behave on their bro trip to Midsommar. Right, right. obnoxiously behaving in the way they want to behave on their bro trip to midsommar yeah right right and i saw i saw that movie uh shortly after i came out publicly and was just blown away by it and was deeply moved by it and i was like why am i moved by this and it is this thing of god damn it it is this this this theme of before you come out to yourself, before, as we call it in the community, your egg hatches, you are frequently in spaces with other men. And you're just like, well, what you perceive to be other men because you think of yourself as a man. And you're just like, what is happening?

None of this makes any fucking sense. And we're all just kind of acting like it's absolutely fine. And I am learning the customs. I'm learning them through osmosis. And I think that the thing captures that feeling of being trapped in a space where you're not entirely sure if you are human, if you are someone that exists in this world, or if you are some sort of deadly shapeshifter who needs to go off and make their head go off and become a spider. But I think there is a flip side of this, and this is the way I've always read this as a trans

text, sort of stemming from Midsommar again as an example, which is there's this play called A Spy in the House of Men. It's written by a trans woman whose name I forget. And the concept of it is when you are among men, you hear how men talk about women. And sometimes that is, I'm just blowing off steam about my goddamn wife you know when you are yeah yes when you are when you are among men uh and they perceive you as a man they talk about women in an unfiltered way and when you figure out you are a woman you also immediately figure out the ways that men have been talking about you all along and it is fucking frightening because yeah some of us just blowing off steam and it's fine but there's inevitably one guy who's just a little bit too angry just a little bit too something and you're like what the fuck is going on here and when it's just you know the guys you can kind of like laugh about it

or whatever but like when you realize what has been happening there there's a really unsettling thing about that um i watched the first move the first thing i reviewed after i came out to myself was um not publicly after i came out to myself was the terror season one great television show glad i get to be the first one to mention it here instead of karen hahn my nemesis um but that is a movie about how when or a tv show about how when you have a group of men together in an isolated location, they're going to start murdering each other. And the thing is also about that, and it just really captures this feeling of not being quite in and of this group.

This is a movie about outsiders within a group of men, both literally in terms of the monster of the movie, but also within the way the camera regards them as like, none of these people quite work. None of them quite make sense. They're all archetypes. They're all very strange and weird and flawed. And they're all kind of unknowable. I mean, the lack of backstory we're given, the lack of sort of big emotional sort of catharsis scenes. Yeah. Something I always think about is that also whoever signs up for this job has something that is going on with them which i think also it's like they don't even lean into any of the backstory but it's just and it's like inherent you're like it's implied yeah you're not gonna sign up it's true like yeah

sure i'll go to antarctica for an end for an indefinite amount of time. Sounds like an adventure. Oh, it's 11 other guys. Sun doesn't rise in the winter. Yeah, that sounds cool. Within, I think, binary gendered environments, non-binary genders, of course, have this experience as well. But I'm not as familiar with them being a binary person. There is this sense of community that develops. And this movie is about a place where there's already no sense of community. It's very much a movie about, oh,

men who don't want to be around each other. Everybody's kind of like, yeah. When I came out, I had some various agents and publishers be like, you should write a memoir. And I was like, I'm not going to write a fucking trans memoir. Everybody does that. But then I kind of had this notion of doing a book that was a different essay about different horror films through a trans lens. And this was always the one that I was like, this is about what it means to pretend to be a man and not actually be one. The thing is about being a spy in the house of men, whether you take that to mean that you are a thing or that you are watching how men behave in violent and destructive ways when they don't think you know that women are watching them um

and like uh i i just i have always related to that very hard before i came out and after i came out it made so much more sense to me so the thing is trans i've proved it Now everyone has to give me cake. All the cake to Emily, please. Everyone has to give you cake. That's a great take. Absolutely. I just, I think the thing that I'm thinking about as Emily talks about it is like, it's so true.

I am thinking about the thing. The thing you're thinking about is the thing. It is. Right, exactly. Is how like no one ever really becomes friends or comes around to each other in this movie because they can't because the distrust is always going to be there

to the extent that we're kind of rooting for... I mean, also, I'm a modern viewer and I probably first saw this movie, whatever. Kurt Russell and Keith David are the people I'm going to gravitate to because I know them best. Of course. Yes. And so I am, I guess, quote unquote, rooting for them the most. But still, at the end, they're still not really they have a there's a hint of a smile at the end,

but that's the most you can give. And so they are throughout the movie. They never can shed that that feeling of like, right. Am I myself? Am I like what i think i am right like or am i just pretending to be because that's what i'm supposed to do in this environment like that's sort of weird liminal like i you know like i i just don't know if if this is real or and then you know you can do this to yourself all the time also where you're just like you know do i live in the real world or you know i just sort of dream that i live in the real world the thing i fucking uh think about constantly uh that uh my my existential terror but um there there are a lot of things in the soup with this movie obviously like the the story in the original film kind of like early cold war panic right and that idea of

like how well do you know anybody people can be trying to assimilate amongst us all that sort of thing and then carpenter has talked about that like uh the the aids crisis figures into this movie as well right this fear of just like oh there's this silent killer out there now you know this thing that can be transmitted through intimacy, through proximity to people. You know, I mean, certainly in the early days, there was so much confusion about how it could or could not be transmitted. But this idea of here's this deadly thing, and we don't know how we get it. And you don't know who has it or not, you know? I think Carpenter is accidentally a really good filmmaker about gender. Like he makes that have gender infecting them at every inch. And this movie is very much about how within all male spaces, there is a fear of intimacy. There's an attempt to be like, oh, we're not actually that close. And you have to work to overcome that yeah and then you never know you know yeah i mean i i bring all this up just because and i i don't want to say i like this is a great movie i was excited to watch it again but there was a part of me that was dreading

the experience of watching it again because much as i predicted this movie is like really it it hits much harder for me post-COVID. And I don't say post-COVID as if COVID is over and done with. I say post-COVID as in a time where we've had to live through this to any degree. A, it's a movie about this weird sort of like broken seclusion. You know, these people living this kind of like closed off, isolated lifestyle and sort of watching their personality and their sense of self die in isolation. But also this fear that like, you know, we we had this somewhat like a horror movie,

like false ending of just like, oh, everyone's getting vaccinated. Things feel good. I guess things can reopen. And at the time we're recording this, we're in this liminal state now of just the Delta shit and how much of a risk is this really and how much is breakthrough cases a thing versus it only affecting the unvaccinated? What are we going to have to give up again in society or things going to stay open? Is that scary in its own and yada yada yada yada yada uh i do increasingly now after like a month where i felt like i was living my life with relatively limited anxiety at least for me i'm now back in this stage now where i have that sort of weariness anytime i look at another person in the flesh, you know, whether it's a friend of mine,

whether it's someone I know well, whether it's someone I know casually, whether it's a stranger, you know, anytime someone walks into the grocery store and they're not wearing a mask and they get too close to you or you make social plans with somebody and you're operating on the faith that I guess we both really want to believe we don't have it but that's a status that can change minute by minute you know even as recently as like i had to get tested twice recently man what a fucking load off my mind to know i don't have it and then that stops being up-to-date information a day later an hour later you know all that is scary and this movie taps into that into such a primal way where it's like AIDS was the manifestation of that at the moment that he is conceptualizing this moment. Right.

But like the form that COVID takes this sort of viral pandemic is much closer to I feel like what this movie represents which is just that like this kind of unseen invisible thing that's only going to reveal itself too late and it manifests itself and the distrust is the thing that has fucked up my brain more than anything in the pandemic where it's like there are people who are very close to me who i now fundamentally distrust and i have a fundamental distrust of strangers and And anytime I let someone get close to me, I'm scared that I'm making a fatal mistake. The modern world is designed to stoke paranoia. It's designed to make you say, oh my God, is this person vaccinated? Is this person not vaccinated? Social media, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, I do think about this in

terms of Carpenter was clearly really fucked up by Reagan's election. And this is kind of a movie about like, who do I know that is secretly like plotting the destruction of everything I hold dear? Absolutely. Right. And then, you know, they live is the more satirical,

goofy version of that. But, but it is a thing. I don't know. I just feel like. Yeah. It's the thing. It's the thing.

18 months of pandemic and then four months of my fucking health bullshit and then i go back out into the world and to some degree it felt like okay i've been in like an arctic base for the last 20 plus months and now i'm cautiously trying to wonder in the way what is as you said the the point of the ending of the movie is it doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter if both of them are things or both of them are humans. The bigger point is they're going to spend the rest of their life not knowing whether to trust anything or anybody for the rest of time, right? There's the point in the movie in which the stakes become not do we survive this, but how do we make sure that this thing doesn't escape and spread? Because Brimley's done his fucking calculations and factored in how much time it would take for this to take over the entire planet.

And so there's a certain degree of self-preservation, but there's also this degree of like, we might be the last stop. Well, they're, and that's what, they struggled so much with the ending because it's like, how heroic can you make it? Like, should they defeat the thing? Should they get wiped out?

Obviously they come up with the perfect ending, which is basically like the two of them sitting there being like we're probably being heroes because we're probably gonna die right like right that's like that's where it concludes where it's like well so i think we're both okay and the whole place is on fire and we're probably gonna die here and that's good unless you're the thing like and it's sort of like let's just wait and it's a it's a perfect thing uh the thing is a perfect thing sorry carry on go ahead emily sorry i i think that uh uh uh slipped my mind i'll come back to it i'll have it i'll have it uh i'll i'll stall for a moment and say that uh carpenter considers the video game to be canon.

And in the video game, apparently, which is a sequel, takes place after the events of this. At the beginning of the game, there is some text on a computer screen that says that they were rescued and MacReady survived. And what's his name? Chiles is the Keith David character. I believe dies of hypothermia, but it does prove that he's human. And so Carpenter has said like, I didn't write that, but I accept that as canon.

There's a thing also in the 2011 movie that they realize a character is the thing or is not the thing. I forget because the thing can't replicate the earring because the thing can't replicate. It's organic. Inorganic matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So some people look to that and the fact that Keith David still has his earring at the end of the movie as proof that he is human. But then also other people say they've replaced the J&B scotch bottles with gasoline. So maybe the bottle that Kurt Russell hands Keith David is filled with gasoline. And the fact that he drinks it and it goes down easily, but you don't see Kurt Russell drink it proves that he was testing him and that he as a thing doesn't know that that's not how it's like you can spiral out in a thousand different directions.

You can do that. And I understand there's a. It's all interesting, but it fundamentally doesn't matter. The question is the point. I love I love a scary movie or I love any movie where everybody realizes we all have to die. Like this is the point. I love a scary movie, or I love any movie, where everybody realizes we all have to die. Like, this is a thing. We all have to die to save the world or whatever.

And yeah, I've been trying to think of my other favorite examples of that. Because the thing is, they remake The Thing on TV so much. Because it's a perfect bottle episode it's perfect we're in one location yeah famously x-files we're talking about ice right which is the best yeah there's a futurama one too there's a futurama episode that's like murder on the orient express plus yes there's a doctor who's a doctor who won but like what i think about that is on tv you have to say okay we save the world and everyone's fine because you have to go on and molder and scully have to save the day next week again and like i don't know something about the bleakness of this i get why it didn't hit people

in 82 but it's it's the only appropriate response to the world this film sets up and the world we live in arguably the ongoing world uh i i agree uh it's just it's such a it's such a fertile concept and and the thing that that this movie was able to do is for the first time actually visualize that you know like there are there are things like the monsters on maple street or what's it called the monsters are coming to maple street twilight zone are due on maple street i believe oh yep it's playing with similar things but you just have to live in that space of one of these human actors might secretly be a monster we're never going to be able to reveal them right you can't have the in-between part the this this movie is like well let's show the in-between part. This movie is like, well, let's show the in-between part. And by the way, it ain't so nice.

Right. And that just adds a whole other level to it. This is kind of a body snatcher movie, but also kind of not. So it plays off the paranoia of the body snatcher genre, but also gets at this added layer of you never know. you never know you know it's also fascinating that the original body snatcher and the original thing from another world come out very close together and this comes out only four years after the kaufman body snatcher and griff i don't know if you noticed but in the dossier jj found this quote where he disses the remake of invasion of the body snatchers which interesting a rare bad take by carpenter but and of course this is at the time so it's a pretty fresh movie and he says like when i saw it i thought why did he do this the original was so much better and showed so much less

yeah which is an interesting note considering his the thing shows lots but his sort of defense is like in terms of remaking the thing i had it easy because i wasn't trying to remake it because you know his argument is really like i'm kind of just doing the story right right and the the hawks movie is its own thing but it's just funny because i love the kaufman movie the kaufman movie is great but that's about um it's sort of the opposite of you know this movie it's you're isolated you're trapped you know all the stuff we've been talking about that the whole brilliance of the coffin movies is happening in plain sight in a big crowded city and it's just about that feeling of like wait do i not trust anyone on earth like do i do i just feel completely unmoored from like how society works like everyone's yeah

i mean i love that movie but that's they live they live as his body snatchers move totally yeah and they live fucking rules so john carpenter wins again um yeah he wins double win uh a few other things i want to just throw out from the dossier he wanted to film in black and white uh universal would not let him regret right but then his thing was like cool so then i'm gonna have this thing be so devoid of color i want everything so drab and bland so that when the thing shows up in any manifestation whether it's green tentacles or red dog head or whatever it really really pops and so a lot of it is just done with lighting and a lot of the lighting in this movie most of it is the natural lighting of the the actual spaces they're filming in but also

lighting it with the flares that the guys carry around and shit like that um it's also just it's one of those things like watching the 2011 movie after this where uh horror movies are not especially studio films comfortable being this quiet for this long and usually they'll only be this quiet in the buildup to a jump scare. But like the lack of sort of unnecessary dialogue, you know, the lack of an overbearing score, the fact that the score is more tonal rather than like underscoring the scares specifically. The score isn't doing the usual Hollywood movie thing of kind of alerting

you to the scare rhythms, right? Like where it's like, okay, we're building up to something. It's mood setting. And even, you know, Morricone is trying to find a tone closer to what Carpenter has done in his earlier scores. But Carpenter's earlier scores are a lot more propulsive and aggressive, you know? And this is a lot more. A big theme. A good, you know, And this is a lot more... A big theme.

A good, you know, chunky theme. We love a chunky theme. This is sort of a slow, simmering score, which really fucking works. I was watching this movie. It's hot right now.

We're in the middle of the summer. I had my AC blasting and I was like, the AC is taking away from the movie and I watched it with headphones because I was like, I need to be like totally in the sound space in the silence of this movie. And it did make a big difference for me.

Definitely. Definitely. Speaking of the technical elements, I think Dean Cundy shoots fire on ice so well. Obviously fire and darkness, but there's something primal in us that's like, oh, fire in the cold. I want to go sit by them and like i think dean cundy captures that that last scene is just beautiful like in a weird haunted way yeah yeah it this movie fucking rolls it really does have you all ever checked out any of the c any of the sequel materials um other than the video game there was a

uh mini series that was scripted by frank darabont and the script of um other than the video game there was a uh mini series that was scripted by frank darabont and the script of that bounces around the internet every so often it's set in like a little new mexico town that gets like infected by the thing it's actually pretty interesting like i don't think it would have been a great mini series i'm glad they didn't make it but it wouldn't have been bad you know i feel like this was the return of the thing which was almost happened 2005 for the sci-fi channel yeah um the other the one thing i do want people to check out is a peter watts story called the things um it's a sci-fi short story it is basically telling this movie from the point of view of the thing and it's a movie it's a movie it's a story about assimilation and conversion

it's basically about religious proselytization the thing is like oh i just want everyone to know the joy of being mini part of the mini and um it's horrifying and unique and really cool and it's available online for free so people should check it out if you just google it it's right there it's not long uh it looks really cool won the shirley jackson award thing i mean now that they're like threatening to i guess blumhouse and carpenter are working on trying to do some new thing but it's like i would much rather see an expansion than a sort of retread of this same story i don't disagree with you griffin but i will say i'm kind of getting sick of the expansions uh in general you know there's this sort of thing now where it's like we need to remake the movie

kind of but yeah well but have it connect to the original in some sort of plotty way you know i mean the worst version obviously just being literally like oh ray is palpatine's granddaughter or whatever but you know what i mean like but even these smaller that was good that was good oh you're right that was good i'm sorry yeah you're totally right uh but like this i almost and maybe it's just a reaction to the the dominant trend where i'm like just do the trashy thing again and make a better remake. But like, well, sure. But have either of you read about the new Predator movie that Dan Trachtenberg is doing? Uh-huh. No, no, I have not.

It is apparently about the Predator versus a Native American tribe. So it's like a set hundreds of years ago or whatever? Right. Which I think is kind of interesting to just go like, we need to just put the Predator in a radically different environment in the same way that like, a Darabont, oh, the thing comes to a New Mexico town. It's just like,

let's use the larger spook and just put it into a totally different setting is a little more compelling to me. I think Darabont reused a lot of that for the mist which is the mist feels very thing-esque yes it's kind of his best movie uh the predator he he can put that fucker anywhere because it's like what does the predator do he he hunts people like where anywhere they're aliens they have spaceships they can go wherever they want so well i mean that was cool with that that That sounds cool.

What was compelling about the Shane Black pitch that then sort of got beaten out of it was the idea of like, oh, it's the predator in the suburbs. Like it being such an incongruous place to drop a predator. I mean, there's definitely a good movie in that Shane Black movie. It's just that movie's obviously really messy.

Release the black cut. Yeah, sure. Can I try to to very quickly i think this is worth it do a merchandise spotlight wait wait i had a pitch for my take on the thing okay okay okay because i was like i was liking your like your train of thought david of like just keeping it like instead of the expansion right just like remake the thing sure but here's the here's the difference this time it's a bunch of dogs working in arctica and then there's you know you just switch it the humans being chased oh there's no one human there's right there's like yeah yeah yeah you see what I'm saying I do I do see what you're saying Do you have anything more than that or that's where it led

That's a good starting point I think it's a good starting point This is This is a movie if you're gonna remake it Doing the gender flipped remake Would be interesting I don't know if it would work but it would be interesting It would be interesting

I don't think anyone would have any objections to that, and there wouldn't be some weird backlash where people claim they always cared about how male the thing was. People would love it. Yeah, people would love it. The one thing we know about Ghostbusters, it's that they're boys. The number one most important thing.

We can't let go of the fact that that was the complaint. It's like, like well ghostbusters have always been boys there's only boy ones look i also i'm not trying to start shit here but i remain flummoxed by how few people are outraged by the fact that the ghostbusters are now kids they should be outraged kids i i don't get them out of here no No. Grown-up Ghostbusters only. Because if you ask me what is the defining characteristic of a Ghostbuster, a cranky grown-up. Boys are priests and they're Ghostbusters. And I know that's true and I don't want that to change.

Yes. Okay, I'm going to try to do this merchandise spotlight thing quickly because there's a thing I'm setting up here that I think is going to pay off. Okay? I weirdly brought this up the last time, not the last time Emily was on, but in the Sans the Lambs episode. But Todd McFarlane kind of like revolutionized his collector action figures in the 90s because he wanted to make his own Spawn toys because he thought all the other toy companies were lame. So he made his own shit and then he was trying to figure out how to branch out into other toys that uh you know kids companies were afraid to make right and so he said like they're all these movie characters that they're one cool looking character in a movie that couldn't support an entire action figure line what if i collect all of those licenses so he does this series called movie maniacs that was like monsters horror characters things that no one else is making

and you put them all in as like a potpourri in one line so he does it's freddy and jason and leatherface and then weirdly because it was topical at that point two of the characters from species two right and it's huge suddenly it's one of the like top 10 best-selling toy lines in america so now he's got this thing and it's like oh it's an anthology line you put the best characters in yeah the thing he's got a thing series two chucky uh the crow ghost face michael myers norman bates right these are all kind of like killer no from scream and then and then pumpkin head who's kind of an odd pick but that's just like well it's just's just a cool-looking monster, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay, this is the thing I want to set up. So Series 3, he goes a little bit hog-wild, right?

And Series 3 is interesting because we've covered most of these movies or characters, and the ones we haven't covered, it's very possible that we will eventually get to them, okay? So Series 3, he does the thing. He does two different sets of the thing. He does one of the creature coming out two different sets of the thing he does one of the creature coming out of the body with the spider head and uh he does another one of the

final monster uh which i guess is the wolford brimley uh mutation right then he also does snake plissken so it's like oh you're not doing just like monsters and stuff now you're doing kind of like badass r-rated heroes right uh cronenberg's the fly sure the final form another big gross thing right edward sister hands like okay like yeah monster a gentle monster but what have you uh ash from the evil dead franchise and then i i just want you to like, I want three guesses quickly of, like, think about the icons of these types of films. And, like, who do you think, oh, it's weird they haven't gotten around to that character yet. Take a guess.

Who the last character is. And I'll give you a hint. It is a movie we have covered on the podcast. Oh, wow. Okay. Is this Hannibal Lecter? It is not. Everyone wanted Hannibal Lecter.

And Anthony Hopkins would not give up his likeness rights. It didn't happen for another 10 years. I know we haven't covered this, but it's not, so it's not like the exorcist.

It's nothing from the exorcist. It's not. Reagan also, there were rights issues for a while, end up happening about 15 years later. Ben, do you want

to take one guess? Was it Fletch? Ben, you are the closest, would argue damn it i was hoping he was correct the final action figure in series three of movie maniacs is samuel jackson as shaft hey whoa though samuel jackson is shaft yep is it the grumpy older version of him that doesn't like like you know soy milk and right you know doesn't like eating ass yeah no it's 2000 john singleton how weird is that why not richard roundtree why not original good shaft but i also just find it fascinating. Like we've done Edward Scissorhands.

We've done Shaft. We've done Plissken. We've done the thing. And it's very, very possible that we, if not likely, that we do The Fly and Ash someday. I mean, The Fly is a movie about gender transition. So I'll be back for that. Okay. And the dip has been claimed.

Actually, all of Cronenberg's movies are about gender transition. I mean, I was about to say, right? Cronenberg does a lot of body stuff. Yeah. What the fuck is this flesh prison? Yes, exactly. Box office game. Okay.

I think that was worth it for that reveal. No, of course it was, Griffin. People love the merch spotlight. I'm looking at it now. You should make some merch spotlight merch. I want to so badly. Interesting. Okay.

It looks good. It looks just like Samuel Jackson. It does look good. It looks like Samuel Jackson. But it's just a man in a trench coat with his hand in his pocket. He's got his hand right there, though. All right. Yeah, it's right there.

This movie comes out, as we've noted, on June 23rd, is it? Or wait. Okay. Sorry, let me look it up, actually, because now I'm forgetting. June 25th, 1982. And it did come out, as you noted, Griffin, the same week as Blade Runner, which seems like a mistake to me. Yep.

I would say. Neither of those films opens at number one, though, because number one at the box office is what? E.T.? E.T. It's E.T., making $13 million in its third weekend in 1982. Just a freight train.

It was the highest-pricing movie of all time. Just absolutely outrageous. It sure was. E.T.'s a good movie. E.T. is a staggering work. It is the fucking best. E.T., for me, is one of those undeniable objects where I just don't want to hear anything bad.

I don't want to hear anyone's criticisms. Every time I see that movie, I'm astonished it works. I'm just like, this is so good. It shouldn't really work. By the end, you just want to die of crying. That's how I feel. Like a decade ago,

I saw a screening of it at Dumbo Park where they projected it in the middle of the summer. And I was sitting on a towel with my friends and the towel next to us was a dad with a two or three-year-old daughter, maybe three or four. And she starts, obviously, losing it when E.T. goes pale, right?

It's not good. We don't like him. And he just, to his daughter, the way he reassured her was he went, don't worry, honey, everyone cries this much when they watch this movie for the first time. And I thought that's such a profound thing to say. He was just like, nothing unusual is happening. This is the common response. We've all been there.

E.T. good. E.T. one. Blade Runner number two. Okay. It's also interesting in terms of the reputations changing and growing for these two movies. Blade Runner has to be like re-edited and re-perceived like three or four different times to become an undiable classic. The thing is just like completely unchanging and everyone just comes around to it. Blade Runner has a similar like long-running debate about it too that's like, oh, is he a replicant?

That doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. It about it too. That's like, Oh, is he a replica? And that doesn't matter. And like, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's so similar. It's weird. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if the top falls over.

It doesn't matter whether Decker's a replicant or not. It doesn't matter if either of them are things. That's the whole point. The uncertainty is the point. Right. But I just love that Harrison Ford the whole time. It's like, what?

He's not a replicant. Fuck you. Anyway, I think he is. I don't know. He seems like, what? He's not a replicant. Fuck you. Anyway, I think he is. I don't know. He seems really worked up about it. Oh, I am. Number three at the box office

is a film from one of our favorite guys. Guy we've covered? We've never covered him because he's made one billion movies. He is, of course, the director and star of this movie. It's one of the many movies he's the director

and star of. It's Clint Eastwood, but that ain't much of a clue because he's made a lot of movies. 1982? Is it Tightrope? It's not Tightrope, which he did not direct, although he ghost-directed that movie. Go ahead, Emily.

What was your choice? Is it High Plains Drifter? It's not High Plains Drifter, which is a great movie. But no, it is a movie that now... Okay. Go ahead. No, go ahead. No, no, no.

You go ahead. Well, I'm going to give it away, but... I'm going to have a guess. No, we're going to get this. We're going to get this, Griff. Sure, sure. It's Firefox. It's Firefox. It is Firefox.

I was about to say it shares the name of a famed internet browser. Wow. It is. Clint Eastwood. Nice work, Emily. I don't even know what that movie is about. It's about like a futuristic new plane that he's going to fly. It sounds like a great movie it does it's one of the few eastwoods i've never seen and i've always been like that

one's probably pretty good right a pilot is sent to the soviet union on a mission to steal a prototype jet fighter that can be partially controlled by a neuro link correct it's controlled by thought firefox and it's just one of those things where i'm like clint eastwood directed this but he sure did i just wrote a piece for vox.com about uh clint eastwood and james gunn having weirdly similar vibes and like i looked at all these clint eastwood movies and every one of them i hadn't seen i was like that sounds like it might be pretty good. And like this man directed the 1517 to Paris, which is another movie where I'm like,

that was awful. So I know he can make shit, but I'm just like, I want to watch them all. But when he makes a bad movie, it is mind warpingly strange. Yes. Correct.

Right. Even though like everyone's like the guy basically phones it in at this point, but you're like, I don't know, man, no one makes movies like yeah but it's also like he's got some wacky nickelodeon phone it's not like a normal phone he's got a hamburger phone he's got a hamburger phone um do you know what the original title was for firefox i don't fly macho what's number four at the box it's a hot one folks okay here we go we're settling

down number four at the box office is one of the biggest hits of the year it's a sequel it's a good movie in my opinion it's Rocky 3 directed by Sylvester Stallone written by Sylvester Stallone sorry Sylvester Stallone we do gotta do Stallone we put Stallone. Written by Sylvester Stallone. We do

gotta do Stallone or do the Rockies. We put Stallone in March Madness. He did. He was in March Madness. Yeah. And we put Rocky in March Madness. We gave him two bites of the apple. I think we need to do Rocky on the Patreon first because it would be tough to do Stallone without doing Rocky.

But I guess we could also just fold Rocky into a Stallone series because like why not i guess right just do the do the bonus episode first do the rock yeah right like it's because it's if you do stallone it's paradise alley rocky 2 rocky 3 staying alive rocky 4 rocky balboa rambo and the expendables that's his directory no we would do we would do like the the norafron thing where the first episode is rocky and you have to do first blood not maybe not the other ones but you have to do first blood as well you have to see then i think no then i think what you do is you put rambo on patreon but he did one

of them yeah that might be good that might be real he never no he never directed a rambo did he did okay so then that's no he did I'm sorry he directed the gross fourth one that fucker how dare he it's so weird which ones he decides to direct and which ones he doesn't yeah I'm gonna direct Rambo 4 alright

yeah no he did Rocky's Rocky 2 3 4 6 you know he left 5 he directed Rambo 4 but not Rocky 2, 3, 4, 6. Yes, correct. He left 5. He directed Rambo 4, but not 5, and not 1 through 3, and then directed Expendables, but then passed over the sequels to other people. He sure did.

And they're making another one of those now, aren't they? What a guy. Number 5. You forget the announced Expendabellas, which Yas Queen put it in my veins. I don't know what that is, but I don't want to talk about it. Big mood. Girl bosses.

Xpandables have always been boys. No. No, Emily. Now they're girls and they're Xpandabelas. Number five of the box office is another sci-fi sequel that's a big hit of the year. We did a Patreon episode on it recently. What is it? Patreon episode on it recently.

Star Trek 2? It's Star Trek. Oh, Star Trek 2. Star Trek 2, The Wrath of Khan. recently uh patreon episode on it recently star trek 2 it's star trek star trek to the wrath of and number six at the box office griffin is the first film i ever saw in the theater what is it fuck you told me this but it was you saw it as a re-release it was being it was being re-released or as a rep screening or something is it no idea when dalmatians no it is no the whole reason it's weird is that it's a weird movie it's john houston's annie the movie of tomorrow geez that was like a movie of tomorrow didn't that make a fair amount of money it was considered a flop because it was so expensive it was a ridiculously expensive movie but it did make money it just was uh kind expensive movie, but it did make money. It just was kind of,

you know, didn't make enough money, but it is totally worth seeing. It is so, there's so much money on the screen because it's like old ass John Huston just being like, what do you mean you can't build a set?

Build a set for everything. You know, like it's these crazy sets. Albert Finney, you know, munching the scenery. Carol Burnett, obviously. There's a lot of good stuff in Annie.

Annie's good. It's just so funny to imagine like that Daniel Plainview voice motherfucker directing people on the set of Annie. The little orphan's gonna, she's gonna, her dreams are gonna come true in this scene. All right, everyone be quiet.

I want more joy in this tap dance. You've also got Poltergeist at number seven and The Thing opening at number eight behind everything we just mentioned. Not good. It is opening above the Hal Needham movie Megaforce

starring Barry Bostwick and Persis Kambada, the duo. Numbers A and B. Letters one and two. Bostwick and Kambada, the duo. Wow. A and B. Letters one and two. Bostwick and Kambada, they're together finally. The tagline for Megaforce, there has never been a superhero like Ace Hunter.

That is the tagline. I mean, this is true. Megaforce, if people don't know it, it's famous. It's a Golden Harvest movie that was built for the American audience. Like it's a Golden Harvest. The famous studio from Hong Kong is trying to make a Hollywood movie. And they made a movie called Megaforce. Anyway, I've never seen it.

I've always thought about watching it. Well, yeah, it sounds interesting. It does. But yeah, the thing, yeah, it didn't do well. But, you know, what are you going to do? 1982, they're wrong. Yeah, I guess you're just going to have to sit around and become an established classic

just by fucking waiting. Yeah, I mean, they were right about E.T. in 1982, but they were wrong about this. Right. But of course, what wins best picture? Gandhi. The best makeup of 1982. So, you know, it is what it is.

Well, Emily, thank you so much for coming on the show. For throwing down the hammer and once again demanding. No one takes over the show by force as well as you do. I'm putting my chips down calling my shot uh midsommar episode 2029 i'm doing it sure and the fly you've already put your chips down for fly do it yeah that's good i uh you need you need to let me know when you're covering some real pieces of shit coming up because that's i gotta do that next that That's my next thing. I'll keep my eye out for real stink bombs.

Horrendous. What's the next movie we're gonna cover that has a Futterwacken in it? Well, O's are tough to come by, Griffin. They're tough to come by. In this economy? A Futterwacken in this economy? Futterwackens, they're like fucking Haley's Comet. It's like once every 80 years there's something

that heinous. Emily, people should follow you on Twitter, a hell site filled with demons. Twitter.com slash EmilyBDW. You can read my writing at Vox. I'm just going to plug everything. That's what I'm going to do. Plug it all.

I've got so much shit to plug. Read all my stuff at Vox. I have a podcast at Vox called What to Watch. It's in the thing called Vox quick quick hits it's just Alyssa Wilkinson and I goofing around every week for about 15 minutes that's a good you can and should listen to my scripted podcast

Arden we just we finished our second season in late 2020 we have a short mini series coming up in November December two women solving crimes falling in love very proud of it we've won awards now. So like I get to be like, hey, award winning podcast. You also could read my newsletter,

which is at emilybdw.letterdrop.com. My book is Monsters of the Week, the Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files. And please don't sleep on my recent Grammy winning album of the year. The third time I've won that. It's folklore. It came out last year.

It's very good. It's a last year. It's very good. It's a good one. It's a good one. You're the best, Emily, and it's always a pleasure. I love coming here. I love talking to you guys. And I want to do it again, but I want it to be for a terrible movie. Yeah, we'll run some titles by you soon.

And thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe. Thank you to Marie Barty for our social media. Thank you to J.J. Bursch and Nick Lariano for our research. A.J. McKeon and Alex Barron for our editing. Pat Reynolds, Joe

Bowen for our artwork. It keeps on getting longer. Leigh Montgomery and the Great American Novel for our theme song. You can go to blankies.reddit.com for some real nerdy shit and go to patreon.com slash blank check for blank check special features where we do commentaries on franchises maybe rambo someday uh but right now we're we're spelunking in the dark with riddick um Also there, what we're doing, we're filling in some of the Carpenter TV movies,

Elvis and Someone's Watching Me, primarily. Tune in next week. And maybe other stuff too. Everyone's like, we definitely won't. We'll see. We'll see. We'll try and figure it out, okay? We don't know.

We don't know. I mean, I'm going to say something now that's going to stress you out the moment I say it, but I have to. Uh-huh. We have, look, it, but I have to. Uh-huh. We have... Look, it's been a weird year. There's been a lot going on.

We have yet to really contend with how we're going to talk the walk this year. Look, Griff, I've been thinking about that. You're not stressing me out. You're wearing the shirt. You're wearing the shirt right now. I am. I don't know what the answer is there. I don't either. Maybe we should have a little convo with shirt right now. I don't know what the answer is there. I don't either.

Maybe we should have a little combo with JD or something. I don't know. Also, buy the shirts because we have a lot of them left. Yeah, buy the Talk and the Walk shirts. We might come up with some deal. You guys don't want, you're not interested? What's up? You don't want a snowman that JD drew?

We'll come up with a deal. Ben, we'll come up with a deal. We're going to have a really hot deal. Tune in next week for Christine. That's right. A movie that for me presents the most terrifying concept in the world. What if a

car existed? Stay tuned for our guest to a car. You're talking to a car? Boom, boom. Honk, honk. I think car oh you're talking to a car hong kong i uh i think i think i just i gotta pitch this you guys on this bicentennial man bring in my wife and i do chris columbus you're gonna love it fuck fuck you're just naming one of the worst movies ever made one of the most cursed movies ever we

have already done an episode of podcasting about Bicentennial Man, and she jokingly said I should try to be on every movie podcast to cover Bicentennial Man, and now I'm holding her to it. She only said it to me, but I'm making it public. It's a great bit. Did he cover the Christmas Chronicles 2 but not 1? Because weirdly he didn't direct the first one. Wait, I'm sorry, what? Chris Columbus only directed the second

christmas chronicles he produced both chris columbus direct chris columbus this is the first i'm hearing of this directed the christmas chronicles part two that was directed by the chris columbus the man who did harry potter kurt kurt russell yeah yeah the guy yeah yeah that guy he he you know kurt russell and him came up with Christmas Chronicles and for two, they brought in Goldie Hawn. Yeah. It's a perfect Emily Vanderwerf overlap of just all my interests. I had no idea.

Yeah. Why would you? Why would you know that? Why would anyone know that? It's hated knowledge. It's like the fucking Incan Empire. Yeah. Yeah.

This is our curse. Yeah. know that it's hated knowledge it's like the fucking empire yeah yeah uh i guess maybe we do christmas chronicles on patreon one and then the two for the i refuse to entertain this any further the show is over this is the end of the episode and as always i would just like to read read the leaked plot synopsis for the Expendabella's, which was supposed to be directed by Robert Luketic, director of Legally Blonde and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton. They had said Avi Lerner had gone out with offers to Meryl Streep, Cameron Diaz, and Mila Jojovic to play the three leads. And this is how I'm going to end the episode, this plot synopsis. When America's Navy SEALs are wiped out

trying to penetrate the island lair of a deadly despot who has captured one of the world's top nuclear scientists, it becomes clear that there is no such thing as the right man for the job and that this is a mission so impossible that only women can handle it the

only way in some of the world's deadliest female operatives must pose as wait for it high class call girls oh good by private plane to satisfy a dictator and instead save the scientist and the day. Please make this movie so I can make the press junket really uncomfortable. Sounds terrific. We're proud to announce that Blank Check Pictures has acquired the rights to the Expendabella's in Turnaround. No, I don't want it.

I don't want it. Turn it back around. We got it. Can't wait. Thank you.