The Thing (four stars total) If you were putting together a team of adventurers to accompany you in Antarctica (I used to imagine such groups for role-playing game campaigns), the real-life Wilford Brimley might make a good candidate. Before becoming the face of Quaker Oats oatmeal, he was a ranch hand, a bodyguard for Howard Hughes and a stuntman in western movies. I like him because he's Mormon and you don't see too many of those in Hollywood. John Carpenter's remake of The Thing (1982) isn't a traditional mad scientist movie, and Wilford Brimley doesn't play a stereotypical mad scientist. He's just a scientist driven mad by the same body-snatching, tentacled, alien invader that he eventually becomes. Now allow me to interrupt this review for a word on tentacles. At a preschool age, I saw two things on TV that scarred me for life. Only one of them was definitively horror, and that was the first BBC miniseries adaptation of The Day of the Triffids (1981; a year before The Thing). When I saw a little boy my age get lashed in the face by a Triffid's tentacle, just for pruning the garden, I couldn't believe my dad saying that the horror in the book (1951) lies more with humans than with alien plants. As an adult, the most shocking horror I've seen is the alien/mecha "tentacle porn" on Meatball Machine (2005; there's so much of this crap in Japan, the term has its own Wikipedia entry). Needless to say, I wasn't too excited with The Thing when a wolf's face blossoms like a bloody Triffid flower and tentacles whip out to lasso the other dogs in a kennel. I could've easily fast forwarded through that scene but never the one with Wilford Brimley (without his trademark moustache!) smashing a computer room up with an axe.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Wilford Brimley, Mad Scientist
"Here, in science fiction form, is an orgy of hate and fear and futility, with no hope of escape, no constructive element whatsoever. The child with whom one is asked to identify is bereft of any security from father and mother, from constituted authority, and the adults burst into meaningless violence . . . For a time we hope there will be an answer in this projection of the formless fears abroad in our world of technological annihilation and savage ideologies, but the terror and dread only pile higher." (Transcript of 1953 PTA reports on Invaders from Mars, as quoted by David J. Skal in The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, p. 251)
The Thing (four stars total) If you were putting together a team of adventurers to accompany you in Antarctica (I used to imagine such groups for role-playing game campaigns), the real-life Wilford Brimley might make a good candidate. Before becoming the face of Quaker Oats oatmeal, he was a ranch hand, a bodyguard for Howard Hughes and a stuntman in western movies. I like him because he's Mormon and you don't see too many of those in Hollywood. John Carpenter's remake of The Thing (1982) isn't a traditional mad scientist movie, and Wilford Brimley doesn't play a stereotypical mad scientist. He's just a scientist driven mad by the same body-snatching, tentacled, alien invader that he eventually becomes. Now allow me to interrupt this review for a word on tentacles. At a preschool age, I saw two things on TV that scarred me for life. Only one of them was definitively horror, and that was the first BBC miniseries adaptation of The Day of the Triffids (1981; a year before The Thing). When I saw a little boy my age get lashed in the face by a Triffid's tentacle, just for pruning the garden, I couldn't believe my dad saying that the horror in the book (1951) lies more with humans than with alien plants. As an adult, the most shocking horror I've seen is the alien/mecha "tentacle porn" on Meatball Machine (2005; there's so much of this crap in Japan, the term has its own Wikipedia entry). Needless to say, I wasn't too excited with The Thing when a wolf's face blossoms like a bloody Triffid flower and tentacles whip out to lasso the other dogs in a kennel. I could've easily fast forwarded through that scene but never the one with Wilford Brimley (without his trademark moustache!) smashing a computer room up with an axe.
The Thing (four stars total) If you were putting together a team of adventurers to accompany you in Antarctica (I used to imagine such groups for role-playing game campaigns), the real-life Wilford Brimley might make a good candidate. Before becoming the face of Quaker Oats oatmeal, he was a ranch hand, a bodyguard for Howard Hughes and a stuntman in western movies. I like him because he's Mormon and you don't see too many of those in Hollywood. John Carpenter's remake of The Thing (1982) isn't a traditional mad scientist movie, and Wilford Brimley doesn't play a stereotypical mad scientist. He's just a scientist driven mad by the same body-snatching, tentacled, alien invader that he eventually becomes. Now allow me to interrupt this review for a word on tentacles. At a preschool age, I saw two things on TV that scarred me for life. Only one of them was definitively horror, and that was the first BBC miniseries adaptation of The Day of the Triffids (1981; a year before The Thing). When I saw a little boy my age get lashed in the face by a Triffid's tentacle, just for pruning the garden, I couldn't believe my dad saying that the horror in the book (1951) lies more with humans than with alien plants. As an adult, the most shocking horror I've seen is the alien/mecha "tentacle porn" on Meatball Machine (2005; there's so much of this crap in Japan, the term has its own Wikipedia entry). Needless to say, I wasn't too excited with The Thing when a wolf's face blossoms like a bloody Triffid flower and tentacles whip out to lasso the other dogs in a kennel. I could've easily fast forwarded through that scene but never the one with Wilford Brimley (without his trademark moustache!) smashing a computer room up with an axe.
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1 comment:
I had no idea the Quaker Oats man was so versatile. Your blog is a wealth of information.
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