Rewriting DVD Marketing Blurbs #6: John Carpenter’s The Thing (Blu-ray)

What it says on the back of the plastic, environmentally irresponsible packaging:

Horror-meister John Carpenter (Halloween, Escape From New York) teams Kurt Russell’s outstanding performance with incredible visuals to build this chilling version of the classic The Thing. In the winter of 1982, a twelve-man research team at a remote Antartic research station discovers an alien buried in the snow for over 100,000 years. Once unfrozen, the form-changing alien wreaks havoc, creates terror, and becomes one of them.

What it should say:

Horror-meister John Carpenter (who made a bunch of awesome movies in the seventies, and a few really cool ones in the eighties and then did that terrible Ghosts of Mars in the nineties and then sort of dropped off the radar which made Todd Robert Anderson very sad because he’s a big fan but then sort of resurfaced when Hollywood started making these unbelievably sub-par remakes of his classics in the new millenium) teams Kurt Russell’s outstanding performance (and make no mistake, Kurt Russell is always awesome even in junk like Tango & Cash, Used Cars, and Poseidon) with incredible visuals (and what makes them incredible is that they are all practical effects and utilize no CGI because it wasn’t available at the time and as a result remain unmatched three decades later) to build this chilling version of the classic The Thing. (Which was actually called The Thing from another world! but given that this is a bare-bones, after-thought re-release, the person Universal hired to write this blurb didn’t bother doing any fact checking–but give the poor guy a break, he had to write three whole sentences and there just wasn’t enough time.) In 1982, a certain family-friendly alien became box office gold and when this alien terror show was released right afterwards, no one wanted to see it, but amazingly it has stood the test of time and is considered a classic, which in Todd Robert Anderson’s subjective opinion, it absolutely is. Of course, because Universal knows it will only get so much money for this Blu-ray disc from sci-fi horror nerds, they didn’t include any of the juicy extras from the last DVD release. They’ll probably re-release it again in a year or so with all those extras and the sci-fi dorks will pony up yet again instead of teaching these fuckers a lesson, leaving Universal stuck with thousands of copies of discs they can’t sell because they are cynical bastards. And Todd Robert Anderson read somewhere that they are planning on doing a “prequel.” That is the dumbest idea of all time.

More importantly…why does Todd Robert Anderson keep referring to himself in the third person?

5 thoughts on “Rewriting DVD Marketing Blurbs #6: John Carpenter’s The Thing (Blu-ray)”

  1. I was a bit worried when I clicked on this because I thought that Todd might actually make fun of one of the greatest horror movies of all time.

    Thankfully he was making fun of the barely adequate blurb, so I can call off my one-man jihad against him.

  2. Give us a commentary on Big Trouble in Little China pigs. We’ll let you watch a good movie! You know you want to.

  3. This movie is not only a horror classic, it’s a classic in general! Rarely do movies engulf your interest as much as this bad-ass flick does. Russell is God!
    The practical effects blow the modern CGI crap out of the pond.

    I think this movie is even better than the other sci-fi horror classic we all know as Alien, not saying Alien is bad by any means(it’s good) but just stating my opinion of this in comparison to Alien.

    Peace

    “Yeah fuck you too!”

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