Guess How I Know It's Summer?

I know it's summertime because I've seen two movies at the theaters in the past month and both of them have sucked. Before, it was The Strangers, which has been poorly accepted by critics (myself included), and slightly better accepted by audiences, judging by its IMDb score and the oddly long legs of the flick.

Tonight, it was M. Knight Shyamalan's latest blockbuster powerhouse of crap, The Happening. Somehow, critics think even more poorly of The Happening than of The Strangers. That's not to say that The Happening was good, just better than The Strangers. By definition, everything is better than The Strangers.

The Happening has some genuinely funny moments, like when Mark Wahlberg talks to a plastic tree, and also some unintentionally funny moments that ruin the movie. Also taking hand in making this one a bomb: poorly written characters. These characters, like in every other Shyamalan film, have a personal struggle to make it through which they are concerned about even through the overt problem of the entire northeast United States committing gruesome suicide. Needless to say, just like in every other Shyamalan movie, they manage to overcome this internal struggle. The characters are all cartoon characatures with a small selection of emotions that don't allow for nuance.

Also, like in every Shyamalan movie, I guessed the plot "twist" six minutes into the movie. Granted, The Happening's "plot twist" feels less like a condescending self-affirmation on the level of Stuart Smalley than, say, The Sixth Sense, or The Village.

Receiving the theme of The Happening is like being slapped across the face with a tuna. Yes, we should live every day as if it were our last. Of course, love conquers all. And we may never know every single reason for nature's actions. Duh. We've had this pressed on us since we can remember.

There are a handful of scenes where Shyamalan attempts to create art, like the shot I kept hearing about where a pistol changes hands a few times, that fall flat on their faces. It makes Shyamalan look like a guy who only wishes he could be pretentious.

The acting here is pretty bad, though not awful, and certainly not the fault of the actors. They were given a pretty crappy script. Shyamalan can't write, and he basically gave each character one or two basic emotions and absolutely no tension. There's hardly any conflict here, and that's what drives characters' actions.

Our favorite director whose first name is "M" has basically taken other movies that came before and mixed them together to create something decidedly not new. More specifically, The Happening is kinda like The Last Man On Earth meets The Poseidon Adventure. His Netflix account should be revoked unless he starts renting better movies. A good one for him to watch would be the German Funny Games, which I watched recently in response to The Strangers. He'll pick up a few methods of handling suspense and horror and even paranoia, which is something he obviously tried to make central here, and failed.

All in all, this is probably worth watching if you rent it, or better yet, if your friend rents it and invites you over. Shyamalan probably has another Unbreakable in him, but I firmly believe that he should stop writing his movies and just stick to the direction. That said, even The Happening had a handful of shots that made me laugh due to their overdone cliche methodologies.

The Happening is just not happening.

The Strangers is the worst horror movie ever made.

Let's talk about what makes a horror movie good.

For me, I don't necessarily need to be scared, since I don't get scared at most horror movies, but if it can make me frightened, that's definitely a plus. I guess what I really need is for the movie to make me feel like if I were in the same position as the characters that I would do the same things they do to try to get out of that situation, and that what they're doing would be all that I could do. I need psychological frights, not cheap jolts to my ears when the music spikes to accompany a bad guy leaping into frame.

If you agree with me, don't watch The Strangers which just came out. I would have felt cheated if I hadn't had to pay to see this pile of garbage. It's like the screenwriter and director picked up a document called "How to Make a Horror Movie" and followed its formula to a T.

The first problem The Strangers has is its pacing. It's dreadfully slow. Boring, even. The director, Bryan Bertino (a first-time director, and it shows), is trying to go for something artful here, but long shots of characters walking (seriously, I watched Liv Tyler walk slowly for two minutes solid, at a stretch) doesn't make art. Neither does framing a victim behind bar-like shapes that make them appear to be "trapped" in the frame of the picture. That's not art. That's cliche.

Speaking of cliche, this movie makes its own cliches. By the time I was done watching this flick (if you can call it that), I was prepared to vomit if I had to see one more masked figure walk slowly out of darkness behind somebody. This isn't even scary the first time it happens. Why should I be scared the next fifteen times?

That's not even the worst of it. The characters here are James (Scott Speedman) and Kristen (Liv Tyler), and they must be the flat-out stupidest characters I've ever seen in any horror movie. See, I can suspend my disbelief if a character in a horror flick does something stupid when they're in the height of their distress, but these characters are doing stupid things before the titular tormentors are even in the house.

Kristen gets scared when her boyfriend goes out for a pack of smokes and strange knocking comes on the door. She tries calling him. How incovenient (or rather, how really convenient for a screenwriter) it is that her phone's battery is dead. So she plugs it into the wall. Then she gets a cordless land-line phone and calls James on his cell. Somebody cuts the phone lines in the house. (Cliche!!!) So she runs back to her cell phone, UNPLUGS IT, and marvels that she still has no battery power. She gives up. Any person with any amount of rationality knows that YOU CAN MAKE A PHONE CALL FROM A CELL PHONE, EVEN IF THE BATTERY IS DEAD, IF YOU HAVE IT PLUGGED INTO THE WALL!!!

During another scene, she screams when she gets frightened, letting her stalkers know exactly where she is. But all of a sudden, she gets concerned that the lamp in the room is on, which -- ZOMG! -- might alert her stalkers that she's in the room. Her solution? Try and turn the lamp off. That might be a good idea, if she weren't too fucking stupid to figure out which direction to turn the switch on the light. Failing at turning the lamp off the normal way, she resorts to BEATING THE LAMP ON THE GROUND, MAKING LOTS OF NOISE, AND COMPLETELY DEFEATING ANY CHANCE SHE MIGHT HAVE HAD OF NOT BEING DISCOVERED!

When James makes it home, the strangers disappear. Of course, he thinks she's gone crazy (CLICHE!!!) since there's no evidence, but when the phonograph turns itself on, he knows somebody's in the house. So he goes to his car to get his cell phone (since Kristen's has been thrown into the fire by a potential killer), and sees that his car's windows have all been beaten in. Nevermind the fact that the masked madmen managed to smash these windows without making any noise whatsoever. He already knows that Kristen's cell phone has been taken away from her by the killers. He can assume the same about his own. Yet he walks slowly to his car carrying a butcher knife and what does he find? Yep, his cell phone's gone. And now he's being attacked. So Kristen runs out to him. Why? Because the script told her to. They proceed to be attacked by the killers in a truck.

Here's another good one. They're face to face with one killer in the truck. They've got two directions they can run. They can bolt off into the very nearby woods which have trees so dense that no truck could ever possibly drive through them, or they can run back to the house. What do they do? Run back to the house. Why? I speculate they do this because the screenwriter wrote it that way. Do their survival instincts ever kick in?

No.

So now they're back in the house. This is James's father's summer home, so he says he knows where his father keeps a gun. He apparently doesn't because he scrambles to find it. He looks for a full-size shotgun behind books on a bookshelf with shelves so narrow that you could never fit a full-sized shotgun on them. He eventually finds it on top of the bookshelf, which makes more sense. They find some ammo in a shoebox in a bedroom closet. Why James's father would keep his firearms and his ammo in two completely separate locations is beyond me.

So they load up. Right as they're about to get to the two-inch-thick solid wood front door, an ax comes chopping through it effortlessly with one blow. Wait. That's not wood. That's styrofoam. Now there's a hole in the door big enough to see the killer's mask outside it. He shoots from a distance, but there's no way in hell that he could possibly hit the ax-wielder because it's a freaking scattergun aimed from twenty feet away from a hole the size of a human head. Instead of walking up to the hole and scaring the bejeezus out of their tormentor, then shooting, taking off half of that person's face, he shoots once from a distance, then runs the other direction - BACK INTO THE HOUSE!

He eventually makes his way outside after another dreadful period of silence and him killing his best friend (or maybe it's his brother, I can't tell because none of the characters have even that level of depth) on accident, he winds up hiding in the woods. He sees one of the killers and that killer doesn't see him. Instead of using that to his advantage and, I don't know, shooting her to death, he lets her find him, then gets his ass kicked and the shotgun taken away.

This leaves Kristen on her own. She runs out of the house, and falls into a ditch that wasn't there when James left the house. Her leg is hurt. Instead of crawling up and away from the house, since none of the killers know her whereabouts, she decides she's going to be stupid again and crawl back toward a barn which is right next to the house.

Allow me to describe this barn. It's very dark. The front door to the barn is very well lit. If somebody were to try to get in, Kristen would know immediately, and be able to do something about it. The other entrance is a window that's so high up and so small that it simply wouldn't be viable to enter through it, especially if you were trying to sneak up on a person. The barn is full of could-be weapons. You've got chainsaws and machetes and a place where an ax used to be, but truly, anything in this room could be used to do some serious damage to a person if thrown or swung. Instead of wielding any of these items, Kristen chooses to turn on an old amateur radio to call for help, as if anybody actually uses those anymore. That's why this piece of shit is IN THE BARN!!! Of course, talking over the radio alerts the killers to her whereabouts (she doesn't even learn from experience in this movie), and one of them swings an ax in through the high-up window, effectively scaring her and destroying the radio... but not much else. Like I said, that window is too high and too small to actually be a threat. But does Kristen keep her position in this safehouse? Hell, no! She runs back to the house which is huge, has multiple entrances that can't be watched all at once, and has been proven several times already to be a major danger zone.

She's very quiet in the house, and her leg (which keeps healing itself and then getting worse again as convenience allows) is all better for the time being. The result is that somehow the killers don't know where she is. One even walks into the room with her and walks straight past. She should grab the knife that's sitting on the counter nearby and stab the fucker in the back. But she doesn't. She hides in a closet.

You ever notice how all closets in horror movies have doors with slats in them? You ever notice how the victims can see out these slats perfectly well, but the killers can never see in? Same deal here. Though hiding in this closet isn't too bad an idea. You can see the killers when they walk in (and one does, and he walks in circles, sits down in an easy chair, then stands back up and does more circles for about five boring minutes), and there are most certainly no other entrances. Kristen's almost in control here. She should jump out and kill these masked freaks while she's got this opportunity to do so. It should be mentioned that NONE OF THEM ARE CURRENTLY ARMED!!! But she failed Kindergarten, so she doesn't do that.

So they get her and they get James (who's still alive) and they tie up the couple and stab them a bunch. There's this great, operatic scene where the killers remove their masks. But we still don't see their faces, so what's the point? Oh yeah. Running time.

I won't tell you how this ends, because you don't want to know. It's too insipid for words (though the screenwriter certainly put those words on paper at some point). What I will tell you is that you don't want to see this movie. Your intelligence, if you have any, will be insulted. I should also mention that the flick is full of inconsistencies, like the ditch that wasn't there before and the fact that, though Kristen cuts her hand really badly on a butcher knife early in the movie so that her hand is bleeding profusely for the following sixty minutes, there isn't any blood on the knife at any time until Kristen gets full-on stabbed by it. I can also tell you that the movie opens on some title cards followed by a 9-1-1 phone call recording of Kristen screaming and saying that there's blood everywhere and that she doesn't know where she is, but that scene is never in the movie because it couldn't have possibly happened because the phone lines are cut and all their cell phones have been destroyed.

I will also say that the movie doesn't trust its audience. It opens on title cards that explain the situation. And a voiceover reads it back to us in full. Thanks. I, unlike Kristen, got through the third grade. I can read just fine. In fact, if I could watch the French original that this movie is based on, I would watch them in French with English subtitles. I would read my way through that movie. Also, they set up this scene where, when we're first introduced to these two retards, Kristen is crying and James is disappointed. He takes her back to the summer home where she's shocked and a little guilt-ridden to find that he's really romanced the place up. There are candles everywhere, music ready to play on the record player, and rose petals all over the floor. He sets a ring box - the kind you get from the jewelry store - down on the table. I assumed, as I hope everyone in my theater did, that he had just proposed marriage to her and had been rejected. But that apparently wasn't enough. We need a series of two or three flashbacks to explain that to us in excruciating detail.

There's also this one scene, when the door is knocked on for the first time, where James says, "What time is it? Like, four o'clock?" Then we get a shot of a clock on the wall announcing the time as 4:05 AM. It's a small thing, but it's just another example of how this movie spells everything out for you and leaves absolutely nothing to your imagination except for how the characters got so stupid.

The killers' excuse for coming into the house and killing them comes in the last fifteen minutes of the movie and the last fifteen seconds of the trailer for the movie: "Because you were home." Let that be a metaphor for this movie as a whole. It doesn't make any more sense. I mean, sure, they were psychotic people with a penchant for murder, so they picked some random house and killed people in it. But it's supposed to be a catalyst for the entire ninety minutes and it just doesn't work. It might have worked if the killers had character depth. Look at The Devil's Rejects to see how a "just because" logic can work very well. I must say that I have not seen a movie this bad since I watched fifteen minutes of Norbit on a lunch break at work once.

Don't watch this. Please, for the love of God, don't watch this. Even when it's on HBO at midnight in a few months, don't watch this "because it was on."

Time...

File under
Examples of Man Trying to Control Nature
·or·

Things Which Are Arbitrary
·or·
Why Even Bother?

Daylight Saving Time came and went, much without incident, even when we were expecting the worst. I guess that proves that when you expect the worst and the unexpected happens, it's really not all that bad in the end.

DST did make me think about the nature of time and how none of it makes any difference anyway. See, time is this intangible thing. I can't touch it. Niether can you. But we all know it. It's really nothing more than a measurement, so it's no more real than a centimeter or an inch. Time is how we measure the sun's progress through our skies (and I don't want to be corrected by some heliocentric theory-proving smartass, either; I know how it works, I'm just being romantic).

So man creates time as a measure of this and somehow we decide that one sun-cycle should be broken up into twenty-four pieces called hours and that those should each be busted up into sixty smaller segments called minutes and that (probably for the sake of accuracy) minutes are really a sequence of sixty even smaller units, seconds, but for all humanity's infinite wisdom, we manage to contradict ourselves in correction after we realize that we were off by some tiny margin in our initial assessment of this breakdown. That twenty-four count of hours should probably have been a little closer to a twenty-five count. And the assessment, after all, was more than just a little bit off.

What was decided was that one year (previously considered to be consisted of 365 days) was 365 ¼ days. So we were underestimating. So now every four years, we throw an extra day in for good measure, to prove ourselves right. But there's nothing to prove except that we were wrong.

Where did we go wrong? Was it when we decided that the day should be twenty-four hours long when it should have been more like thirty? Was it when we decided an hour should be sixty minutes when in reality it should have been seventy-five? Or when we realized that our measurement of one minute was nine hundred seconds too short? The answer, of course, is none of the above.

Where we went wrong was deciding that we as humans could control nature. The sun rises and falls when it's going to and, since Earth is tilted, most likely any breakdown of time measurements we could create would be somewhat inaccurate. I'm not the only person to realize this. Obviously someone else came to this conclusion first, because for about half the year, the United States of America pretends that we're reliving an hour just so we can sleep and work better. Time, as an intagible entity that doesn't really exist, marches on while our perception of it changes dramatically. It's like time travelling. At two AM on the fourth Sunday of November (I think), our clocks are supposed to jettison straight back to one AM. Then in the springtime, when the clock strikes two, we leap straight to three o'clock in the morning. We first create time and then dispose of it. Our days are just as long, just a little brighter. Here's a diagram.

So you see, we live 1 AM twice on November's fateful day, and disregard 2 AM completely in March just to suit our needs of having daylight to work in. Since daylight is overrated anyway, and since we actually have the ability to do this, I can safely conclude that time is just a way for man to attempt to control something which he created. If time were really nature, we wouldn't be able to do this. You can't disregard what is obviously there.

And if this spelling-out of what you're all already aware of didn't help you see it any better, perhaps this will serve as proof that none of it matters anyway. I don't eat lunch at noon. I eat lunch when my stomach growls. My hunger is not controlled by time. It is controlled by my nature of consumption and excretion. So why bother changing the time if all it means is that my stomach will growl an hour earlier?

What Dell Can Do...

Preface the First

I'll begin by saying that I wish people would get off MySpace and put their blogs somewhere else. I'm sick of advertisements flashing around my reading material and I'm sick of my customers coming to me saying they clicked an ad and their computers filled up with spyware shortly thereafter. MySpace is a whorish website which exposes the true nature of Microsoft theology: do nothing you're told to do and you won't have problems, which is backward and stupid.

Folks, learn about RSS and get with the program.

Preface the Second

Now I'll say that I'm one of Dell's biggest detractors. Even in a market vastly populated by low-grade, cheap hardware being sold off at high prices and being called "quality" materials, Dell makes some of the worst computers a person can buy. Proprietary motherboards, power supplies, and cases don't make anybody's lives easier. We should strive for standardization, especially in a world dependant on the solutions sold to them and even more especially in a world where the buyers of technology have little to no tech knowledge, so the purchase decision can be based on bottom-line price, not what a biased, sales-oriented website tells a person.

But lately, Dell has shown some promise.

The Bulk of It

What you can gather from above regarding my opinion on the end-user desktop computing market is:

• Knowledge of the subject is generally minimal
• You can't expect the entire world to be a tech nut
• People should at least attempt to keep up with tech trends (like RSS)
• PC sales are based on advertisements, not truth
• Windows, while a functional OS, creates far more problems than it solves

Further, you can gather that I'm a Linux enthusiast. By no means am I an expert. But I am a geek for it. And I do believe that the ideas behind it embody the solution to many problems. Linux, especially amongst the Debian family of distributions, is all about community. Community support, community development, community involvement. It's all free for distribution and mostly free of charge.

Imagine this utopia: You live in a town. You have a tomato farm. Your neighbor ranches chickens. The guy across the street can grow wheat and turn it into flour. Down the road there's a dude with a huge building. Everybody takes what they make and puts it on a shelf in the building. When you need something, you walk in and take it. Most everybody contributes. The contribution is the price of the product that you take. It's the same concept behind Ubuntu and other Linuxes.

No viruses, no spyware, no bugs. Linux is robust. Linux doesn't crash. Linux doesn't cause unfixable problems.

And now Dell is putting Ubuntu Linux on a small portion of PCs that they sell. This may be the one thing Dell has ever done right. Will people buy it? Maybe. Maybe a geek like me. Should everyone buy it? No. But most people. Should Linux be bigger than it is? Yeah. Definitely.

What experience do I have that allows me to make this claim? I do desktop support for PCs that people buy. A good 80-90% of peoples' PC problems are the result of Windows. These customers are frustrated with Windows. They're as sick of Windows as I am sick of flashy ads urging me to put a pie in Britney Spears's face when I'm reading my friends' weblogs. Linux is a solution for this. I offer it every time. Sure, you could call that moonlighting, but is it really so wrong to do that? I don't think so. I use Windows for two things: commercial video gaming (read: gaming that costs money) and programming in Windows-only programming languages. Aside from these two things, Linux does everything else I could ever want to do.

What keeps people from using Linux? It has a bad rap, and I know why. Windows is sold to a buyer. Linux is not sold at all. It is given. With all the benefits of Linux, the fact that it comes at no cost seems too good to be true. So I understand the skepticism. I am, after all, a master of cynicism. Also, Linux has this "geek chic" culture surrounding it. So a buyer thinks, I am not a geek. I cannot use Linux. I will be lost. And they knock it before they've tried it.

Dell can help solve this problem. The problem is, after all, an issue of image. PC sales are based on advertisements, not truth. Advertisement, I believe, can allay the lack of knowledge about the product. If I stand on a soapbox here at my blog, or if I show up at Starbucks with a stack of Linux Live CDs and purport to know that I hold in my hand the end-all, be-all of computer problem solutions, who will listen? No one. Because I'm just a guy. I'm a geek. I get Linux. My response, of course, is, "Do you get Windows?" No average PC user can honestly say, "Yes." So what's the friggin difference?

But if Dell advertises to the masses saying that Linux is a solution for a good 70% of the PC-using population, they can convince people. Whether they'll do this or not will be left up to Microsoft, I fear. If Dell makes claims that Linux is better than Windows (in other words, if they speak the truth), and their efforts succeed, they'll be shooting themselves in the foot, considering all their profit comes from the fact that they pre-install Windows Vista on damn near every PC they sell.

Dell can help. I'm willing to take a step back from my anti-Dell ranting to allow them time to perfect their "open" product line and fix their company.

In conclusion, I propose that people comment here on things Linux does not do or things that Linux does not make user-friendly, or encase in a GUI. That way I can prove you all wrong.

Update!

On October 27, 2007, I wrote a post entitled, "Is Michael Bay Able to Save Himself?" The post's title was in reference to his latest movie, Transformers. I simply couldn't believe that so many people could absolutely rave about a flick and it could still be as bad as Bay's previous "efforts." You see, I still don't understand how an advertising point like "From the director of Armageddon and Pearl Harbor" actually sells tickets.

So I reluctantly watched the movie, and my answer to the question "Is Michael Bay able to save himself?" is a very ashamed and self-disgusted "NO!" How could I have let a movie like Transformers pique my interest? How could I have let the opinions of millions of bovine-minded masses influence my life? This is like that time when everybody thought 300 was the greatest movie on earth and I was like, "Meh."

Transformers is mediocrity at its most shameless. It's astounding to think that Michael Bay, given nearly 250 million dollars, can only make a movie this boring. For Christ's sake, man, the explosions aren't even real anymore! Where's the fun? What happened to the Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry days of exciting filmmaking? Vanishing Point, anybody? Death Proof?

That's an interesting concept there - I didn't initially think that Death Proof was as amazing as Tarantino's other work, but now that I realize that it's specifically Michael Bay he's out to punish with that movie, I think it's the coolest movie of all time. Next time I watch it, I'll be imagining Michael Bay in Stuntman Mike's driver seat while Rosario Dawson, Zoe Bell, and Tracie Thoms kick his ass. I'll be cheering for them.

"You know I can't let you go......without tapping that ass!"

CRUNCH!

Ambushing the mainstream...

Read a report last night (sorry, no link, but it came from Engadget) about the first Trojan to be written for the iPhone. Apparently, it only affects Jailbroken iPhones, but that's beside the point, which is something like this:

If it's only taken this long to get malicious software written for the iPhone, then it's a sign that Apple's marketing is flawed (and I knew all this before I read the article; the article just made it strikingly clear). If you switch to Apple, then no worries about catching a nasty virus or worm or Trojan or adware. But the truth is, the reason there isn't a huge Internet overload of Mac-based malware is because its market share never really gets above 10-15%. Windows holds the vast majority of the operating system market, so, to affect the most people, you write evil-ware for Windows.

But if Apple succeeds in switching a significant portion of people away from Windows (which is becoming easier to do now that Vista's been received so generally negatively), enough to recover their market share, then that will open Mac up to all sorts of disgusting little bits of code. Mac will no longer be able to use that same old schtick of theirs to gravitate customers away from Windows.

What really scares me about all this is that Mac OS X (and probably previous versions as well) is a Unix-based operating system, just like Linux. The directory structure of Mac OS is virtually identical to the directory structure on my computer running Ubuntu 7.10. Should Mac by some chance become popular enough to begin attracting more attention to the hackers and advertisers and Internet black marketers, wouldn't this put my precious open-source OS in danger? I mean, if I were writing this kind of software, I'd make sure it infected some kind of Unix system folder like /bin or /usr/lib or /etc. Since these folders exist both here in Linux and out there on Mac, wouldn't my computer become like an unintended target for that software?

It'd be almost like friendly fire!

On horror and The Thing...

Got around to watching John Carpenter's The Thing last night. This is one of those movies that, being so well-known by friends and family to be a hopeless lover of horror flicks both amazing and atrocious, I am embarrassed to have never seen. I can be embarrassed no more, for I have now witnessed the flick and I have to say that it's an excellent example of how a horror movie should be made.

Jenny turned to me and said that she liked it, but it seemed a little like every other horror film she's ever seen. There is a point to be made by this comment, though the point is quite the opposite of the comment. It's not that The Thing is like other horror movies. Other horror movies are like The Thing. Carpenter is a master of the horror genre which gets just enough nose-turning to make it seem like it's not something one can be master of. But those who turn their noses at these nose-turners would cite The Thing as a major point in their argument.

Of course, The Thing takes an awful lot from Ridley Scott's Alien, released three years prior, but that's not such a bad thing, is it? The pace is sluggish, but it builds the tension. It builds the fear. The Thing has all the elements of "classic" horror.

Watching the film made me think about the qualities of horror that segregate the bad ones from the good ones.

I hate it when a horror movie attempts to frighten its audience by using cheap scares involving something ugly rapidly entering the frame accompanied by an orchestral lurch in the score. It's simply a given that the audience will jump. It's a defense mechanism our bodies have. The adrenaline blasts through our veins and our muscles tense. It's not hard to do that. But it leaves the audience with a feeling not unlike going on a rollercoaster. We zoom off on a guided track, helpless against the force of gravity which tugs us upside-down on loops, ties our guts in knots as we spiral through corkscrews, peels the skin to the front of our faces as we are suddenly braked to a stop. And you know what? The next time you ride the coaster it's gonna be the same. And the next time you watch the movie it's gonna be the same. But it's a movie theater we're in, not an amusement park, and we're all going to leave thinking the same thing: "I've been cheated."

The kind of horror that really gets to people is the kind that attacks you in a way more than physical. It gets at your own fears. It wrenches your own psyche. When a movie can wrangle the truly terrifying into a context that we don't have to make very forgiving leaps and bounds to believe, it transcends the cheapness onto a level that grabs us and doesn't let go when the lights come back on.

Stephen King usually works this type of magic by writing his characters and stories into small towns or isolated areas, and then makes the characters seem just like us. The Shining takes place at a snowed-in hotel. There is no escape. There is no hope of rescue. Jack Torrance is a regular alcoholic falling back off the wagon. When he's finally done in by the isolation, his victims have nowhere to go. They can hide, but Jack can find them easily.

Carpenter is working with an adaptation here. There's the B-movie from '51 (The Thing from Another World, Howard Hawks), but initially, even that movie was the spawn of a short story by John W. Campbell called "Who Goes There?" The story seems somehow modern by the insertion of some brief mentions about the titular monster's cellular manipulation. Admittedly, I know not if these factoids were in the original story or older movie, having partaken in neither of them. Adaptation or not, the idea of isolation comes into heavy play and goes a long way toward making the story believable. An alien existence that a team of scientists has no reason to know about crash landed in the frozen antarctic terrain many thousands of years ago and has been thawed out by a similar team of Norwegian scientists. As the alien presence grows more menacing, a storm blows in, efficiently trapping the band in their forty-below-zero, limited-sight, guide-rope-necessary surroundings.

There are two sequences in particular that show off the true confines of the encampment. The first is the opening sequence. A singular helicopter rages closely over the landscape, its two passengers firing at a sled dog from the air. You know something bad is happening, but you can't be quite sure what it is. And the fact that a singular dog is the only non-human life in the area instills a feeling of desolation in the audience. Later, a crew member frantically crosses between buildings by grabbing and following a guide rope. The line is his only direction to his destination, which has no shape, only beams of glaring white-blue light that could be close or could be a quarter-mile away.

There is one cheap thrill in The Thing, but it's surrounded by such tension from the crew (who, by this point in the film, cannot trust any of the others for fear that they're really the harbinger of extraterrestrial doom) that it does more than just cause an unavoidable, natural jump. It briefly opens us up to the cold, to the fear, to the true meaning of failure.

The Thing failed at the box office, something which is largely attributed to the release of the infamous E.T. The Extra Terrestrial a couple of weeks previous, but it has certainly found a welcome home on the shelves of cult movie enthusiasts across the country. Perhaps this is where it belongs. Let those who cherish this should-be acclaimed film have it, and give the others One Missed Call.