First, there’s the cover: published in November 1982, issue 64 of Starlogfeatures the benevolent, childlike face of E.T. The issue of Starlogin which Alan Spencer’s review of The Thingappeared provides several clues as to why the critical reaction to the movie was so extreme. A major summer release, The Thingscraped in at number eight at the US box office, and while it was by no means a flop – its lifetime gross amounted to just under $20 million according to Box Office Mojo – neither was it considered a hit. In terms of its theatrical performance, Carpenter’s dark vision didn’t exactly go down as either he or Universal had perhaps expected. ![]() Here’s some things he’d be better suited to direct: traffic accidents, train wrecks and public floggings.” It has no pace, sloppy continuity, zero humor, bland characters on top of being totally devoid of either warmth or humanity It’s my contention that John Carpenter was never meant to direct a science-fiction horror movie. In science fiction magazine Starlog, critic Alan Spencer wrote, “John Carpenter’s The Thing smells, and smells pretty bad. The magazine Cinefantastiqueran a cover which asked, “Is this the most hated movie of all time?” Timemagazine dismissed The Thing as “an exercise in abstract art,” while Roger Ebert, in a slightly less aggressive review, described it as “a great barf-bag movie”, but maintained that, “the men are just setups for an attack by The Thing.”Įven reviewers outside the mainstream were hostile towards The Thing. Writing for The New York Times, noted movie critic Vincent Canby described the movie as “foolish, depressing” with its actors “used merely as props to be hacked, slashed, disembowelled and decapitated, finally to be eaten and then regurgitated it is too phony to be disgusting. Yet when The Thing opened in US cinemas on the 25th June 1982, the critical reception was almost as aggressive and seething as the movie’s title monster.
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