In 1989, six year old Martin Bristoll was kidnapped from his backyard swing in Minersville Pennsylvania. Graham Sutter, a psychotic recluse, kept Martin imprisoned on his derelict pig farm, forcing him to witness and participate in unspeakable horrors. Chosen at random, his victim’s screams were drowned out by the rural countryside. For five years, Martin’s whereabouts have remained a mystery, until 17 year old Allison Miller (Alexandra Daddario) comes to live with her Uncle, Jonathan (Michael Biehn). While exploring her new surroundings, Allison discovers things aren’t quite right at the farmhouse down the road. Her curiosity disturbs a hornet’s nest of evil and despair that once torn open, can never be closed.

Bereavement, sadly, is another bit of rock, as it’s another film that follows the exploits of—what else?—a religious wacko (Brett Rickaby, seemingly doing a Jeff Fahey impression) who mutters to himself while hooking and disemboweling well-endowed teenage girls that he’s imprisoned somewhere in the subterranean bowels of his—what else?—rundown slaughterhouse. Soon, a troubled teenage girl (Alexandra Daddario, who looks rather enticing in the obligatorily sullied white tank top) finds herself battling the killer over one of his prisoners: a small boy the madman is grooming as an heir in response to a freakish disease that renders the child impervious to physical pain.

Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime. Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago. But it is about to wake up. When a simple experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time. And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish. The Thing serves as a prelude to John Carpenter’s classic 1982 film of the same name.
I am deeply impressed, therefore, by the ingenuity demonstrated by the Universal Pictures executives responsible for The Thing. They have found a way around the usual dilemmas. They realized that to simply remake John Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic would be blasphemy. It would make too many people angry.
However, there are no scares in it, which is a serious drawback for a movie that’s supposed to be scary. Some of the computer-generated creature effects are eye-catching, though, and there are a couple moments of sheer mayhem that allow us to get caught up in the horror of it all, albeit only fleetingly. For someone who’s never seen Carpenter’s version, this one might be passably entertaining, in a matinee-price, lower-your-expectations, I’ve-seen-everything-else-and-this-starts-in-10-minutes kind of way.