You see, back in 1982 when I was a wee lad, my father dropped off my brother and I at the local cineplex theater in order to see a new release: “Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn” (Are you feeling old yet? Me too! ) With our admission money in hand (plus a buck or two for popcorn and candy, natch), we dutifully bought our tickets, proudly presented them to the under-paid, surly, teenage ticket-taker dude and made our way down the Hall Of Movies trying to find the correct theater to go into and see our film. But Lo! there was a very interesting poster beside door number 5: “The Thing”. Glancing at my younger brother (who was 7 years old at the time), he gave me the thumbs up and we snuck into “The Thing” instead of Kahn and H.O.L.Y. C.R.A.P. were were scared out of our pants. I have never, ever! been so scared in a movie before or since. My father quickly uncovered our misadventures after querying us about the movie we were supposed to have seen, and instead of gettig in trouble, God bless you pa, he just laughed because he’d already seen it and was probably proud of our sense of adventure. (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.)

Anybody else have some fond movie memories?

The basic set up is a group of friends are trapped in a cabin where a bunch of aliens try to get in. Here are a few scenes I remember:

1) A guy gets his hand bit off so his buddy cauterizes the wound with a roll of burning paper towels while saying “We learned how to do this at Scout camp.”

2) A guy getting eating by monsters shouting his last words: “HELP! I being devoured by creatures without souls!”

3) Some unfortunate chap being tied down and having his (infected?) hand cut off with a big paper cutter.

As you can tell from the above, I’d love to find it again and feature it here on the site. I searched on IMDB for “Things” and this just might be it:

Things

Has anybody seen this or can get ahold of it? It appears to be quite rare, but you HAVE to see this.

Anyway, I re-watched about half of the original Alien last night and there were a lot of restored scenes which made it pretty cool. It’s funny that I can spot the additional footage even though I haven’t seen Alien for years…maybe a movie like that just gets burned into your brain. Looking forward to finishing it off tonight and seeing that scene were Ripley stumbles across Dallas glued to a wall with a baby alien about to pop out of his chest so she flames him. (Sorry about the run-on sentence…I haven’t had my coffee yet.)

In case you don’t know who he is, Cardoza was one of the brains in Coleman Francis’ think tank and appeared in all of his movies as well. It’s an interesting conversation if you’re into bad movies, and, since you’re here, I assume that’s the case.

Prelinger Archives

Whoever you were that sent me this link so, so long ago, I salute you!

By the way, if you can find it, there is a Russian newsreel where they managed to keep a dog’s head alive for a while after removing it from the dog’s body. It’s really, really, really bizarre and totally freaked me out…especially the way it was licking the lemon-juice Q-tip…Extra credit if you can find it!

Enjoy Mission To Mars!