The Thing From Another World

Watching TV was a big deal for me between about 10 and 14 years of age, because that's when my mother had the devil box banished from the house. Very uncoincidentally, that banishment marked the beginning of my fascination with the written word, which before was neglected due to the tendency of neurons to flow along the path of least resistance.

Enny wey, my dad owned Homestead Sales in Richfield and in the office there was a TV. A few times during my Middle School years I persuaded my mom to let me have a sleepover. That consisted of me and my brother Anthon, or simply me, hanging out in the office with sleeping bags and a few quarters for the Coke machine, watching TV until the newer, color programs went off and the old black-and-whites took over.

One of my most memorable TV marathons was about 1981 when I watched Friday Night Theater alone, with "The Thing From Another World" as the feature. It fascinated and frightened me, and I've never forgotten it; the most horrifying, brain-searing scene was of a torn-off alien arm coming alive and starting to twitch on a laboratory table.

Just Saturday it occurred to me that the film was doubtless in the public domain. Sure enough, it's free to watch on Google Video here.

I'm not as hooked on kooky old films, particularly horror and sci-fi from the 50s and 60s the way Doug Gibson is, but I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed The Thing as an adult. The writing is actually quite good, despite the over-enunciated/under-nuanced, but certainly well-memorized lines. The dialogue was written for an unusually natural flow, with characters anticipating each other's statements and talking over each other. But these actors were raised on radio shows.

There are some silly technical things, but less so than with most modern pictures; there are fewer breakdowns of common sense and more discussions of actual physical principles. The dumb guy who gets good guys killed is, of course, the Ph.D. dude with his goatee and Continental accent and constant reference to "science" as an almost godlike force: "We must leave these things to science," etc. Of course, he really means leave it to him and the other eggheads who want to sing kumbaya with the vegetable-based biped that lives off the blood of sled dogs and unlucky eggheads.

Filmed in 1951, just months after the explosion of the first H-bomb, and just a few years after the mass UFO-sightings of 1948 onward, this is a fascinating look at the culture our parents and grandparents inhabited. This movie predated Star Trek by 15 years and doubtless had a major effect on that show. It's the earliest movie I know of that sets the pattern for hundreds of other "first contact" shows to come. For my fellow sci-fi geeks, it's worth a watch. I even think I'll be buying the DVD if I can find it.