Every Thing fan who hasn’t read Ann Billson’s wonderful BFI book on John Carpenter’s The Thing should do so immediately; I quibble with Billson here and there but it’s a pleasure to read a good writer given free rein to create a searching, detailed love-letter to the object of her obsession.

The review you’re reading right now is not, unfortunately, that.

When the 2011 prequel to Carpenter’s 1982 version was announced a couple of years ago, Billson wrote an article for the Guardian about it. It ends like this:

The prequel will be set in the Norwegian camp, which, as we already know from Carpenter’s film, is doomed.

But is the prequel doomed as well? Perhaps, but only if the slow-burning tension is broken up by fashionable staccato editing and camerawork. Only if the Norwegians all turn out to be young studs with six-packs, apart from maybe a couple of hot lady scientists played by skinny chicks under the age of 25. Only if everyone speaks English with cod Norwegian accents, if the special effects are all rendered by CGI and if Ennio Morricone’s chilling orchestral score is replaced by a hard rock soundtrack. What are the odds?

Pretty good, actually. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is a shade over 25 but you’d never know it. The special effects are, indeed, CGI. Morricone’s score makes a tantalizing appearance in the opening seconds but immediately gives way to conventional orchestral underscoring, never to be heard from again. The controls in the Norwegians’ snow trucks are all in English. The Norwegians themselves aren’t exactly studs (and what lurks beneath their woolens remains blissfully – or is that criminally? – unexplored) but they appear to all be cut from curiously similar cloth, a pretty serious flaw in a movie with such a large cast of victims.

But you know, none of these things is really a dealbreaker on its own, or even in combination. What sinks the movie is a complete blindness to what made Carpenter’s film so great, combined with a paradoxical unwillingness to deviate even an inch from its template. As many critics have noted, it’s as if the 2011 movie is a Thingified version of the one from 1982. The details come correct. It’s the humanity – the problem-solving, the sex, the recklessness, the swagger – that’s been noisily eliminated.

Unfortunately this applies as well to Winstead who, unfairly or not, has to compete with Kurt Russell’s barnstorming turn in the 1982 version. Winstead plays a sweet, smart kid who’s plucked from obscurity doing research in the States and flown immediately to Antarctica at presumably enormous expense by a Norwegian research team who have stumbled across what appears to be an intact alien, frozen just inches below the surface of the ice.

It’s handy that her job affords her this kind of leeway; she appears to have no boss to ask permission from, no classes to cancel, no boyfriend to check in with, no out-of-office reply to turn on. Just your average idealized brainy beauty, ripe for knighting into the Order of the Action Movie. But the sum total of the team’s expectations for her turns out to be advice on how to get the t(T)hing out.

She suggests cutting a rectangle shape.

After that she’s ignored.

It’s her subsequent attempts to dent the cloddish control of the man who recruited her that create the only substantive narrative in the movie. As the Norwegians stumble from one Thing attack to the next, she keeps finding clues, and her pleas to the others to use this evidence to make good their survival resemble a desperate whistleblower filing reports to a calcified bureaucracy. It could hardly be otherwise, given that Winstead’s character is a triple outsider: non-Norwegian, non-male, and not part of the camp in the first place. So the shifting group dynamics of earlier Things, with all the heirarchy games and paranoia they entailed, is out the window. This is a modern tale of individual pluck. This is Winstead versus the world.

Which is a shame. It would have been cool to finally investigate what sort of “distractions” Carpenter and Campbell were deliberately avoiding in making their casts exclusively male. The only boy toys here are Platonic. Can you imagine – being schtupped by a Thing without realizing it?

Other notes:

* The opening titles tell us that it’s “Winter, 1982″. Surely no one goes to Antarctica in the winter! The sun never rises, so you can’t see anything! And it’s 70 below. Right? I watch Frozen Planet, I’m no fool.

* Getting Thinged is in some way already a kind of schtupping – you are entered, changed, merged with another. It’s probably no accident that the first victim in the new version is penetrated from behind, or that the first woman-Thing committed to film is witnessed here engaged in a kind of weirdly tender moment with her victim.

* I’ll take any chance I get to share this link, an essay called “Fecund Horror” by Noah Berlatsky. “We have seen the enemy, and it is coming out of us.” – http://gayutopia.blogspot.com/2007/12/noah-berlatsky-fecund-horror_12.html

* Carpenter’s movie was delayed by about a year, allowing him time to comb over each line of the script and get everything the way he wanted it, a rare luxury for a director. Its ambiguities and mysteries have withstood a cavalcade of obsessive Youtube deconstructions. Not so with this one. What happened to the storm that was supposedly on its way? Why can you see everyone’s breath at the beginning, but not at the end? Why don’t we ever see the famous shredded clothes, clues that provided so much of the suspense in the 1982 version?

That said, there were enormous leaps of illogic in Carpenter’s movie, far more egregious than the above, but somehow we just accept them. The blood test, for instance. Macready, a helicopter pilot, conjures an idea from his whiskey-addled imagination that blood cells from the Thing might somehow become motile when threatened with heat. It’s just lunacy, a kind of hallucinatory dream-logic, but it nevertheless winds up being bang on the money. It’s as if the craziness of the Thing has created a world in which your own imagination creates its laws. That would never fly in the 2011 version. Audiences, you can practically hear the producers saying, are more sophisticated now. The test has to be believable. And so it is. It involves dental records.

I was stung 11 times in the next eight years. Each sting required a trip to the emergency room. Trust me when I tell you that “the ER” isn’t as sexy as George Clooney made it out to be. One time I saw a guy with multiple stab wounds in the waiting room, sitting calmly on one of the orange plastic seats, holding his sides. (Many of my friends had never been stung at all. Is there something about the flesh of allergic kids that proves irresistible to bees – and indeed to yellowjackets, wasps, and hornets? Something about the way they smell?)

The full-body swelling is what distinguishes your allergic types from run-of-the-mill stingees. When it happens, it’s serious. So throughout my childhood I went every six weeks, like clockwork, to get “my shots” – four injections, each with a different blend of hymenoptera serum, designed to mitigate any systemic reaction to a bee sting. But the shots hurt, too. Was it worth it? Getting “stung” 30-some times a year by a needle just in case I got stung once by a bee?

Why am I telling you all this? Well, I’d never realized there was a qualitative difference between the sting of a needle and the sting of a bee. Or if I had, I’d never thought to try and describe it. But one man has. He’s attempted not only to quantify every range of sting that it’s possible for a human being to feel, he has begun the almost brain-breakingly admirable work of describing these stings. Ladies and gentlemen, Justin O. Schmidt, and the Schmidt Sting Pain Index (thanks to Wikipedia):

• 1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
• 1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.
• 1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
• 2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
• 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
• 2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
• 3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
• 3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic and burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
• 4.0 tarantula hawk: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
• 4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.[3]

By the way, did you know that a bee will always die after stinging you? Its body isn’t capable of pulling the stinger out of your flesh – but it doesn’t know that. Thus, it will struggle so mightily to retrieve it that the effort rips its own guts out of its body. There, something to look forward to.

Just off the Lauriston roundabout in Hackney, near Victoria Park, stands a handsome pub on the corner of a residential street. It used to be something else. Didn’t they all? Not that its previous incarnation was any great shakes. In fact, it was terrible. But crucially, it was also ignorable. Now, BEHOLD. The HEMINGWAY.

It’s one of those refurbs that’s been carefully designed to appear old and burnished, like it’s been there since The Sun Also Rises came out. Overstuffed leather couches hulk around like dozing ponies. The walls are.. wait, what the hell is on the walls? It’s dozens of taxidermied HUNTING TROPHIES.* Cause Ernest Hemingway liked to shoot stuff! I guess?? It all feels quite manly. This is your den, gents. A large (nonfunctional) hearth is adorned with a mantelpiece on which recline several ersatz leather-bound volumes of… shall you guess? Go on, guess. Who do you think the author is? The author of every book on the mantel? Well done.

My companions and I (ages: 36 and 2) had planned on eating here. So it’s not as though we’d wanted a straight boozer experience and been shanghaied by gastronomy. No, we were in the mood for the kind of comfort stodge the New Year always seems to demand. The Hemingway seemed just the place. I toddled back toward our low coffee table from the bar (which has been crowned with a bespoke copper drop-ceiling) with one glass of red wine and one Doom Bar. £10. The menu looked yummy but no cheaper than the Empress of India, a proper sit-down restaurant four minutes away with fanatically attentive staff. No such staff at the Hemingway, but hey, at least there was Connect 4.**

We ended up at the Fish House, where we were treated like kings. My 2-year-old companion even got a tour of the kitchen.

* I have since been told that some of these trophies are “fictional animals”, taxidermy artwork created specifically for the pub. I’m not sure whether this makes them more or less objectionable.

** Famously, Connect 4 was Hemingway’s favourite diversion. When asked, near death, if he had any regrets, “Papa” is said to have expressed longing for a pocket-sized Connect 4 game made from cherrywood and ivory which was shattered when an errant poacher’s bullet entered his hunting vest near the left breast pocket. The wooden case stopped the bullet and saved his life but “better the hunter than the game,” he said, such was his devotion to it.

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Produced by Elisha Sessions.

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The new series of the Lollards of Pop got pushed back to this week, a huge stroke of luck for all of us dreading having to play – and/or listen to – the controversial winner of our Most Dangerous Album poll. Our new series will start at 7pm BST (2pm EST) this Thursday, on Resonance FM 104.4 in London (streaming available). And that’ll be our slot for awhile.

In place of the DANGEROUS poll, we have a brand new poll to dread the results of. Voting and Youtubes after the jump…

Exact dates TBC but you know, probably some time next week the first show will be hitting the airwaves and its pod will be cast here, on Freaky Trigger.

Its theme is DANGER.

So help us, O reader, to determine which of these attention-seeking, faux-admonitory albums is the best. But to sound a warning note of our own, we will play some of it on the show.

Please note the distinction with Crazy Eddie’s Used Cars – “I must be insane to offer prices this low!” No, these products tell you that you’re the insane one. These products are so great – they inspire such fervour and loyalty – you will pride them over family, over friendship, over even sex or sleep.

Of course there ARE products that genuinely do this. They’re called videogames. But curiously, videogame advertisements don’t call attention to these time-sink life-destroying qualities (A friend of mine used to call Tomb Raider “Tumorator” in honor of the cancer it had become on her relationship with her boyfriend.) Maybe they’re defensive about that kind of thing.

Anyway, how far back can we look?

Well, first there was Sonny. Sonny the Cuckoo Bird was midwifed in the Mad-Men sweet spot year of 1962, appearing on-screen engaged in some random activity when something would trigger a memory of Cocoa Puffs. Like an OCD child his bird-brain would go into a tizz and he’d compulsively start chanting “crunchy… munchy… CHOCOLATEY!!” and explode in orgiastic joy – “I’m CUCKOO for Cocoa Puffs!!” and then tuck into a bowl of them.

Relatively innocuous as these things go. “These little breakfast nuggets are so fucking good, they’ll release the beast within.” All of the self-repressive apparatus you’ve assembled in order to be a civilized person, it’s out the window when confronted with our product.

Well, OK. But this basic message has had an astonishingly enduring appeal. It has persisted and strengthened since 1962. All through the entire, record-breaking run of Sesame Street, incidentally, whose core idea is that sharing is good.

Republicans have often said that the American government ought to abandon its funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which in turn funds Sesame Street, arguing that if the programming is really worthwhile then it would be supported by the magic of the marketplace. But tell me, could you really see an ad break in Sesame Street being occupied by this Juicy Fruit spot?

Hilarious. It’s a double veil that comes off here – the veil of the actor, who’s supposed to stick to the script, and the apparent veil of just normal human decency, revealed as bullshit nanny-state artifice. Confronted with the awesome power of Juicy Fruit – and its potential absence – we humans will cave to our basest impulses and ignore all professional codes of conduct, ignore the loss of paycheck that beating a co-worker senseless would entail, and abandon self-respect.

In short, Juicy Fruit will make us insane.

But apparently this insanity is realer than anything else! The desire for Juicy Fruit lets us be ourselves. When we give into the desire for products in general – that is when we are being true to ourselves. The rest is artifice and repression.

A final example. It’s not online but there’s a screenshot here

For some time, DirecTV (the American equivalent of Sky, but not nearly as powerful) ran a series of ads depicting a satellite dish installer visiting someone’s house, making the installation and preparing to leave. At the end of the ad, the man or woman of the house approached the installer. There was a moment of hesitation. Then suddenly, they’d hug him. A big, long, heartfelt bear-hug. Cut to reaction shot of installer, only slightly surprised. Like Chekhov the doctor, he’s seen this all before.

TV completes them.

The product itself, sure – the basketball games, the cooking shows, the snazzy menu system – but also everything that a vast number of channels makes available. First, and quite foremost, it provides an escape from any obligation to actually interact with your wife. Let your hair down, dude! But it also provides access to a galaxy of ads like the ones above which just reinforce what a great choice that is. The ones that say you don’t have to put on a nice face. It’s OK to be a fucking jerk. Give in to your most childish impulses. Sharing – your time at home, your Juicy Fruit, your Cocoa Puffs – is for children, simps and pointy-heads who think they’re better than everybody else.

Any other examples?

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But you don’t have to wait til then to hear it! We’ll be posting up the episode here at some point tomorrow. And if you feel like catching up on the previous episodes, you can do so here, where there’s also a link to subscribe to the podcast.

In the meantime, why not download this 1hr+ mix of Nigerian party tunes? It’s called SUMMER PARTY BLEND and it’s by DJ Ennie Billie-ons.

There’s also an unreal number of Nigerian jams on this constantly updated blog by DJ Wolf. See you on the radio!

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Produced by Elisha Sessions

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And don’t forget that the polls are still open for Nigeria v Ghana and Cameroon v Spain in the Pop World Cup 2010. So go vote! And reduce the chances of another controversial result.

Update! Tom Ewing and Mike Atkinson will also be taking part!

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“Sex sells” of course and the deliberate twinning of products with young women of child-bearing age is the oldest advertising move in the book. But now we’ve got ads that don’t even bother trying to seduce you. If you buy them, they’ll perform, whatever the gender. Just check out this Radisson ad:

Now before you say, “Oh that’s in Japan; they’re freaky that way”, this is a worldwide campaign. If you’ve flown anywhere in the last few months you’ve probably seen a variation on this. In Stansted there’s a Radisson ad that’s been up for at least a year now that offers a satisfaction guarantee. Why? “Because we love to leave you satisfied.” Phwoar! Radisson is pricey but you always do pay extra for top quality service now don’t you fellas.

Speaking of a “first-class experience”, elsewhere in Stansted you may have run across this ad, for Lavazza coffee:

More subtle this time, though just a little – the explicit promise of prostitution starts bleeding into your run-of-the-mill hot-girl-in-an-ad territory – but I think we can see what’s going on here. For starters, this lady is not the pilot as that jacket is clearly too large for her. Perhaps you are the pilot and she’s wearing your clothes? Well no, you’re shuffling gormlessly in Stansted airport waiting for your fucking gate to be announced, you’re definitely not a pilot. So where’s the outfit come from?

Hang on, who’s that in the background? Is that a… dude washing up back there?? Is HE the pilot? In any case, isn’t three something of a crowd in this particular luxury hotel room? If I were the guy washing up I might get a little jealous that the blonde vixen in my bed has assiduously reapplied her makeup and is now smiling devilishly at someone else. Unless, of course, she were a ho.

There’s a Lovefilm ad in the London Tube that asks if you “fancy getting it” from “London’s largest” online DVD shop. “We’re not faking” they say. “It’ll be our pleasure”.

Look if I get that desperate to watch a movie at home I’ve got more self-respect than to PAY for it, don’t I?

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Produced by Elisha Sessions.

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- “My Job Is Not Enough”
- “Dr. No, I’ve Got a Headache”
- “From Russia With Vague Longing”
- “The Bitch Who Loved Me”
- “Octopissy”

More at the bad place