TheRetroCritic

"Man Thing"... What WAS I thinking? Here I was picking up a Marvel-approved comic-book monster movie directed by Brett Leonard ( Lawnmower Man ) expecting something a bit like Swamp Thing : kitsch, stupid fun. Perhaps even an underrated, gory action flick? If you haven't guessed yet, I was wrong. Talk about a waste of time...  If you call a movie Man Thing and make it all about some giant swamp creature, I would suggest perhaps showing the character? Because otherwise what you're left with is bad actors playing bland secondary characters going back and forth to some swamp faking you out every time, making you think you're going to see something when in fact you're not. You're just not. I mean, I have no problem with big build-ups but this is hardly The Third Man : this sucks. So when you do finally see Man Thing, 10 minutes from the end, why would you even care? The ending of the film should have happened within the first 20 minutes! This is

Hands up who wanted a prequel to The Thing ? Really? Come on! No one cares about the Norwegians? Well now you have to, for here is their story. Yes it follows almost every single key scene from the original film to the letter, but why wouldn't something this crazy happen twice in two different places just around the corner from each other? Because Hollywood knows better, that's why. So indeed we finally get to see the untold story of the Norwegians, who were the first to uncover the Thing before Kurt Russell and the gang even had a look at it. This time we get Mary Elizabeth Winstead being called into a base in Antarctica to help dig the titular whatchamacallit out of the ice. You know what happens next: Thing breaks out, people scream, paranoia sets in, it all becomes a "whoisit" (as opposed to whodunit) and it all ends in flames. That this The Thing remake isn't a disaster is almost shocking. Replacing practical effects as amazing as the ones in J