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The North Pole: A mix of scientists and soldiers led by Doctor
Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) - science - and Captain Hendry (Kenneth
Tobey) - army - have found a UFO landing place including a UFO that
seems to be still intact under the ice .. and then make a mess of it,
blowing up the UFO when trying to thaw it out. Still, at least they have
found an alien (James Arness), frozen into solid ice, and they take it to
their arctic science lab. Once in the lab, Carrington and his scientists
want to immediately examine the extraterrestrial, but Hendry orders it to
remain untouched until he receives further orders - which won't be until
radio-communications resume. Somehow though, the alien gets thawed out
anyways and wreaks havoc, first killing all the dogs then attacking the
human occupants of the lab, who manage to keep it at bay for the moment,
but who knows how long because the alien seems to grow stronger and more
cunning by the minute. Carrington examines the creature's remains in his
lab and comes to the conclusion that it is actually a plant-like creature
feeding on blood. That gives Carrington the crazy idea though to plant
some of the spores collected from the creature into his green house's soil
and grow them to examine them. And while everyone else is preparing to
defent the whole station against the creature that seems to be
invulnerable no matter what you throw at it, Carrington becomes more and
more obsessed with preserving it to learn from it - to an extent that he
tries to sabotage the others' defense efforts. Ultimately, Hendry and
his men have made up a plan to lure the creature into a trap and
electrocute it, and even though Carrington makes one last effort to warn
the creature and establish communications with it - for which he is just
tossed aside by the creature -, the plan to finally kill the creature
works ... but where this creature came from, there might be others, so
"Keep watching the skies!" Margaret Sheridan plays Hendry's
sweetheart, Douglas Spencer a newspaperman desperate to get te story to
his publisher. A very ok suspense film of the science fiction
variety, well-written (provided you can accept the pulpy basic premise)
and featuring a better-than-average cast of characters played by a
better-than-average cast of actors. Also, many of this film's narrative
devices, plottwists, and its premise as such could be found time and again
in science fiction movies over the years - but to call Thing from
Another World a timeless movie would be dead wrong: The film is
actually deeply rooted in Cold War paranoia and xenophobia 1950's style,
to a degree where it becomes almost disgusting, and its pro-military,
anti-science messages are almost an insult to every thinking brain. That
said, as long as you don't read Thing from Another World as a
message movie, you will still be entertained. By the way, Howard Hawks,
producer of the film, is labelled as its uncredited actual director in
many sources, but there's an equal number of sources that contradicts that
rumour. Fact is, that the movie might be well-crafted, but in terms of
direction, it simply is nothing out of the ordinary.
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