Greatest movie scenes ever # 32

The Thing and Predator : two movies which begin with a scene of an alien spaceship hurtling towards earth before groups of blokes in remote locations deal with the often unseen Extraterrestrial terror which was onboard the craft, and two movies which the dvd extras revealed had godawful alternate endings. The cheesy "oh shit, it's the dog again!" alternate ending of The Thing (at 3:24) that's been used for some tv airings of it over the years is bad enough as it undoes a climax which is both depressing with MacReady and the possibly assimilated Childs facing death, and truimphant with Mac and (maybe) Childs selflessly sacrificing himself/themselves to stop the alien reaching the mainland with a cheap climax reminiscent of the possessed cat in Amityville 4, but, oh man, that alternate conclusion of Predator where the alien's distorted replication of Billy's cackle (sidenote : the only time I've ever been impressed by a stranger's ringtone is when someone on the train a few years back had that as his) is replaced by the same guffawing of a drunken french chef which popped up again over twenty years later in the terrible Adam Sandler production Strange Wildnerness for the scene with a laughing shark really, really stinks. What was John McTiernan thinking?

I'm not sure whether it was John Carpenter's Hawksian sensibility of men-grumbling-at-one-another-in-an-enclosed-environment at play, his notion that a token female a la Margaret Sheridan in The Thing From Another World would be unrealistic amongst such a motley collection of sex-starved men marooned in the Antarctic, or his trepidation that any female character would bring about unfavourable comparisons to Ripley in Alien (or it might just have been because the Antarctic research station was originally intended to have a female in the form of MacReady's blow-up doll before the scene got scrapped), but The Thing is the first Hollywood film I can think of to shun D.W Grffith's premise that "all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun" as there isn't a single chick present, and even the sled dogs in it were all male. I'm the guy who winces with disgust anytime a canine dies in a flick no matter what the human carnage may be (in theory, this would be the only Facebook group I'd ever join, until I checked the wall and realised it was just 3 girls talking about Marley And Me) but the scene in The Thing where the assimilated dog gets taken to the kennel to chill out with the other sled dogs manages to manipulate me to the point where I'm tangled in a web of contradictory emotions :



Maybe I'm just completely desensitized to loss of human life in movies, but I find that scene far more disturbing than when the alien bursts out of the infected Norris's stomach when Copper is attempting to defibrillate him and rips Copper's arms off :



Finally, one of the biggest cliches in the menswear industry the past year or so has been the seasonal lookbook featuring miserable chaps with facial hair wearing chunky knitwear and heavyweight Parkas in outdoor locations, so you'd think the cast of The Thing would be the ideal inspiration for one of these brands to have a little fun and reference a classic movie in a photoshoot, but, shucks, all these menswear labels appear to be run by humourless hacks and herbs so I've yet to see one where a bearded male model gazes into the camera authoratively as his facial hair freezes up like MacReady's did in The Thing after he was locked out of the camp during the blizzard :