Director: Matthijs van Heijningenit

Stars: Joel Edgerton

Screening: Glendale, Reading, Charleston, Tuggerah, Erina, Ettalong

Rating: **

THERE simply aren’t enough flame-throwers used in movies these days.

Which is about the only thing The Thing gets right.

Oh, and the sound effects.

The squelching noises in this science-fiction monster mash are particularly juicy – the squishy rips, snaps and pops adding big dollops of ick to the horror of some rather grotesque visuals.

So, if that’s your kind of thing, try The Thing.

Otherwise, stand well clear.

The film is a remake of John Carptener’s cult 1982 creature feature starring Kurt Russell (they collaborated a year earlier on Escape From New York).

Actually, the remake is being called a prequel because it is set in the days leading up to the opening scene of the original.

And yet first-time director Matthijs van Heijningenit sticks religiously to the same format of paranoia, frights and splatter as the Carpenter film.

The new Thing opens with Norwegian scientists in Antarctica discovering a flying saucer deep under the ice.

When they unwisely thaw out a frozen extra-terrestrial back at their research base, all hell breaks loose as the ravenous beastie goes on the rampage.

Luckily, everyone seems to have a flame-thrower to hand, including the two requisite Americans at the base, feisty paleontologist Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and gruff pilot Carter (Aussie Joel Edgerton in a Yank drawl).

The shape-shifting creature effects are suitably gruesome.

The trick with this clawed and tentacled alien is that it spreads like a virus, is absorbed into the blood stream and flesh of its victim, silently replicating inside them until it bursts violently out of the host body to attack again.

Kind of like the NSW ALP, but with slightly less blood on the floor.

And yet the suspense and scares in The Thing are only middling, despite extended scenes depicting the escalating paranoia of the scientists as they wonder which one of them could be a monster.

If you want to go looking for it there’s a terrorism metaphor buried in the subtext – something about fearing the enemy within.

But mostly The Thing is about gross, flesh-ripping monster effects and an angry chick brandishing a flame-thrower – which is kind of hot even if the film is not.