The Thing from Another World (1951)

 "We aready found one boner..."

I've never seen this film before, unless you count the fact that characters watch it in Halloween. I'm impressed; it's well-made, well acted and scripted, and with realistic characters, all of which make this a serious film and not the B movie I was expecting. It's genuinely good. Except... it's actually quite dull in places.

The film has a lot to go for it. The characters feel real, including the only woman, Nikki, who comes across as intelligent and real. There's even a flirting scene between her and the Captain, featuring bondage(!) and some flirtatious dialogue that actually comes across as convincing. There's a slightly obsessive doctor who becomes more and more obsessed with studying the creature and preserving it whatever the cost- and interesting variation on the maerick scientist trope.

The concept is interesting and well-developed, too- an alien plant-based life form, completely different from us. There's also a lot of tension, especially in the earlier half of the film. The Arctic setting is nicely claustrophobic.

And yet... the plot is basically a padded out base under siege. The creature is found, gets loose, nd prowls around the base killing people until it's cught. Barring a few characer-based sub-threads, that's pretty much it. That's the plot. Pure base under siege and decidedly formulaic. The end result is a film which feels high quality but never quite succeeds in scaring us or getting us to invest in the stakes. That's a pity, and a surprise.