Movies: Shadow and the Thing

Even though I really don't like the netflix PS3 interface, I'm still watching movies on it. The awesomeness of the netflix website more than outweighs the crappiness of the PS3 interface so I use the website to find a movie and hen I just search for it on the PS3. On the website I can sort and easily search by either their categories or by using tags for movies. Netflix has vastly increased the number and types of movies they have available which makes choosing a movie much more difficult and fun at the same time.

Over the last couple of days I've watched two movies on netflix: Shadow and The Thing. Shadow is a survival-type horror movie where the protagonist is on leave from serving in Afghanistan and is mountain biking in the UK. There, he meets the woman of his dreams and he gets in a fight with a couple of local thugs. When he and the woman, who meet up in the woods, prevent the thugs from killing an animal, the thugs come after them. Of course something comes after them, and there's some torture (more implied than actual), and a twist at the end. 

The twist was good. The rest of the movie was fairly predictable but that didn't stop it from being suspenseful or interesting. There were some scary bits and some tense bits and some gross bits and overall, I found it an entertaining couple of hours. Apparently it was supposed to reboot Italian horror and I don't know if it accomplished that but it was interesting.

The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, is a movie about men at a science base in Antarctica who come into contact with a thing that invisibly eats and turns into whatever it touches. There are part of the plot that make no sense: there's no night/day cycle in an Antarctic winter (only night); an Antarctic winter is cold enough that no one can go outside without wearing a coat; and the people at the base, including the helicopter pilot, won't be drinking all the time.

Ignoring those minor (yet annoying) points, the movie is very suspenseful. It does a good job in showing the mistrust and infighting that happens when people are cooped up together and suspect another of being inhuman (or a traitor). The effects are surprisingly good for a movie made 30 years ago and the story is timeless. This is one great horror movie and one that I highly recommend it.