Awesome and gory as hell sci-fi horror thriller from horror master John Carpenter and this one is a masterpiece of paranoia and one of the scariest films ever.
I saw this movie on video when i was 5 and thought it was scary, i loved it over the years.
One thing that bugs me is that some people refer to this as a remake, well let me tell you something, it's NOT, it's a remake in name only and so different than the 1950s "original" as they have little in common other than alien and snow plus only 2 homages (Carpenter is a fan of Howard Hawks) to the 1951 film like circle of men and opening titles, that's just it. They share a name but everything like the location (one in the north pole and the other in the south pole), the characters and their backgrounds, story, nature/methods of the alien (one is a dumbed down vampire alien frankenstein plant that could reproduce itself and could suck blood as it was a lumbering beast but it wasn't the imitator from the story and the other was a shapeshifting parasitic organism that could imitate other lifeforms by cells), the ways to kill the monster (one by electricity and the other by fire), discovery of the spaceship, origin of the spaceship etc. are both very different from each other. They are 2 separate films which both are based on a source material that is a novella called "Who Goes There" by John W. Campbell, the 1951 movie is a very good film as it's own but it's one of the worst book to film adaptations of all time as it was nothing like Campbell's story. The Carpenter film is a standalone film that is by far an excellent and very faithful adaptation that got it right on film for the first time which was something the earlier film ignored.
Afrerall i consider remakes and re-adaptations to be 2 very different things, remakes means only for films based on original screenplays/original screen stories not based on source material (comics/novellas/novels) like say The Blob for example, a REAL remake as it's based on an original screenplay/original screen-story not based on any source material. Other stuff like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dracula, Frankenstein, War of the Worlds, The Thing, Batman Begins, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo etc. are re-adaptations of novels, comics and novellas.
