Why did the John Carpenter version of The Thing get an R rating? Everybody thinks it’s an incredibly gross and gory movie, but when you come down to it, the only real violence you see to people are a helicopter blowing up, a guy shot in the eye (and another shot in the head), and a guy’s hands geting cut off. Just about everything else either shows you an aftermath, or involves something unreal. The Swede with the cut wrists is a frozen corpse. ALL of the violence against the Thing in its many forms involves effects with puppeteers or with things attached to people. As the film stands, or possibly with a very little judicous cutting, it wouldn’t rate an R if people really looked. I’m convinced this film got its R rating because of perceived violence against a non-exisent creature that didn’t even really resemble any real animals.
I just watched a making-of documentary of all of the PotA films, and the producers and directors repeatedly stressed how important it was that the films were to be considered “family films” that you could bring the kids to.
They filmed tons of extra violence and then just trimmed it down a bit, somehow to achieve a “G”.
It truly boggles.
You’re forgetting about the doctor’s hands getting chomped off when he went to defibrillate the feller in cardiac arrest (whose head subseqently grew legs). Oh, and when Wilford Brimley shoved his fingers through that guy’s facial skin right at the end, and Windows getting his head chomped during the “blood test” scene. The “blood test” scene is one of my all time favorites; very quiet, very tense. But I digress.
Quite a lot of the time, the Thing looked mostly human, and on at least three occasions I can think of, a mostly-human-shaped Thing was destroyed with a blowtorch. The creature depicted may not be real, but I think they’re more concerned about appearances, and even though it was all puppets and such, what happened on the screen looked pretty violent. I reckon the “R” was deserved, although I’ve seen it on broadcast television with fairly minor cuts.
I took a government class once and, according to the teacher, the people who sit on the review board for MPAA actually doing the movie watching are ordinary people who get rotated out every few months. He said people get tapped to be on it, somewhat like jury duy. (His point was that movie ratings are a big way to tell what has become more acceptable by society over time.) I questioned if the guy really knew what he was talkng about, but being pretty indifferent, never went to the trouble of finding out.
No, I’m not – you’re not reading me carefully enough – I pointed that out. And Wilford Brimley sticking his hand in the guy’s mouth isn’t terrifically shocking (certainly not as shocking as the productio sketch of it was – that showed the fingers visible behind the eye socket).
I can only assume you’re whooshing or don’t remember the movie very well.
The movie would have earned an R-Rating based on a single scene:
A kennel full of huskies howling in terror as a not-huskie’s face splits open and it slowly peels itself apart into a hideous, bloody monstrosity and impales them with intestine-like tendrils?
These effects may seem dated now, but at the time they were horrifyingly realistic.
If any movie was well-served by an R rating, The Thing is it.
I can only assume that nobody’s reading my posts carefully.
IT’S NOT A REAL DOG. IT’S NOT EVEN A MODEL OF A REAL DOG. IT’s A WHOLLY IMAGINARY CREATURE THAT ONLY SUPERFICIALLY RESEMBLES A DOG
I’m convinced that, if this is the only reason they’d give it an “R”, then they could’ve avoided it by coloring the “blood”, say, GREEN. It seems to me that they’ve given this whole movie an “R” rating because it shows the bizarre biological behavior of a totally imaginary creature in gory (literally) detail. Need I point out that, in the scene in question, the creature itself wasn’t even harmed?
Well, when people die in movies, they really don’t die. So what?
According to the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, the director of which hired private investigators to hunt down the ratings board, many of the raters have been on the board for years, including two priests (one Catholic, one Episcopalian) who sit on the appeals board.
Coincidentially, turning red blood green is a common tactic used in video games to lower their ratings in countries such as Germany which have very strict laws against violence towards humans in video games. (Another one is turning the human villains into robots.) Sometimes it’s done in the states as well. When The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was rereleased, the blood Ganondorf coughs up during the final battle was changed from red to green in order to avoid a T rating. (Music was also changed in one of the dungeons to avoid offending Muslims, who believed it sounded too much like a holy chant. When the game was rereleased on the GameCube and Wii, a Islamic-looking star-and-cresent device which appeared throughout the game was also removed.)
Right, but there are really people, and they really die. And if they showed a real person being, say, pulled to bloody pieces they rightly give it an “R” rating (like in Hellraiser), even though we know it’s not a real person, just special effects.
If they pull a manikin apart, with white goop coming out, they don’t give it an “R” rating. When the vampires die in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer by dissolving into dust, they can show it in prime time. Because it’s all imaginary, and can’t be mistaken for the real thing.
In The Thing, the Thing-Dog isn’t even being killed. It splits apart and absorbs the other dogs. It’s part of its made-up life cycle. So the argument Scupper makes above is that the movie gets its R rating, in part, because we’re shown — what? Not a dog being torn to bloody bits, but the supposedly natural actions of a creature mimicking a dog that looks kinda like a dof being hurt. Of course, the tentacles and jointed insectoid legs coming out are pretty much a dead giveaway that this isn’t a real dog.
So it seems to me that, aside from the hands chopped off and the couple of gunshots (both of which could get edited out), this movie gets an “R” rating simply for looking gross.
I’m serious. When they showed this on CBS for the first time in the 1980s they could have just cuit out the hands and gunshot scenes (which they did), but *they also cut out almost every other scene of The Thing, including this “meat-hole” dog scene (as the effects guys called it).
Okay. So, by your reckoning only movies showing actual violence to actual human beings qualifies?
The dog-thing looks like a dog til it splits open (horribly) and the dogs that it kills look and sound like real dogs (and are, in fact, played by real dogs for part of the sequence). Sorry, but your “life-cycle” argument doesn’t really hold water for me. The Thing may not die (though I believe it gets burned up with a flame thrower in the same sequence, no?) but the other dogs certainly do.
It’s one of the most horrific scenes in any movie I can recall, but, because the thing splitting apart and killing the other dogs is not, itself, a dog, it doesn’t qualify?
What does qualify?
The chest-burster in Alien apparently doesn’t, because it’s clearly not a real thing, and they obviously didn’t actually kill John Hurt to get the shot. And, really, it’s just a part of the life-cycle of the alien organism, right?
The ratings are supposed to give some kind of guidance as to what audience the movie is appropriate for. Are you really suggesting that this movie should have been rated PG?
It doesn’t show the other dogs dying horribly – it shows one dog tied up by a tentacle, and another covered by slime. I guarantee that you could show those in a movie and not get an “R” rating.
The only thing iobjectionable and horrible in that scene was how gross and bloody the Thing-Dog looked.
Mind you, I wouldn’t show it to a child or anything. But the truth is that that movie was excoriated mainly because the alien looked gross and disgusting. Not because the film depicted dogs being killed, and not becauuse it even showed a creature being killed. Just because, despite the spider legs, the tentacles, the white stuff gooshing out, and the fact that it was still moving, the Thing looked too much like a bloody and mutilated dog. Even though it wasn’t, and, to the critical eye, it didn’t really.
Always keep in mind that the movie ratings are intended primarily for children, not adults. How does it look to a child?
You must’ve posted as I was posting this:
Here, maybe you haven’t seen it in a while.
Please tell me how, at 4:28, the emaciated, dissolving dog that is struggling as it is consumed by the Thing’s tentacles is not dying horribly.
Oh, and at 4:38, the dog that is being strangled but still twitching as it is shot through the chest with a shotgun – that’s not horrible and violent?
Which is why it doesn’t belong in this thread. Not remotely.
At the time, to a 12-year-old kid, it certainly did.
The dog scene is rightly considered one of the most horrific moments in horror cinema history. It is brutal and brilliant, and fucked me up good because I really shouldn’t have seen it. I’m not a fan of gore for gore’s sake, and I don’t believe any moment of this movie can be considered that. It’s gory, it’s horrifying, and it is damn effective.
I love The Thing, but in this case, the viewing public was perfectly served by an R rating.
I enjoyed **Eurotrip’s ** 4th wall break when Cooper walks in on our first naked breasts with this line, “There’s your R rating right there.”
Yeah, yeah, Siskel & Ebert have been pushing for that for over 20 years now. I know there were mistakes with the way the NC-17 rating was introduced, but I don’t think it really mattered. Any adults-only rating will be rejected by mainstream advertisers as too controversial. Plus films that would get A-Ratings are non-mainstream, arthouse fair, and they don’t give a shit about them to begin with!
And the hardcore “Hollywood is evil” people don’t consider an ‘A’ Rating progress, even if it delineates between sex & violence, because they’d rather roll things back to the Hayes Code (i.e. pure restrictive censorship!)
A Streetcar Named Desire. I believe I rated it as the second most important Hollywood film in my 50 Most Important Hollywood Films list.