Flix for Short: Pingu’s The Thing

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The Thing is tied with David Cronenberg’s The Fly as my favorite horror movie. The bleakness, strangeness, and paranoia gets under my skin, and those creature and make-up effects by Rob Bottin are still better than most effects today. As John Carpenter put it in an audio commentary, the movie is a vision of hell.

Pingu’s The Thing, Lee Hardcastle’s short remake of the film, is a more adorable vision of hell… in claymation… starring penguins and a seal. Using characters from the Swiss show Pingu, it recreates the major horror sequences and creature effects of the Carpenter movie.

Only things missing in Pingu’s The Thing are two Wilford Brimley scenes. (And Blair probably should have been a walrus/leopard seal.) But still, those are very minor gripes about a fun, well-made watch.

[Via Bleeding Cool]

Hubert Vigilla
Brooklyn-based fiction writer, film critic, and long-time editor and contributor for Flixist. A booster of all things passionate and idiosyncratic.