The Thing is back. Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars in this prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 classic science-fiction horror film. How does the new creature-feature hold up?

One of the greatest remakes ever made, John Carpenter’s 1982 science-fiction horror is a tale of terror that sees Kurt Russell battle a shape-shifting alien.

Aside from the great gulf in quality between John Carpenter’s classic 1978 slasher and Rob Zombie’s post-Scream back-story-cum-remake, the new film couldn’t be more different from the original. The original Halloween was a benchmark in horror. It set new standards that would become standard convention in movies that followed like Friday The 13th and A Nightmare On Elm Street. Heavily influenced by Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, Halloween became the trend-setter of slasher movie lore. Essentially, to remake Halloween – a classic film loved by so many – was an impossible task. It’s like trying to remake Citizen Kane or The Godfather: you’d be fighting a losing battle.

If there’s one thing you learn from watching Rob Zombie movies, apart from what your insides look like, it is not to waste your time watching Rob Zombie movies. Zombie is the picture postcard of MTV-generation trash that has spilled into the cinematic mainstream. His films are eye-candy to the uninitiated (or should that be uneducated), appealing largely, and unfortunately, to the mass teen market bred on quick-fixes, episodic action-orientated TV shows, and, seemingly, naked girls.

Despite John Carpenter’s fall from grace you can’t help looking at his back catalogue with fond memories. Anyone with a knowledge of cinema only dating back to the middle 1990s would be forgiven for thinking Carpenter was a straight-to-video hack with little discernable talent. That’s understandable. There have been few worse films than “Escape From L.A.” or “Ghosts of Mars”, and Carpenter has gone into hibernation since. But cast your mind back to 1978 and the release of “Halloween” and you might think differently.

Science-fiction and horror seem to go hand in hand. Sci-fi usually involves futuristic foreboding or fear of the unknown, and this works well with the frightening realisation of the darkest depths of the human mind that define the horror genre. Science-fiction horror is also notable for producing some of the best examples of science-fiction regardless of sub-context, as well as some of the worst. And yet, when films such as Norman J. Warren’s awful “Inseminoid”, or the Alien/Aliens clones “Split Second” and “The Dark Side Of The Moon” hit our …