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For once a European Universal Blu-ray disc that's better than the US release
John Carpenter's remake of the Thing From Another world was a significant box-office underachiever when it was released in 1982 but found a new lease of life on home video and has proved a perennial ever since, going from panned-and-scanned video to letterboxed laserdisc special edition to DVD and now Blu-ray secure in the knowledge that its fans would upgrade to each new format. There's nothing new here that wasn't on the exhaustive laser disc special edition or the DVD, and the improvement in picture quality from DVD, though noticeable, isn't huge, but the region-free European release is a considerable improvement over Universal's US release. Where that only offered the feature-length 84-minute making of documentary Terror Takes Shape as a picture-in-picture feature, the European disc allows you to watch it separately in fullframe as it was meant to be seen. It's also got nearly all the extras from the previous special editions - out-takes, stills, storyboard, production design and conceptual art galleries and original theatrical trailer - with only the extensive production notes failing to make the transition. Added to that, it's still a terrific bit of sci-fi horror even if it is a shame that its success has overshadowed Howard Hawks' terrific original version.
