Boo!

There, did I scare you? Didn't think so.

That's pretty much the way it is in the latest incarnation of "The Thing." It's a series of "Boo!" moments that add up to less and less as director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. piles on more and more of them.

In fact, one of the characters says exactly that — "Boo!" — early on, getting a rise out of another man and a laugh out of the audience. And that's the last time even a smidgen of humor invades this "Thing." The rest of the way it's Shock Theater as gory jolt follows gory jolt with tedious regularity.

Based on a 1938 sci-fi novella by John W. Campbell Jr. and made twice previously — first in 1951 as "The Thing from Another World" and then again in 1982 by John Carpenter — "The Thing" has a classic creature-feature premise: Scientists find crashed spaceship buried in the Antarctic ice, thaw out long-frozen alien pilot and live (and die) to regret the deed.

The kicker is that the alien is a malevolent shape-shifter who can take on the identity of any man or beast who comes into contact with it. Paranoia strikes deep as the humans, isolated in a remote research outpost, fearfully wonder who's who, or rather, who's what.

The people behind the latest version decided to reverse-engineer director Carpenter's picture and make their movie about the events that immediately preceded Carpenter's story. And anyone familiar with that earlier movie knows what that means: No one gets out alive ... maybe.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear — it was 1982 — when Carpenter's "Thing" was released. It was a genuine shocker. When the alien, all thrashing tentacles, big fangs and scuttling giant-insect legs, first burst forth amid a spray of glistening viscera, a new threshold of horror was crossed. What could anyone do to top that? Nothing much, it turns out.

Carpenter effectively balanced the gore with the atmosphere of rising dread. Filmmaker van Heijningen, a Dutch commercial director making his feature debut, is content to wallow in grotesque special effects.

And his cast is weak. It's headed by American actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead, playing a researcher, and Australian Joel Edgerton, playing a helicopter pilot. Both are inexpressive in their roles. Most of the rest of the cast members are a bearded bunch of Scandinavian characters (the picture takes place in a Norwegian outpost) who blend together into a stubble-covered blob. They seem interchangeable and utterly disposable. As they die screaming one by one, it's hard to figure out who was who and even harder to care.

Soren Andersen: asoren7575@yahoo.com