When it was first released, the themes, environment, and solid performance of the actors as defeated men, even before the alien shows up, were overlooked because of the special effects. Roger Ebert wasn’t even as harsh as other critics, and yet his mildly positive review described the film as “The Thing is a great barf-bag movie, all right, but is it any good?” And then later, “The Thing is basically, then, just a geek show, a gross-out movie in which teenagers can dare one another to watch the screen.”

Vincent Canby, writing for The New Yorker at the time, didn’t hold back in his assessment, “Sometimes it looks as if it aspired to be the quintessential moron movie of the 80’s – a virtually storyless feature composed of lots of laboratoryconcocted special effects, with the actors used merely as props to be hacked, slashed, disemboweled and decapitated, finally to be eaten and then regurgitated as – guess what? – more laboratory-concocted special effects.”