The Thing #3

Yet another resin kit I picked up on eBay. This the third “Thing” in my collection and my second based on the John Carpenter's 1982 film. The sculpt is by Simon Lee who has done extensive work in cinema concept design and sculpting. Some of the productions that he has done work on that you may have heard about are “the Strain”, “Pacific Rim”, “Kong: Skull Island” and “Edge Of Tomorrow”.

The 16 piece kit is of average quality in terms of casting and stands roughly 12” tall. It retails for $150 plus $50 for shipping from China. I don't believe that this is a pirated kit since the web page for Lee is pretty extensive. This kit has sold out but they may have another casting run in the second quarter according to the site. They will combine shipping though you have to do a lot of back and forth to establish this since the seller isn't readily available and doesn't handle English very well but I can't speak Chinese so I guess we are even.

The kit doesn't come with assembly instructions so I found myself referring to the eBay page I bought it from to get an idea what it looked like once completed. Because this Thing is a composite of the scene that takes place in the dog kennel and that of the sofa “test”, it isn't that apparent where what goes where. I managed to figure it out and I added a “reject” extra arm I had kicking around from a Ymir kit. The Ymir arm's middle finger didn't cast (which is why it was a reject) so I ground down the stub with my motor tool and attached it to the back. An inside joke for you purists out there, the Thing MIGHT have gone to Venus, so a Ymir arm is possible.

The parts didn't fit that well so I found myself grinding down half of them so they'd seat properly when pinned. With many gaps in view, I had to use quite a bit of Liquitex Molding Paste to cover seam lines and the like. The upside of this issue was that the creature is so unusual in form that just about anything would look “good” so I had TONS of latitude in that regard.

The sculpt is quite rough in terms of detail which proved to be very disappointing considering the talent behind the figure. For example, the three partial human heads cast into the Thing are very crude and their ill defined features were a bear to paint much like the rest of the model. The base had several long narrow gouges which I assumed to be very unconvincing 'cracks' in the concrete floor. Lots of thin spindly tubes were laid across the base around a couple heads and a partially formed husky to represent some of the Thing's 'probes' as seen in the kennel scene.

In an attempt to make the model more interesting, I applied thick strands of clear fabric glue draped over various objects on the floor as well as oozing from the Thing's body here and there to give it that extra icky look done so well in the film.

I'm not that impressed with this kit along with how it turned out which may be do to my inability to make it 'work' but a part of my disappointment is in the average quality of the kits as a whole. I'd be hard pressed to recommend it unless you are a serious fan of the film and want to add a somewhat different interpretation of the monster than what is currently available. 5/01/21