Already greeted with much criticism before it was even released, The Thing was neither a critical nor financial hit when it scuttled into cinemas back into 2011. Although we won’t go into the relative merits of the film here (we’ve often said it’s not as a bad a movie as its 36 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes might suggest), we’ve often wondered what those originally shot practical effects would have looked like. In it, Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s character (and the audience) learns that the creature which attacked her Norwegian camp wasn’t the pilot of the spacecraft found earlier in the film, but a specimen which killed and imitated the craft’s original crew. Below, we get a rare look at this previously unseen alien pilot, which was replaced (if memory serves) by a computer-generated oddity made of rapidly-shifting cubes. Personally, we prefer the animatronic pilot – but you can leave your thoughts in the comments. If you’re interested, Amalgamated Dynamics have some fantastic images and videos from The Thing and their other projects (not least the classic Starship Troopers) over on their Facebook page – it’s well worth a look. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
