6. The Thing
Here's a very cheeky film that tries to paint itself as a prequel when, in fact, it's basically a glorified reboot. Coming nearly 30 years after John Carpenter's The Thing, it's got franchise bait written all over it, and though it leads up to the point at the start of the '82 film where the Norwegian helicopter arrives at the Antarctic base, it's a completely superfluous reference thrown in simply to allow it to piggy-back onto Carpenter's film. Otherwise, this is just a straight-up pilfering of all the best things about the original, yet with none of the charm or atmosphere. All the beats are the same pretty much; The Thing attacks a dog, they use flamethrowers to attack the monster and it picks the team off through increasingly grotesque visual effects-driven sequences, before they all perform a test to see who is human (using teeth fillings rather than blood). So as not to rip the original film off verbatim, we do get an excursion to the alien ship and a different finale, but on the whole, it's just a pointless retelling of the classic original (which is itself a remake albeit a starkly different one). Lame.