I hadn’t heard about this movie until stumbling across it last week. But it has Lance Henriksen in it. Any movie with him starts at a 7! Love him. He is a genre god based on Pumpkinhead alone.

Harbinger Down is a movie that absolutely feels like it exists in the same world as Carpenter’s The Thing. From that perspective, this movie isn’t treading any “new” ground. But new ground is hard to find. New ground is compensated for by the way a story is told.

Harbinger Down starts with a spaceship re-entering the atmosphere. A ship that is then lost to the ocean until decades later when a crab ship stumbles across it. A ship captained by Lance Henriksen. Naturally he has a motley crew comprised of a grizzled Russian woman, a friendly Inuit, an anti-social engine room guy, a lumbering giant, and Dock (a black crew member who seems to be here to embrace and call out cliches in horror movies.) Add in to the mix a college group looking to track some whales. This group consists of Stephen (the snooty professor), Ronelle (a student), and Sadie (another student, but also the granddaughter of Lance Henriksen’s captain.)

The spaceship is encased in ice, which the crew breaks off before moving it into the hold. All of this reveals that there is a body within the spaceship. The Professor shows his cards and demands that the salvage become the property of the college, but the captain denies his claim and points out that under salvage law it is finders keepers rules. And Sadie was the one who found it. Interestingly the spaceship is supposed to have been “lost” in 1982, the same year that The Thing was released.

But nothing can be that easy, right? It is a horror movie after all. So when the dead astronaut turns up missing, are you gonna be surprised? Of course not. And once he is “warmed up” and on the move, things get dicey. Because he isn’t moving on his own. And the whiplike tentacles will instantly bring to mind The Thing.

And here we get to the crux of the movie. Something has come back with the astronaut and it simply wants to live and grow, not too different than in The Thing. The creature begins picking off the crew one by one as it harvests the biological mass to grow.

Honestly, I feel like getting into the details of this movie isn’t needed. If you saw and liked The Thing, you will like this. If you are a horror fan, then you certainly know and love Lance Henriksen, then you will like this one. Who lives? Who dies? Early on the Russian woman shows a fascinating level of character which made me say out loud “I really hope she becomes the final girl.” But also knowing that there is no way she would be, because Sadie is the obvious one assigned that role.

I definitely intend to rewatch this one, and may make it into a trilogy with The Thing and (uhhh) The Thing. And technically I would watch (uhhh) The Thing before watching The Thing because of story timeline. If you have seen the Things, you know what that means. 

I’m inclined to give this 9 stars, and there is a good chance I will seek out a physical copy at some point.