Pun Salad

This currently ranks as #165 in IMDB's top 250 movies of all time, but … sorry, I can't say much more than "OK". There's not much that distinguishes it from dozens of others.

The opening is unusual, though: a Norwegian helicopter is chasing a dog across an Antarctic wasteland, one of the passengers trying to shoot it with a rifle. You don't see that every day. The dog makes it to an American camp, the crazed Norwegians manage to get themselves killed before revealing the reasons for their behavior. That's good news for the doggie, but not so good for everyone else. As it turns out, the dog is really a disgusting alien in disguise.

And apparently, just staying a cute dog isn't really an option when you're a disgusting alien.

Pretty soon, the Americans, who are kind of irritable and fractious even when they're not being threatened by a deadly alien menace, realize they're in a bit of a pickle. The alien could have easily transmogrified itself into one of them. (And, duh, it did.) Paranoia and distrust abound, which—this is one of those irony-laden messages adored by critics—makes it tougher to vanquish the alien. There's probably metaphors going on too, but I always miss those.