DVD Review: TheFog (2005)
You can’t go wrong with a John Carpenter movie (well, there are exceptions).
This is a surprisingly terrible movie directed by Rupert Wainwright who also directed Stigmata, so one would think he had the experience to bring this remake into the modern day and make a classic much more terrifying than the drivel I watched.
The Fog is about a small seaside island that discovers the true identity of its past: a group of cut-throats who break a contract to sell the island to a colony of seagoing lepers and burns them to death, leaving the others to drown. Obscurely, on the island’s anniversary, an evil is awakened that wants to reclaim its lost heritage: the island, by killing random people and maintaining a psychic link to an ex-resident. A fog braces the town, bringing with it an impending and vengeful death on the island’s residents to claim what is rightfully theirs.
One of the more surprising aspects of the movie was its poor casting, consisting of Tom Welling (Smallville), Maggie Grace (Lost), and Selma Blair (Hellboy). The other actors I wouldn’t recognise without looking them up, and wonder whether they are in the right business. Selma Blair was the only character I had the slightest interest in, but she isn’t the sharpest actress on the block. God himself is the only person who knows how she got the part in Hellboy.
There are so many problems with this movie. I just don’t know where to begin and I am afraid that if I started, I would never stop. The last movie I watched which was as bad as this was Stephen King’s Desperation. It is the bottom of the barrel, should’ve been a B-grade movie at best, given free to the public or the suicidal. The ending makes less sense to me than explaining string theory to a cage of monkeys trained to smoke marijuana by the ton.
If you like waiting for something to happen and don’t care much for plot, characters, suspense, horror, action, adventure, and if you really don’t care about being riveted to your chair hoping the kid survives or what so-and-so is doing, or if you live with five cats and mutter to yourself as you incessantly scratch the inside of your ear, then you will love The Fog.
But, if you’re like me, you may want to consider a movie that rates more than 1 out of 100 on the Kane-o-meter.
2 comments:
Yeah, I watched this a while ago, thought it was setting up well and then felt like the writers just couldn't be bothered anymore. Like they'd rather be down the pub having a pint instead.
Spot on, Damien. I'm fairly tolerant when it comes to movies, being willing to adjust my expectations according to circumstances. But I despised this movie. Sure it didn't help that Carpenter's "The Fog" is one of my favourites, but this "remake" could have won me over with a bit of effort. Instead, it was slack, stupid and insulting. Even where it replicated suspenseful and creepy scenes from the original, it somehow managed to make them inane and dull. The filmmakers didn't believe is atmospheric set-up. The CGI ghosts came over like cartoonish Disney sideshow attractions -- not nearly as creepy as the low-tech glowing eyes of Carpenter's spectral lepers. And I won't even go into the casting (where every person involved was about ten years too young to adequately play the part). The fact that Carpenter was the "Executive Producer" makes sense in the light of a remark from George Romero that being "Executive Producer" means [and I paraphrase] "Here's some money... now go away and leave us alone".
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