The Fog

I see so many reviews of this movie hailing it as an underrated gem, a forgotten classic of suspense and dread and I just gotta know ... what movie did everybody else see? Cause I sure didn't see a classic. I saw a movie with an interesting premise that didn't know how to handle it, and totally whiffed at the finish line. John Carpenter followed up Halloween with this (overlooking a made-for-TV Elvis biopic) and looked to use almost the entire playbook, right down to most of the actors. Three actors return from Halloween, one actor would go on to be in Halloween 3, and hey, for good measure, let's toss in Janet Leigh and Adrienne Barbeau. Solid cast, and all of them do everything they can to keep this movie alive. Carpenter's minimalist score, slow burn, and intelligent camera angles that he used to great effect in Halloween are employed here. I mean, it worked so well in Halloween, there's no shame in going back to the well, right? Except when you forget a vital ingredient. Halloween was a slow burn, alright, and used awesome cinematography to amplify how deliberately Carpenter paced the movie and built the tension through moments and atmosphere. Every sighting of Michael Myers in a small suburb, every missed intersection between him and Loomis, every little element is building to the third act, chipping away at your comfort until the dam bursts. Here, though, Carpenter is so focused on building atmosphere and tension, he forgets to actually BUILD to anything. The tension never feels like it escalates. There's one night where the town feels haunted and some fishermen disappear. We wait for the characters to catch up to what happened, and while that happens, NOTHING ELSE IS HAPPENING. Halloween is slow in parts, but there's always a layering of the tension going on. The Fog doesn't have that; it spends some time setting things up (including a terrible exposition dump in the very first scene that makes Loomis' exposition to Sheriff Bracket in Halloween sound like poetry), goes into a lull, and then here's the third act and that fog we named the movie after! It leaves the third act feeling cold and lifeless when you should be digging your nails into your armrests. It also doesn't help that the movie has quite a cast that is just begging to be thinned out, and it doesn't happen. Every death is a redshirt or a C-tier side character. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Halloween had a couple no-names eat a knife, but it also had two of the three girls. It feels like a wasted opportunity. It could still be a good if flawed movie, but then the ending. Woof. Okay, so the fog is part of a curse of this boat that sank 100 years prior, and there's a curse they'll come back after 100 years. A priest finds this diary that details all this and how the boat was betrayed and sank on purpose by six people. The curse is these murdered sailors want revenge on six people. So ... they kill three random fishermen, a guy at a weather station, and an elderly babysitter. Eh? Why aren't they after the descendants? Going after innocents makes no sense at all. And then to add insult to injury, in the middle of the climax, the movie actually has the audacity to pull the "wait, we didn't read ALL of the document!" card. Oh, the curse can be stopped if there are six murders OR they're given back stolen gold that has heretofore been unmentioned! So now we have a deus ex machina to boot! They find the gold, evil pirate ghost zombies go away ... until the priest -- a descendant of one of the conspirators -- is wondering why giving the gold worked and why he wasn't taken. So here comes the dead captain to cut his head off! WTF MOVIE. Add to that a bunch of plot threads that go nowhere; the flirtation between the radio host and the weather station guy, the radio host having moved to this small town from Chicago, the purpose for the campfire story exposition dump at the beginning, why Jamie Lee Curtis is hitchhiking up the coast and why she decides to stop in this small town for several days, the antagonism between the planner of the town's centennial party and her assistant, and probably three or four more I forgot. Or why there needed to be an awkward, out of the blue May-December romance between Curtis and Tom Atkins (they go from him picking her up to in bed together with NO hint of romance or even flirtation). Or the party planner and her assistant going out to the church and talking about renovating it when it looks perfectly fine and is, in fact, in use and staffed. I see what Carpenter was trying to do here, but just because you use a lot of the same ingredients in a new meal doesn't mean it'll come out as good. This movie has a lot of intentions, but its execution is sorely lacking.