While I haven't reviewed other John Carpenter flicks on this blog, I have mostly enjoyed the seven I've watched, especially the ones from the late '70s and early '80s. It's too bad he apparently lost the knack in the '90s and largely retired from directing early. The Fog was his first post-Halloween silver-screen feature, so I figured it held promise.
The story follows multiple heroes -- among them radio DJ Stevie (Adrienne Barbeau), her young son Andy (Ty Mitchell), career fisherman Nick (Tom Atkins), drifter Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis), festivity hostess Kathy (Janet Leigh!), her assistant Sandy (Nancy Loomis), and Father Malone (Hal Holbrook) -- in the fictional California town of Antonio Bay within the course of a day, namely the town's centennial. It's also the centennial of a fog-based fatal shipwreck. From the stroke of midnight, strange things happen around town. And where the glowing fog hits, death is likely to follow. None of this being coincidental, of course.
No, the fog doesn't kill people directly. It simply conveys or heralds the killers, all from the drowned crew, whose usual MO involves hooks and swords. At first I wondered why these sailors would turn murderous, but Malone learns soon enough that the town's founders had tricked them into crashing, partly to steal their gold and partly to avoid the arrival of a leper colony. Yep, undead lepers. Just as well that the fog usually obscures them.
One of those founders was Malone's grandfather, Patrick, also a priest (but not faithful enough for chastity, if I'm right about his sect). Patrick was not one of those cinematic religious nuts a la The Night of the Hunter who think God approves if not demands their murderous treachery. His newly discovered diary indicates that he knew himself to be sinning severely at the time and could only hope for divine forgiveness. I have to wonder how many pastors ever find themselves in this state of mind.
Anyway, it's a pretty typical horror conceit for revenants to want revenge but seek to take it on innocent descendants. Makes for an easy way to let us understand the villains while rooting for the heroes. Mercifully, the crew isn't out to annihilate the whole town, but neither is it picky about targets.
For me, the main scares were not from the killers but from other effects of the fog, often without rhyme or reason. Those include sudden cold sweeping in, objects moving, glass breaking, machines turning on or off, and victims not always staying down. Nice to have a decent excuse for characters facing technical difficulties at the worst times. They have no way to fight the fog -- not that they ever try to fight the ghouls, either.
To someone who's seen even a smattering of the genre, it's not hard to guess who will survive and who won't. That doesn't mean we can't get a sense of suspense. The survivors tend not to have an easy time of it, and some get hurt.
Alas, almost as predictable as who will survive is how. Writers Carpenter and Debra Hill put very little creativity into resolutions. I won't say the good guys are frustrating morons like in so many horrors -- at least they catch on pretty quickly to what's happening -- but neither do they show any particular relevant skill.
Or much personality, for that matter. Stevie's about as interesting as they come, if only by virtue of her job and single motherhood; the rest are rather cookie-cutter. That might be deliberate, for the same purpose as in 'Salem's Lot: letting the audience identify the townsfolk with people they know. Or it might just be amateurish writing.
The soundtrack? We do get more of Carpenter's signature spooky minimalist compositions. When it's not that, it's either silence or radio jazz that clashes with the atmosphere. I don't mind that sort of dissonance, but it might decrease the fright factor and/or provide a modicum of comic relief for you.
I can see why TF got remade in 2005, and I can imagine why the remake bombed. This is just one of those creep fests that may leave you cold or, y'know, leave you cold. A fog is hard to bottle.
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