The Fog (Remake)

Posted by Bloody Disgusting Staff on October 17, 2005 @ 12:00am

On a dark and ominous night in the late 1800’s, a small band of local men have boarded a Clipper ship in the misty waters off the coast of Oregon, under the auspice of a land swap. But, upon receiving the gold, the men turned on the crew and their families and burned the ship, and all aboard it, to the waterline.

These men are the founding fathers of the rural dockside community of Antonio Island. A community built on the blood money taken that fateful night. A quaint and peaceful seaside town that will tonight, in the midst of a supernatural haze, pay for its crimes with the blood of its citizens.

This is the basic premise for the original 1980 John Carpenter classic, The Fog. From this masterpiece of mood and understated filmmaking, Hollywood has once again seen fit to unleash the terror of The Fog upon an unsuspecting public. The issue at hand is, after 25 years of some of the best and worst remakes imaginable, will a savvy movie going audience still cringe in fear at an everyday atmospheric occurrence? It would simply be too painless, to just say no.

What works in this new adaptation of The Fog is almost completely eclipsed by the disjointed mess that appears on the screen. The story has been tightened into a neat little package so that everyone and everything in the town are as uncomplicated as possible. The characterizations are so stereotypical that I could point out their counterparts on virtually every television show presently airing on the WB.

Surprisingly what works in this adaptation is what makes Carpenter’s original seem so dated in the age of CGI. In the original film, one might chuckle that a ghost could not open a door or climb a ladder. In this version the sprits are one with the fog, making every crack and crevice the means to their victims end.

It would be a gross understatement in this media saturated and desensitized age to say that this film had any true shocking moments. Most of the scares are played out for the “jump viewer” so, with no real connection to the town or the people in it, a majority of the sensible viewers will recognize that, for the most part, the ones that got it all had it coming in the end.

Hollywood’s recent trend of cannibalizing its classic horror catalogue does not appear to be waning. So as the future of the PG-13 horror film persists, we can only shut our eyes and hope that this new generation of homogenized horror fades rapidly into an impenetrable fog.