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‘Identity’ – Heading Back to the Motel to Revisit a Near-Perfect Thriller Nearly 20 Years Later

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Identity 2003

Goodfellas was, justifiably, the first word in nearly every headline that ran upon Ray Liotta‘s passing last week; any actor who can hold their own opposite Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci in a Martin Scorsese classic deserves the recognition. But, in addition to excelling at the tough guy persona, he also had a vulnerable side as well as comedic chops. As a result, the list of his memorable performances is impressively long.

He earned a Golden Globe nomination for his first supporting role in Something Wild; he embodied the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams; he flew off the handle as an unhinged cop in Unlawful Entry; he ate his own brain in Hannibal; he appeared in two Muppet movies (Muppets from Space and Muppets Most Wanted); he played a pivotal role as Ryan Reynolds’ partner in Smokin’ Aces; he duked it out with Seth Rogen to the tune of Queen in Observe and Report; and he voiced the protagonist in one of the most celebrated video games of all time, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, to name a few.

But the Ray Liotta movie I find myself thinking about most is 2003’s Identity, in which he plays one of several people left stranded at a desolate Nevada motel due to torrential rain only to be picked off one by one by an unknown killer. It’s essentially a modern retelling of Agatha Christie’s influential 1939 whodunit And Then There Were None (which a character directly references in the movie) until a seismic twist recontextualizes everything.

Identity 2003 thriller

The guests include limo driver Ed (John Cusack), corrections officer Rhodes (Liotta) and his prisoner transport Robert Maine (Jake Busey, Starship Troopers), sex worker Paris (Amanda Peet, The X-Files: I Want to Believe), diva actress Caroline (Rebecca De Mornay, Risky Business), young newlyweds Lou (William Lee Scott, The Butterfly Effect) and Ginny (Clea DuVall, The Faculty), parents George (John C. McGinley, Scrubs) and Alice (Leila Kenzle, Mad About You) with young son Timmy (Bret Loehr), and motel manager Larry (John Hawkes, Winter’s Bone).

The plethora of characters are juggled deftly, each one easily defined by their quirks following brisk introductions via keenly edited (courtesy of Academy Award winner David Brenner) flashbacks showing their intersecting trajectories. As the mystery builds, the B-story concerns an informal trial for death row inmate Malcolm Rivers (Pruitt Taylor Vince, Constantine), with Alfred Molina (Spider-Man 2) as his psychiatrist and Holmes Osborne (Donnie Darko) as the judge.

Identity is a breakneck thrill ride that builds Twilight Zone-esque intrigue while ratcheting tension over the course of 90 minutes. The rug is pulled out from under the viewer several times over, most notably with a clever third-act twist that could astonish M. Night Shyamalan and again with a shocking button right before the credits roll. Like any good mystery, the clues are hidden in plain sight, making repeat viewings rewarding.

James Mangold (Logan, Ford v Ferrari) was a somewhat unexpected choice to direct Identity in 2003, coming off back-to-back lauded dramas with Girl, Interrupted and Kate & Leopold, but he does so with gusto. Despite being contained to a single location, the visuals never become tiresome. Working with director of photography Phedon Papamichael (The Pursuit of Happyness, Ford v Ferrari), Mangold gives the glossy picture a neo-noir atmosphere with shadowy cinematography and a never-ending stream of rain.

Identity 2003 ray liotta

Similarly surprising is the fact that the tightly-plotted script was written by Michael Cooney, whose only earlier work of note is writing and directing the 1997 killer snowman cult classic Jack Frost. He utilizes his genre background by injecting a slasher movie mentality into the psychological thriller. As Cusack notes in a making-of featurette, “In a lot of films, you have to do stuff where character motivates plot. This is one where, in a way, the actors are kind of these elegant chess pieces; the writer and director are weaving these different stories.”

From screen veterans to character actors, the eccentric ensemble plays well off one another. Cusack sparkles as the flawed hero. Liotta, reuniting with Mangold after working together on 1997’s Cop Land, delivers a layered performance. Peet embodies the independent woman who refuses to be mistreated. A bespectacled McGinley plays ineffectually shaken well. Busey is effortlessly unsavory. Vince, who starred in Mangold’s 1995 debut Heavy, is chilling yet sympathetic.

Angelo Badalamenti (Twin Peaks) was originally hired to compose the soundtrack, only to be replaced by Alan Silvestri. Silvestri’s score is noticeably more subtle than his grandiose work in the likes of Back to the Future, The Avengers, and Forrest Gump, but it’s eerie enough to match the film’s tone. The soundtrack also makes good use of Foo Fighters’ “All My Life” and Bob Dylan’s “I Want You.”

The film was shot in the Los Angeles area on a budget of $28 million. Identity opened at #1 at the box office on April 25, 2003, grossing over $16 million, and went on to earn over $90 million worldwide. It received mixed but generally favorable reviews, sitting at 63% on Rotten Tomatoes. While I can see why it may unravel with the twist for some, I consider it to be a near-perfect thriller, as it ingeniously subverts expectations at every turn with nary a dull moment. It’s currently streaming on Netflix.

Identity 2003 cusack

Editorials

‘The Fog’ 19 Years Later: There’s a Reason You Don’t Remember This John Carpenter Remake

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The Fog remake
Pictured: 'The Fog' (2005)

John Carpenter’s illustrious catalog of horror and non-horror classics has already seen three remakes (Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, and this column’s focus), with at least one more kinda-sorta confirmed on the way (Escape from New York). If you consider 2011’s The Thing enough of a remake, notch another on the bedpost. It makes sense; Carpenter turned his no-bullshit attitude into a masterful filmmaking style, and those listed titles harbor nostalgic admiration. We’re probably closer than we think to seeing Bryan Fuller’s Christine remake for Blumhouse or a contemporary They Live, while Dwayne Johnson’s Big Trouble in Little China sequel project fades away. Imagine Julia Ducournau’s Christine should Fuller exit, or what about if James Gunn booked a brief horror vacation away from the DCEU for his take on They Live?

Carpenter’s brand of down-and-dirty storytelling mixed with societal commentaries make his works perfect for generational updates, but they can’t all be winners.

Take 2005’s woefully tragic The Fog, for example.

Rupert Wainwright’s disastrously shallow remake lacks the finesse of even a crusty barnacle attached to the underbelly of Carpenter’s original. During a period of horror cinema inundated by remakes, The Fog asserts itself as one of the worst. The 2000s had a very “show, don’t tell” approach to horror filmmaking and leaned on grisly violence popularized by Saw, all exploited in their lowest forms throughout The Fog. Bless both Carpenter and the late Debra Hill for serving as producers, but Wainwright and writer Cooper Layne do their salty source shanty zero justice.


The Approach

‘The Fog’ (1980)

Carpenter’s The Fog is successful because of the auteur’s influence. Between his stronger emphasis on churchly greed, eerie musical score, and abilities as a simplistic yet impactful visionary, viewers get plenty of “bang for their buck” in 90 minutes. Wainwright doesn’t possess those qualities and relies on archaic horror templates without any investment. In an era where computer graphics were still advancing, and some producers only valued horror as gory inserts within a lax narrative, Wainwright’s direction equates to background noise. There’s nothing spectacular or signature about the filmmaker’s approach, as recyclable as the plethora of 2000s horror films plagued by the same churned-out doldrums.

Smallville heartthrob Tom Welling follows in the footsteps of fellow WB/CW stars like Supernatural’s Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki to shepherd his own horror remake, playing Tom Atkins’ role of fisherman Nick Castle. He’s a descendant of Norman Castle, one of the founding fathers of Antonio Island, which is located off the Oregon coast. It’s been over 100 years since the island’s bustling Antonio Bay community was established, and to celebrate an upcoming anniversary, a statue is commissioned that displays its founders as a dedication to their contributions. Mayor Tom Malone (Kenneth Welsh) wants everything to be perfect, but little does he know Antonio Bay is about to have an undead problem to confront when a mysterious fog rolls in thick as sauna steam.

The bones of The Fog are all there, but both needlessly overcomplicated and disparagingly unkempt. Carpenter introduces his film with an eerie ghost story told around a campfire that becomes a grave truth for Antonio Bay — Layne’s remake screenplay does backflips to try and explain the unexplainable. Nick’s charter fishing vessel unleashes the curse when second-mate Spooner (DeRay Davis) rips open a burlap bag concealing curse items with the boat’s anchor because the film doesn’t trust audience comprehension past any viewer’s eyesight. One of the biggest scourges upon 2000s horror cinema was creators believing their audiences were as dumb as algae-covered rocks, causing them to spell the obvious out in even more blatant and less captivating methods.


Does It Work?

The Fog remake carpenter

‘The Fog’ (2005)

The adjustments Wainwright oversees in 2005’s remix are a bungle of what out-of-touch producers presumed horror fans wanted to see at the time. Carpenter’s quaint coastal atmosphere is eradicated by Spooner’s Girls Gone Wild behavior or the need to belabor flashbacks that lay out every grim detail about Captain Blake (Rade Šerbedžija) and his lepers. Antonio Island’s tainted history is still prevalent as a driving force behind the weather-based haunting, but where Carpenter leaves us to imagine the atrocities founding fathers committed, Wainwright and Layne lean on time jumps that detract from overall moods for cheap betrayal thrills. The remake retains less reflection, whereas Carpenter’s original better depicts a town reckoning with its horrifying heritage — an example of hollow vengeance versus frightening introspection.

Maggie Grace co-stars in Jamie Lee Curtis’ hitchhiker role, except she’s no longer affable nomad Elizabeth Solley; she’s Kathy Williams’ (Sara Botsford) daughter, Elizabeth Williams. Her ties to Antonio Bay are supposed to represent how we can’t escape our fates, fair enough. What’s unfortunate is Layne’s need to shoehorn relationship drama because she’s (apparently) the love of Nick’s life despite his handful of hookups with KAB radio DJ Stevie Wayne (Selma Blair) while Elizabeth fled her hometown for six months — a love triangle situation that adds no special sauce and is practically forgotten. Carpenter is fantastic when letting his characters exist without bogging their arcs with fifty reasons why they’re exactly where they are in any given scene. Wainwright is no mimic, nor does his film’s desire to tangle characters together as friends, lovers, or family members add further intrigue. If anything, it adversely tanks character development because there’s no resident we intimately care about.

Which brings us to the “fog” of it all. Carpenter’s maggot-ridden swashbucklers from the deep are memorable and creepy, while Wainwright pulls his haunted visuals from a grab-bag. Sometimes, they’re atrocious see-through animations made of mist — other times, indiscriminately human entities. One victim contracts leprosy as his punishment, another fried to ash upon touch, and yet another is dragged underwater by invisible hands — there’s zero continuity to Wainwright’s justifiably antagonistic forces. They become a Mad Libs gaggle of props fitting whatever scare-of-the-hour The Fog decides is necessary at that moment, none of which ever collaborate in unison. That includes Captain Blake’s parting climax, in which he abandons his group’s attack on Antonio Bay because he claims Elizabeth as his ghost wife after it’s clear she’s the spitting image of Blake’s 1870s lover [insert seventy thousand question marks].


The Result

The Fog remake tom welling

‘The Fog’ (2005)

The Fog remake is everything I despise about thoughtless horror outputs rolled into a briny clump of seaweed and misbegotten reinventions. It’s hardly scary, unable to let audiences invest in atmospheric spookiness, and so wildly incompetent. Each scene gets progressively worse, starting with the reveal of evil personal belongings stamped with identifiable “Hallmarks” that become pieces of a puzzle that never gets finished. Carpenter makes you feel the offshore breeze rolling in with his fog, sending chills up your spine as these scurvy-soaked scoundrels start stabbing and hooking Antonio Bay residents. Wainwright doesn’t ever grasp what his iteration of Blake’s demons should look like or how they should cause havoc, so he starts throwing basic horror visuals at the screen out of desperation.

Revolution Studios’ The Fog downgrade sinks thanks to primarily messy effects, hampered by the early millennium’s digital capabilities. That’s not exclusive to awful ghost illustrations that look like someone just decreased the “Transparency” slider in Photoshop. The fog, the TITULAR FOG, doesn’t even hold up to Demon Wind standards (in which the wind is essentially fog, roll with it). Wainwright and his team brainstorm ideas that sound rad on paper — an older woman gets barbecued, a ghost outline appears in fog like Imhotep’s sandstorm face, a younger woman is attacked by seaweed — but execution almost exclusively whiffs. The remake’s drunkard generalization of Father Malone (which is such a slap in the face to Hal Holbrook’s fantastic original performance) should meet an epic death when Captain Blake levitates glass shards as a containment circle, but three pieces fly through Malone’s body, and it’s over. That’s the level of SFX disappointment that festers throughout 2005’s The Fog, all buildup with no reward.

The film’s finale feels like a prank; the rest of the conflict’s resolution is lost at sea. Carpenter’s much heavier scolds against organized religion’s dirty dealings help give his film an identity down to the glimmering golden cross, while Wainwright goes as generic as they come and abandons ship when the well runs dry. Nothing justifies the kind of conceptual excitement that comes along with worthwhile remakes, whether that’s copycat role replications (I love Selma Blair, but her Stevie doesn’t match Adrienne Barbeau’s presence) or storytelling reductions that choose numbing violence over folkloric sensations of dread. We love a horror movie that’s critical of early America’s disgusting colonization tactics, but The Fog doesn’t know how to turn those frustrations into a compelling genre production. Whatever’s kept from the original holds no candle to Carpenter’s version, and whatever’s added — like Nick and Elizabeth’s awkward shower sex scene set to softcore porno music — brings nothing of value.


The Lesson

‘The Fog’ (2005)

Just because your remake starts with a banger like Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Going Down Swinging” doesn’t mean the film itself is a banger. There’s no world where I’d recommend Wainwright’s The Fog over Carpenter’s titanically superior original, and I say that as a leading Aughts horror remake champion. It’s another Nu-Horror approach that strips away commentary crucial to the plot’s intrigue since all Layne musters is a non-creepy and waterlogged story that feels like an unwieldy CW episode — not meant as a compliment. Not even the chiseled beauty of an early 2000s Tom Welling in a wool turtleneck can save this travesty from becoming another forgotten wreck.

So what did we learn?

● Not all CW figureheads have a hit horror remake in their blood.

● Less is so often more when it comes to horror movies, as long as you’re selling scares and confidently telling a story within your means.

● Some movies from the 2000s horror era will always suffer thanks to dodgy digital effects because while it was the shiny new toy everyone wanted to play with, golly, the technology was rough to start.

● Horror fans can be easy to please, but they’re also first to call out your bullshit — get out of here with these ghosts and their inability to pick a lane.

Wainwright’s film never knows what kind of horror movie it wants to be, and that’s the kill shot. Is it a slasher flick? Zombie movie? A large-scale haunted house blueprint? There’s never any indication that Wainwright or his screenwriter conceptualize a path forward, so they barrel on, praying there’s enough horror familiarity to appease the masses. There isn’t, it’s a boneheaded slog, and that’s that. Horror fans deserve better than to be fed the equivalent of table scraps for 100 minutes. To each their own and all, but now that I’ve finally seen 2005’s The Fog, the only times I’ll think about this movie again will be if someone interacts with my Letterboxd post.

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