Saturday, March 11, 2006

The Fog

Pooteewheet and I watched The Fog last night. It was boring. Unendingly boring. I remember being terrified of the original John Carpenter movie when I was kid (1980!) as it was probably the first horror movie I really watched (if you don't count Soylent Green, which scared the crap out of me). But the remake pulled itself down to a PG-13 to catch the teeny-bopper crowd, and the "horror" seemed to consist of being thrown through windows or other panes of glass. Seriously, everyone in the movie that died was repeatedly thrown through a plate of glass - a boat window, a building window, a museum display case... Didn't the filmmakers find it a bit strange when reviewing their writing that every fifth page included the stage instruction "throw [character] through window"? Why is that scary? And why, if you have an evil fog from the ocean, presumably full of creepy crawlies, feathered lobsters, choking seaweed, and that salty stuff that can drown you, do you kill everyone by throwing them through plates of glass?

To top it off, the people they kill and/or try to kill are for the most part not even descendents of the people who shafted the ghosts/zombies (in the original they were more like zombies, in this one they were more like ghosts). And when they're done exacting their revenge on mostly non-evil descendants, they steal the lead's girlfriend by turning her into a ghost (she seems to be a reincarnation of the ghost captain's wife) and then just going away. What? The ancestors of the town burnt a ship full of lepers alive and stole all their treasure and all the fog/ghosts want is for the captain to get his hoochie mama back?

Bad writing, bad film editing, just bad.

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