The atmosphere is setup beautifully here by an old man telling a campfire story to a bunch of kids. The demise of the good ship Seagrass is pretty chilling and even though there's not a lot of gore, it is disturbingly violent. The one-night stand between Jamie Lee Curtis and Tom Atkins characters feels a little icky at first, but they develop a chemistry very quickly that really gives the movie a center. This is handy because even though Adrienne Barbeau is good and I've always liked her strong and spunky character work, her role as Stevie Wayne is not interesting enough to build around. She's like a play-by-play broadcaster, calling the action but too isolated in her radio station/lighthouse to be an active part of the horror that drifts in from the ocean.
The fog itself and the ghosts within it are cool creations. I watched the credits scroll at the end of the movie and saw that a couple of the supernatural sailors were played by Tommy Lee Wallace and Rob Bottin, two prominent figures in John Carpenter's rise to fame as a director. And speaking of Carpenter, he plays a janitor in the very beginning of the movie. It's a speaking cameo, no less.
John Carpenter is one of my favorite directors and I always find a lot to like, but a few things to roll my eyes about in his films. I consider "The Thing" and "Halloween" to be flawless, and while "The Fog" is just as deadly serious as those two films, it just doesn't have the same impact. Still, it's got a creepy look and feel that are absent from most of today's Horror films.
Review by ShubesBlockedParent2024-05-22T02:17:23Z
There are a number of curated lists that I keep finding across "the ol' interwebs" (as Richard Rawlings would say) and I have to keep reminding myself, "These are someone's opinion, just like a playlist that somene puts together of 'Greatest Hits' that includes a bunch of B-side tracks from unknown artists." On such a curated list, I saw that the 2005 reboot of The Fog was listed among the "10 Worst Horror Films Ever"; the opinion ranked the 2005 reboot as horrible yet praised the John Carpenter original made in 1980. Since I had never (at least, not that I could recall) watched the original - and since the 1982 release of John Carpenter's The Thing still remains one of my favorite horror movies to date - I figured this would be at least worth watching.
I've been wrong before, and I will undoubtedly be wrong again at some point in my life.
Avoid this smelly thing at all costs. It did not age well AT ALL and I can't imagine a 2005 reboot being ANY worse than this thing. It has a ... okay, it HAD... an all-star cast including Jamie Lee Curtis, Adrienne Barbeau, and others but even in their prime they couldn't pull this thing off. The effects were ludicrous and you never see exactly what is IN "the fog", apart from a momentary glimpse of some red glowing eyes and (very briefly and inexplicably) a close-up of some maggots that one assumes are feasting on human leprous flesh, I guess? Who knows... The whole thing is just rotten from start to finish, and I kid you not, we're still seeing opening credits ELEVEN MINUTES IN to the film. What's up with that?!!! But if you take my wise counsel, you won't have to even worry about that because you won't even watch the first 10 minutes. Avoid this one; I say again, AVOID THIS ONE. Even at a mere 89 minutes, it's not worth sitting through. It just absolutely stinks. Sorry, John Carpenter, but you came up short with this turd.