An Amorphous Mass Is Coming To Get You!
John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) underwhelmed me. Horror films are supposed to be scary. I haven't seen his most famous film, Halloween (1978), though from what I've seen it's quite a scarefest, with a maniacal masked knife-wielding villain and an atmospheric and relentless musical score by Carpenter himself, plus a great performance by a young Jamie Lee Curtis
My expectations for The Fog spoiled my viewing, I guess. Having enjoyed Adrienne Barbeau in Swamp Thing (reviewed in this blog) I assumed she would enliven Carpenter's film as she did the swampy movie. Adrienne Barbeau is a good actress as well as a very good-looking woman with a killer body. I don't apologize for noticing the hotness of Barbeau, a quality on display, too, in The Fog.
She plays a radio disc jockey putting in long hours at a station located at the pinnacle of a lighthouse on the east coast somewhere, although the film was shot in California. She has a young son I didn't care about because he's barely in the movie. He serves late in the film as a menaced person worried about by the protagonist, Barbeau.
What is the menace? A mysterious fog surrounding a ghost ship from 1880 with the shades of lepers rejected by a council of six town elders, so they return a hundred years later to exact vengeance on six townsmen. The fog glows pale blue, moves like it wants to kill. Adrienne Barbeau has a wide and high view of the phenomenon as it engulfs the town. With her radio voice, she can direct people away from the fog containing maggot-faced men in nineteenth century rain slickers, armed with boathooks, scythes, and knives. These ghosts stab, slash, rip, they're even polite, knocking on the doors of their potential victims before doing vengeance. One potential victim, in the middle of talking a lot to Jamie Lee Curtis, manages to avoid a bloody death by answering the door too late; the dead angry lepers don't like to wait past a certain point, I guess, a sure way to defeat them, but most everyone in the film who dies reacts too swiftly, answering the evenly spaced knocks.
The premise of this film, like fog itself, is hard to grasp.
The whole film feels like a moderately scary ghost story told to kids around a campfire, but nothing that would cause nightmares in even the most timid Boy Scout.
John Carpenter reportedly felt disappointment after seeing the film's rough cut. He added a scene at the beginning with John Houseman telling some children, Adrienne's son among them, the story of the leper ship. Even this introduction doesn't make the film stronger.
There's an episode of Space: 1999 with Moonbase Alpha running into a cloud or intelligence that penetrates their defenses. The climax, accompanied by "Mars" by Gustav Holst to make it seem gripping, shows Moonbase inhabitants fleeing from and wading through what looks like laundry suds, lots of suds. It's so stupid, just slightly less so than the misty menace in The Fog.
The lack of a strong and specific villain weakens this film when compared to something like Halloween. Though I haven't seen that film, I recognize the effectiveness of a story dealing with a masked adversary killing people. Michael Myers, the killer from that film, is a great villain, long-lived in people's imaginations, giving birth to many sequels and remakes, whereas the fog inspires terror only for its on-screen victims, but laughter for this reviewer.
John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) underwhelmed me. Horror films are supposed to be scary. I haven't seen his most famous film, Halloween (1978), though from what I've seen it's quite a scarefest, with a maniacal masked knife-wielding villain and an atmospheric and relentless musical score by Carpenter himself, plus a great performance by a young Jamie Lee Curtis
My expectations for The Fog spoiled my viewing, I guess. Having enjoyed Adrienne Barbeau in Swamp Thing (reviewed in this blog) I assumed she would enliven Carpenter's film as she did the swampy movie. Adrienne Barbeau is a good actress as well as a very good-looking woman with a killer body. I don't apologize for noticing the hotness of Barbeau, a quality on display, too, in The Fog.
She plays a radio disc jockey putting in long hours at a station located at the pinnacle of a lighthouse on the east coast somewhere, although the film was shot in California. She has a young son I didn't care about because he's barely in the movie. He serves late in the film as a menaced person worried about by the protagonist, Barbeau.
What is the menace? A mysterious fog surrounding a ghost ship from 1880 with the shades of lepers rejected by a council of six town elders, so they return a hundred years later to exact vengeance on six townsmen. The fog glows pale blue, moves like it wants to kill. Adrienne Barbeau has a wide and high view of the phenomenon as it engulfs the town. With her radio voice, she can direct people away from the fog containing maggot-faced men in nineteenth century rain slickers, armed with boathooks, scythes, and knives. These ghosts stab, slash, rip, they're even polite, knocking on the doors of their potential victims before doing vengeance. One potential victim, in the middle of talking a lot to Jamie Lee Curtis, manages to avoid a bloody death by answering the door too late; the dead angry lepers don't like to wait past a certain point, I guess, a sure way to defeat them, but most everyone in the film who dies reacts too swiftly, answering the evenly spaced knocks.
The premise of this film, like fog itself, is hard to grasp.
The whole film feels like a moderately scary ghost story told to kids around a campfire, but nothing that would cause nightmares in even the most timid Boy Scout.
John Carpenter reportedly felt disappointment after seeing the film's rough cut. He added a scene at the beginning with John Houseman telling some children, Adrienne's son among them, the story of the leper ship. Even this introduction doesn't make the film stronger.
There's an episode of Space: 1999 with Moonbase Alpha running into a cloud or intelligence that penetrates their defenses. The climax, accompanied by "Mars" by Gustav Holst to make it seem gripping, shows Moonbase inhabitants fleeing from and wading through what looks like laundry suds, lots of suds. It's so stupid, just slightly less so than the misty menace in The Fog.
The lack of a strong and specific villain weakens this film when compared to something like Halloween. Though I haven't seen that film, I recognize the effectiveness of a story dealing with a masked adversary killing people. Michael Myers, the killer from that film, is a great villain, long-lived in people's imaginations, giving birth to many sequels and remakes, whereas the fog inspires terror only for its on-screen victims, but laughter for this reviewer.
Vic Neptune
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