Movie Review: The Fog

Creating a really fine, really scary horror movie is not an easy task. It should not be undertaken lightly, and that goes doubly-so for a remake of a highly-regarded film. A good horror movie must be believable, so that all the characters are recognizable and "true" to viewers. Yet a horror movie must also feature something unbelievable (like an immortal slasher, or a vampire...). That's a paradox that takes talent to navigate.

A good horror movie should also be so finely and carefully crafted from a technical standpoint that audiences reflexively jump at all the right moments, as if manipulated by a puppet master. And yet there's another contradiction or paradox. A really good horror movie must also feel so raw that it genuflects to the random nature of our existence, and therefore we feel caught up in the film's world; as though it is our world...filled with questions and ambiguities. We should feel imperiled in the theater along with the characters on-screen.

Perhaps most significantly, crafting a good, solid horror film requires patience on the part of a director. Story elements must be set-up carefully and almost obsessively in the first portions of a film, so the pay-off "jump" and "suspense" moments that arrive at the climax work as intended. It can't all be one-pitch of phantasmagoria, or it just ain't scary. Building a mood, an atmosphere of "dread" is not something that can be done with one shot, or one line of dialogue. It happens in the frame, in what is seen, and also what is not seen, but rather merely "detected" by the audience's "fear" radar.

Which brings us to this abomination. Rupert Wainright's remake of John Carpenter's The Fog (1980), is an utterly craftless horror film, and one so lazy, so poorly constructed that it can't even be bothered to develop the most rudimentary idea, or even present an interesting character and logical storyline. The overriding atmosphere of the film is literally one of "I can't be bothered to scare you." It is the absolute worst case of PG-13/remake-itis I have seen in 2005, and consequently the worst horror film of the year.

That's a pretty big claim, and I intend to support it. Point-by-point, until you believe me.

Let's begin with some background. The new version of The Fog depicts the story of Antonio Bay, a town in Oregon that was re-born as a wealthy community in 1871 after years of poverty. The town's four founding fathers - Wayne, Castle, Malone and Williams - (secretly) built the community by copping out on a contract with a rich leper named Blake. Blake wanted to build a colony nearby and was on his way to doing so, when the founding fathers attacked and burned his clipper, The Elizabeth Dane, at sea. They then stole his fortune in gold and built the town. Now, 130-something years later, Blake and his men are ghosts, returning for vengeance and to claim something else that was stolen from them. In 2005, a fisherman named Nick Castle (Tom Welling), his sometimes girlfriend Elizabeth Williams (Maggie Grace), a radio DJ, Stevie Wayne (Selma Blair) and her son Andy get caught up in Blake's return, as a murderous fog rolls in...

Above, I wrote that a horror movie requires patience and skill to build an ominous and effective tone. Viewers need a sense of where they are, and a "vibe" of the setting where the film is set. In the original Carpenter movie, for instance, we see Stevie Wayne taking a long and perilous walk down a staircase on a vast, craggy mountainside overlooking a ragin sea. She is headed towards her lighthouse radio station, and the wind blows against her with a vengeance. In long shot, we see her isolated and alone on this rocky coast, far from help. This location will be of critical importance in the finale, when Blake's avengers attack. As viewers, we know where Stevie is, how small she is on that vast, lonely landscape, and most importantly, that help cannot reach her. We know this because Carpenter has taken the time to show it to us, and to do so effectively. It isn't an image that easily leaves the mind.

In the remake, the film can't be bothered to build that much of a mood, and again and again, we actually race past the suspense, past the atmospherics, to get to not-so-good CGI effects. We get, perhaps, two establishing shots of the lighthouse. We never see the new Stevie in a vast long shot, or even climbing the stairs to the lighthouse tower inside. Her car pulls up and then boom, we're in the studio of the light house. Consequently, there's no sense of this place, where it is, or why it is important.

Had this occurred only once, we could dismiss the lack of mood, of location, as an oversight. But the director shows time and time again that he has no energy or will to dramatize for viewers a "place" we can believe in (which is important, since the film is about a community, Antonio Bay). For instance, the same lack of detail (and therefore suspense...) occurs when Nick and Elizabeth head out on the open sea in a small boat when they hear that his vessel, the Sea Grass, is missing. Does it take them some time to find the missing vessel (as it did in the original?) Nope. They literally find it in one shot. They go out to the big, wide sea and immediately locate the missing vessel. Again, the opportunity for suspense has been utterly squandered. Instead, we race from point-to-point as if this is the cliffnotes version of The Fog, sans mood, sans scares. The sea itself was almost a character in the original film. It was the place that spawned the ghosts, of course, but it was also a realm of mystery. In Carpenter's version, Nick told Elizabeth (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) a story he had heard recounted as a boy, about another ghost ship. Our unease in the original came in no small part because the sea is a place where we're not at home; a mysterious place. This film hasn't thought about the ocean at all, and what it means to us, or how we - as viewers - react to it. What scares us about the ocean? This movie has no idea.

Some long shots, some moody sequences of searching for the Sea Grass might have brought us into the characters' situation. We might have had to reckon with the vastness of the ocean, the empty, isolating nature of it. We could have had time to grow scared, to reflect on a mystery. But again, this movie can't be bothered.

Finally, the unveiling of the statue of the Founding Fathers at the Antonio Bay City Hall is another scene that exists just to exist. There are maybe four or five people at the bloody unveiling. Could the film not afford extras? Could the film not have afforded a few moments of ironic dialogue (like the original featured...) where the point was hammered home that Antonio Bay was built on theft and murder? Nope. There's no sense of a real community in this film. There's the mayor, the mother, the priest, the fisherman, the DJ, her kid, and the token black.

The entire film is like that. It just can't be bothered to resemble something approach reality. There is no verisimilitude. Which brings us, inevitably, to talk about the gaps in situational logic here. On its return to Antonio Bay for revenge, the Fog first attacks the 30 foot trawler, the aforementioned Sea Grass. The Fog infiltrates the boat (via a lousy CG shot...) and destroys the generators and all nautical equipment aboard. The fog then murders two party girls on board, and Nick's cousin, leaving only the movie's token black Spooner (DeRay Davis) alive. When last we see Spooner, three corpses are spread out at his feet, he sees something off-screen and screams in terror. We assume he's going to die and we don't get to see it because, after all, this is a PG-13 movie. Yet, later Nick finds Spooner alive and well (if chilly...) in the ship's cooler. Okay, how did Spooner - on the deck with corpses at his feet - escape the minions of Blake? How'd he get below deck? We already saw the fog infiltrate every aspect of the vessel, so much so that it knocked out the instrumentation and power generator. But it couldn't go into the cooler? Why? This gap in logic goes totally unexplained.

But this is nothing compared to what happens next. Spooner is returned to shore and questioned by the police. They think he's a murderer but he counters that there's something in the fog, something evil. Nick believes him without question. I can beileve that, because Nick is Spooner's buddy and we're always inclined to believe our buddies, right? Fine. But Elizabeth shows disdain and skepticism over Spooner's claim that "there is something in the fog." Apparently, the movie has forgotten at this point two very important things about Elizabeth's character. A.)She has been having recurring nightmares about being burned alive in a fire. B.)She researched a symbol from the Elizabeth Dane on the Internet at Nick's house, and when she did, she saw ghostly wet footprints walk across the ceiling. They led her out to the fog-encrusted shoreline, where the Fog repeatedly whispered her name, "Elizabeth." So, she readily admits to an irrational experience of her own (vivid recurring nightmares) and she's had a first-person encounter with the mysterious fog to boot! You'd think all this might ring a bell when Spooner mentions the fog, not leave her at all skeptical. But the movie isn't smart enough to remember what happened a few scenes earlier, so instead, Elizabeth doesn't believe Spooner.

More gaps in situational logic abound. Stevie Wayne drives into the fog. It comes in through her car's front vents, and the car breaks down on a road. A truck then hits her car head on. She survives the impact, but the car is thrown down a rocky embankment into the churling sea. She awakens underwater, tries to flee the sinking vehicle, and is grabbed by a ghostly hand. She escapes, swims to the surface, and that's the last we see of her for awhile. Then, five minutes later, she shows up at the Antonio Bay Town Hall. So...she swam ashore, climbed the embankment, traveled the highway (without a car...) and got to the center of the community in time for the climax. Oh, okay. Right.

A few minutes later, Nick is in his pick-up truck with Elizabeth and young Andy, and the fog surrounds them too. Only this time, it doesn't get in the car through the vents. Why? This is exactly the kind of thing you shouldn't do in a horror movie: break the rules. We got a cool CGI shot of wispy fog flowing in through the vents before, but then there's another scene with a moving vehicle, and the movie wants to forget that the fog can penetrate it. This is a movie tailor-made for people with only short-term memory.

The opening "flashback" of the film is even more confusing. We see the four founding fathers sail away from the burning Elizabeth Dane in their row boat, clutching their ill-gotten treasure. Then a hand reaches up from underwater and grabs one of them, pulling them into the murky depths. That's where the flashback ends. In the present, however, not a single character ever reports that one of the founding fathers was killed on this expedition. So what happened to the guy who got pulled down into the sea? Was he rescued? Was he killed? Why is there no mention of this incident?! Again, the script can't even be bothered to connect the beginning of the film to the finale.

And then there's the finale. Oh my god, is it horrible. Ostensibly, Blake and his ghostly crew have returned to kill the descendents of the four founding fathers and "reclaim" something that they believe is rightfully theirs. Okay, well the descendents include Mrs. Williams, Elizabeth, Father Malone, the Mayor, Stevie Wayne, Andy Wayne and Nick Castle. Yet the ghosts don't attack and kill Stevie, Andy or Nick. Why? Instead, they torture and murder the Mayor (played by Kenneth Welsh). What did the Mayor do specifically to deserve this manner of gruesome death? More importantly, what did Andy, Stevie and Nick do NOT to deserve so merciless and individual a demise? The movie never tells us.

More to the point, Elizabeth and Nick witness the Mayor being attacked in the Antonio Bay graveyard. He is handed a contract by the ghostly Blake (who looks about as scary the Cryptkeeper on Tales from the Crypt) and when he touches it, he burns up in flames. Elizabeth and Nick, for some reason, believe that this is the end of the incident, and walk away. A moment later, Elizabeth returns, feeling drawn to Blake. She goes to him, he kisses her, and she turns into the ghost of his wife. Then they all disappear together, thus explaining her nightmares. Nick returns just in time to see them vanish together.

My problems with this are almost too many to enumerate. Are we to believe that Elizabeth is a reincarnation of Blake's wife? That's fine, but she is still made of flesh and blood, isn't she? She still exists as the daughter of Mrs. Williams? She has a genetic structure! So how does she go all ghosty all the sudden, without having to die first? Could someone explain that? Or, alternately, was she a ghost all along? (But again, Mrs. Williams gave birth to her, right?) Again, the movie just can't be bothered to be coherent. Perhaps my biggest problem here is with the ridiculous and lazy staging. Nick turned away and left Elizabeth behind long enough for her to walk back to the graveyard, approach Blake, kiss him, and turn into a ghost, before he noticed she wasn't with him? I would have to say to Elizabeth, regarding Nick, "he's just not that into you, girl," if he could let all that happen without FRICKIN' NOTICING!!!

The original, and far superior version of The Fog laid down some essential ground rules for Blake's ghosts. They grew stronger as the hundredth anniversary of the Elizabeth Dane's sinking approached. But even as they did, they could only come out during the "witching hour" between midnight and 1:00 am. Also, they were only allowed to claim six lives - the lives of the six conspirators who sank the Elizabeth Dane. Finally, in the original Fog we knew exactly when characters would be in danger. If they stepped into the fog during the witching hour, and six people hadn't died yet, they were imperiled. In the new The Fog, there are no ground rules. There is no attempt at consistency. People step in and out of the fog, which comes and goes as it pleases, and sometimes survive, sometimes die. We don't know how many victims the ghostly fog can claim, or why it chooses people in the first place. There isn't even a consistent mode of killing. One kindly old lady gets burned to a crisp after the fog comes up her through her kitchen sink drain, yet the party-girls on the Sea Grass are just drowned. What's up with that?

By messing with the structure of the original film, the makers of this version have forgotten why their movie is even titled The Fog in the first place. In the original, an unearthly fog rolled into Antonio Bay the night of the sinking, and the conspirators lit a fire. Blake and his people mistook the light of the campfire for the signal of a lighthouse and steered their ship through the heavy fog and onto the breakers, where it sunk. That is why the "fog" is Blake's medium of revenge. It killed his people and now he summons it to befuddle and kill the descendents of the conspirators. In the new version of the Fog, the founding fathers burn the ship! There is no fog! The original incident shown in flashback here has nothing whatsoever to do with the fog, so the reason that Blake and his people return in the fog has no connection to the original crime!! Argh! This is what happens when people remake movies willy-nilly. They forget why the original versions worked and - in the rush to present their "own vision" - forge only disaster.

Another example of this disregard for the original: the return of the spirits isn't even connected to the 100th anniversary of the founding of Antonio Bay. So why do the ghosts pick this moment to return to wreak vengeance? Is it because the Sea Grass's anchor dislodged a bag of treasure at the bottom of the sea? Sure is convenient how that happened just as Elizabeth was at the right age to be Blake's ghostly wife again...

The Fog is a full-fledged disaster not only in story concept, but in execution. John Carpenter is a classicist who understands how to compose a shot; how to make the full-breadth of the frame meaningful and yes, even artistic. His shots mean something, and are constructed with intelligence. What is depicted in the foreground and background of each shot is critical to an understanding of the film, and in many cases, the forging of a "scare" moment. Rupert Wainright has apparently spent too much time directing TV like UPN's Wolf Lake because he shoots his version of The Fog like a TV show. There is no sense of cinema here, no sense of a rectangular frame that could provide scope and a feeling of location (and therefore mood). Instead, he focuses on close-ups, medium shots and squarish-video-style composition. The result? His movie has all the style and cinematic depth of the latest episode of the WB's Supernatural.

Lastly, I'd just like to say that The Fog is - sadly - a symptom of the times we live in. Hollywood has forgotten how to make decent scary movies, and hamstrung the genre with the necessity of a PG-13 rating. Young directors today don't understand how to use the frame to its full advantage, that blocking and composition should mean something, and that even in the world of supernatural, there should be a framework that the audience can follow and understand. They've been weaned on TV, and so now our horror movies look like...horror TV. It's a sad development, and I don't know if the genre can stand many more remakes like The Fog. In almost every moment in this film, you sense a marketing decision rather than an artistic decision. In the original film, a bunch or beer-drinking rednecks got killed on the Sea Grass. Here, two of the victims are teenage party girls in bikini tops. In the original The Fog, Nick didn't romance Stevie and Elizabeth, but here he must, because Elizabeth is slated to become a ghost, and well, we can't leave hunky Tom Welling without a prospective girlfriend, can we?

Do yourself a favor, let this version of The Fog sink into the mists of history without a further look. Go back and watch the classic original instead. Don't give this cynical, lazily-constructed enterprise a dollar of your hard-earned cash. Even if you love horror. Especially if you love horror.