The Fog (1980)

8/10

My favorite Carpenter movie...mind you not necessarily the one I think is his best, but it's my favorite. As ghostintheshell & Captain Spencer both pointed out, great creepy atmosphere that's really effective.

It's a fun movie.  

I've tried watching it three times and every single time I've fallen asleep halfway through and woken up in a groggy haze towards the end. So the movie is actually a fog for me.

Not my favorite Carpenter movie I'd wager but since I've only seen half of it, I can't say for sure.

I really liked it but being a big fan of Adrienne Barbeau may have swayed my opinion a bit.

I can't imagine why anyone would have been a fan of hers...

For me, the saddest part of the remake was Selma Blair trying her damndest to imitate Adrienne's breathy, throaty voice she had in this movie.  Whereas it was damn sexy when Adrienne did it, it was just pathetic when Selma tried it. 

You really think so, huh? Not to denigrate your opinion, but I’ve always felt that Holbrook is more or less just phoning it in.

The Fog is a movie that I really want to like, a movie for which, every time I start watching it, I think, This is gonna be the time. I’m going to like it this time—and I always come out of it disappointed.

The opening is marvellous, and mystical, and even atavistic—it recalls primal notions of night and fog, and what we don’t see in the shadows. For all of his minute or two of screen time, Houseman is the perfect fit for this: “gather around me, lads, and I’ll tell a tale that will chill your blood…” In a way, it’s kinda similar to the beginning of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride: to quote what a blogger wrote about that ride, as Houseman weaves his tale, “…we sense rather than are told that the layers of reality are being stripped away.” By the time he’s finished, we are full-believers, thoroughly in the story’s thrall.

And the rest of the movie never matches that. Nope. In the climax, Carpenter even commits the unforgivable sin of showing us the goddam monster! At least in Halloween the tone is consistent throughout; here, we are given a superbly-told Jamesian ghost story, only for it to turn into a special-effects show by the end of the picture.

Too, none of the characters gets much screen time, as we’re constantly cutting between them, and I simply can’t feel for these people as I can for Laurie and her friends. The “twist” comes out of nowhere. Adrienne Barbeau, who’s great (the image of her alone in the lighthouse is the best in the movie after the opening), has a wonderful Hawksian name (“Stevie Wayne”) but never becomes a true Hawksian woman because she’s given no opportunity to do so. The plot goes nowhere; plot-points are raised, characters glimpsed (what does Janet Leigh have to do with anything again?), and what we have is a slasher flick (and, unlike Halloween or Scream, not a particularly accomplished one) masquerading as a ghost story. 

The eternal problem is that a director of scary movies has to decide whether he is going to do a horror picture (horror, shocks, scares) or a ghost picture (terror, ominous dread, atmosphere above all else). At brief, punctuated moments, it’s possible to combine the two: Mrs. Markway at the trapdoor in The Haunting, for example. But only at brief punctuations, or else we’re left with neither kind of picture but rather a big, ugly mess (vide the remake of The Haunting or the 2003 Haunted Mansion). 

I wish—I wish!—I could like The Fog, in view of that brilliant opening. But, unfortunately, I just don’t think it’s a good movie.