The Fog Review

The Fog review.

The Fog boasts an incredible cast and a genre defining filmmaker…but somehow ends up being less than the sum of its parts. A ghost story missing the key element. Still…as one of John Carpenter’s earlier works (the follow up to Halloween) and one of Jamie Lee Curtis’s string of horror films to begin her career, The Fog carves out a historical footnote for itself.

Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.

The Fog

Directed by John Carpenter

Written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill

Starring Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, John Houseman, Janet Leigh and Hal Holbrook

The Fog Review

The first thing that strikes you about John Carpenter’s follow up effort to Halloween is how great the cast is.  It feels like Carpenter rounded up his friends to make a movie.  Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis and Charles Cyphers are back from Halloween.  Curtis brings her legendary mother and Psycho star Janet Leigh with her.  Adrienne Barbeau is on board from Carpenter’s tv movie Someone’s Watching Me!  Future collaborator Tom Atkins is here.  Hal Holbrook and John Houseman round out the principle cast because, hey, if you can get Hal Holbrook and John Houseman you do it.  Carpenter even names characters in the movie after friends and colleagues. 

Unfortunately for The Fog this is a good news/bad news situation.  The bad news is that there isn’t a whole lot more to the movie than its excellent cast of familiar faces.  At least, there isn’t enough more to make it a memorable or classic entry in the Carpenter canon.  The good news is that the cast is good enough to deliver a pretty good movie anyway.

Funnily, the biggest flaw in The Fog is the greatest strength of Halloween.  There’s a lot of building going on throughout this movie and a very restrained payoff.  It works for Halloween because the suspense is palpable, the slight story is compelling.  The Fog has a fairly compelling story too…but it’s buried underneath countless scenes of exposition.  It’s lost in the mist.

Speaking of the titular fog…it comes around less often than Michael Myers does.  There’s more violence here than there is in the superior Carpenter horror flick.  The product of reshoots as Carpenter quickly realized that the Halloween formula wasn’t working twice.  To be fair, some of the formula did work.  Dean Cundey shot another good-looking picture and Carpenter’s music is still on point.  The patient wait for an explosive climax does not fair as well this time, however.

The story of The Fog is about revenge.  The six founders of the town where The Fog takes place intentionally caused a ship to crash and the victims have returned to claim six lives on the community’s centennial.  It’s a fine set-up for a ghost story and the glowing fog brings with it its own unique atmosphere.  Unfortunately, these elements are very underplayed.  The fog rolls in a couple of times before the climax…claiming the first few lives the curse demands…but the entire finale feels underrepresented. 

Instead of focusing on the horror of the situation or even building an atmosphere of impending doom…The Fog focuses on its characters.  Kind of.  It’s more accurate to say that it lets its characters dominate the screen.  There is a lack of urgency that fills much of the running time and most of the lead characters aren’t even among the six inevitable deaths.  It feels like a cheat.  An all-star cast and six bodies marked for death…and almost all the principle characters survive.  There’s a version of this movie that is a lot more fun somewhere.

That’s not to say there aren’t fun scenes in The Fog.  When we do get parts of the town surrounded by fog and infested with vengeance ghosts…it works well.  The gore is a nice addition and is well done.  The backstory of why this is happening and the curse on the town provides a good first step in building a ghost story.  It’s just rarely the characters we care about that are in danger…and the danger itself is too rare to get under your skin.

But, again, early Carpenter movies have a floor.  The Fog looks and sounds great.  The cast is terrific.  The script needed to choose a more exciting path.  When Carpenter chooses to ratchet up the horror elements…he’s a master.  He chooses to downplay it too often to deliver a classic…but at this time he was incapable of delivering a movie that wasn’t good.  A disappointment given the talent in front of and behind the camera.  A decent watch and historical oddity, nonetheless. 

Scare Value

The Fog is actually a pretty good movie. There’s a floor to the early Carpenter films and even though The Fog rarely rises from it…you’re still in safe hands. Carpenter seems reluctant to go all in on the ghost story underneath the titular fog…and mostly lets his all-star cast carry the movie through heavy dialog. The cast is good enough to elevate a lack of material and Carpenter’s score and ability to deliver a horror scene here and there make this a fine movie. You just know it could have been so much more. Of course, given the quality of its remake 25 years later…it also could have been so much worse.

3/5

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The Fog Trailer

If you enjoyed this review of The Fog, check out another classic movie review Darkness Falls