The Mist (2007)
Directed by Frank Darabont
After a violent storm, a dense cloud of mist envelops a small Maine town, trapping David Drayton and his five-year-old son in a local grocery store with other local residents. They soon discover that the mist conceals deadly horrors that threaten their lives, and worse, their sanity.
30 connections found
View:
30 films that influenced The Mist
What critics say influenced The Mist
Using fog machines, dry ice, and other common tricks, the title villain actually looks far better here than in the 2005 remake , or in 2007's " The Mist ."
In the cinema of reduced visibility, I think it ranks well behind "The Fog," wherein the real monster was a spectral pirate with a hook for a hand, and he was chasing Adrienne Barbeau.
Like the old John Carpenter shrieker "The Fog," "The Mist" gets rolling when a mysterious cloud bank descends on a coastal town (this being Stephen King, we're in Maine).
Someone has finally succeeded where John Carpenter failed with The Fog. Darabont, who was an established screenwriter before trying his hand at directing with 1994's The Shawshank Redemption, has made four motion pictures.
It sounds suspiciously like a new name for yet another remake of John Carpenter's classic, The Fog .
Frank Darabont más que trabajar en un relato de horror, quiso darle el tratamiento de un drama de supervivencia, de tensión humana y de relaciones límitrofes, sin dejar a un lado el aspecto visual-metafórico de los monstruos y por supuesto de la niebla, que inevitablemente remite a otro clásico del género The Fog (1980) del maestro del horror, John Carpenter.
A slimy, spiky tentacle reaches inside for meat, a military officer wrapped in caustic goo rasps "It's all our fault" before dissolving into an image from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness -- this is the Darabont who wrote the screenplay for the 1988 remake of The Blob, not the insipid Oscar-baiter beloved to IMDb voters.
What works: The gutsiest ending to a studio horror film since John Carpenter's "The Thing."
Adopting the jerky handheld technique from the Sci-Fi Channel's "Battlestar Galactica", but apparently learning nothing from the teachings of "Jaws", Mr. Darabont lets his creatures roam free in broad daylight in all their computer-generated fakery.
Forgoing the lessons learned in Jaws into teasing us with the monster (thus making the unknown of the imagination far more frightening), Darabont gives us a glance early on.
Though director Frank Darabont is falling further and further short of the standard he set in the classic “The Shawshank Redemption,” the first act cooks up some of the gray dread of Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds.”
Adopting the jerky handheld technique from the Sci-Fi Channel's "Battlestar Galactica", but apparently learning nothing from the teachings of "Jaws", Mr. Darabont lets his creatures roam free in broad daylight in all their computer-generated fakery.
"The Fog was a movie with Adrienne Barbeau," said Jane. "And she has pledged never to come to Maine unless we host an inter-dimensional portal to a Swamp Thing reunion."
Advertisement
By the time the movie’s final moments were completely undercutting its supposed message, I was fondly recalling Paul Verhoeven’s ridiculous, fascist space-insects epic “Starship Troopers.”
The low budget production constraints form a direct link to films like Hitchcock’s "Psycho," Don Siegel’s "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and George Romero’s "Night of the Living Dead" and "Dawn of the Dead."
Combine (1) a mysterious threat that attacks a town, and (2) a group of townspeople who take refuge together, and you have a formula apparently able to generate any number of horror movies, from " Night of the Living Dead " (1968) to " 30 Days of Night ."
The filmmaker has been watching a lot of Hitchcock, and "The Mist" plays like the diner sequence in "The Birds" padded to fill an entire movie.
And, look, here's the town's pretty new schoolteacher Amanda, played by Laurie Holden with Tippi Hedren's hair and Kim Novak's "Vertigo" wardrobe.
The low budget production constraints form a direct link to films like Hitchcock’s "Psycho," Don Siegel’s "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and George Romero’s "Night of the Living Dead" and "Dawn of the Dead."
Advertisement
The irony should not be lost on the fact that David Fincher's Mank, a dramatized feature about the writing of one of Orson Welles's greatest films, Citizen Kane (1941), is being released by the streaming giant Netflix.
The film is an adaptation of a Stephen King novella, and it's the fourth time Darabont has adapted one of King's works (the first was a short "The Woman in the Room" from a collection of adaptations from King's short story anthology Night Shift).