The Mist

THE MIST (2007)

THE SMACKDOWN. Don't underestimate the impact of a little cloud coming over the horizon -- and I don't mean the mushroom variety. You see, some types of ground-hugging hazy vapors possess evil things which brutally attack isolated villages and wreak more havoc than this year's BCS situation. I know, I've seen several films dealing with this concept and they make me think twice about venturing out when the sun ain't shining. Written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill, "The Fog" is a terrific example and may very well be the gold standard of this sub-genre. We now welcome John Darabont's "The Mist," based on a novella by none other than Stephen King. Two heavyweight directors tackle the same basic precipitation premise. Is "Mist" simply "Fog //igLite," or does it weather the storm of this writer's criticism?

THE CHALLENGER. In the opening scenes of "The Mist" a violent storm passes through a small village in Maine (with Stephen King where else would it be?). As the townsfolk begin to clean up and attempt to make repairs, an approaching cloud of mist appears and slowly engulfs the entire community. Those inside the Food House supermarket are soon warned that "There is something in the mist!" by a frightened neighbor who seeks refuge inside.


Actually, there are a lot of things in the mist including intestine-devouring creepy crawlers, killer spiders who can shoot their poisonous webs farther than you can spit a watermelon seed, gigantic deadly mosquitoes (for lack of a better description) which make the Houston variety seem impotent, scores of what look like Zanti Misfits (or should I say Mistfits?) and multi-tentacled giant arachnids who have a propensity to probe where we wish they wouldn't. Scary stuff, indeed, but none of these creatures of destruction equal the horror of the Bible-spewing, supercalifragilisticexpiationdoses-demanding Marcia Gay Harden who proves that true evil is not lurking outside in the parking lot but within the souls of those huddled inside. It helps that the entire ensemble cast is quite good and you can rest assured that the overall graphic horror quotient will satisfy even the most blood-thirsty cineaste. And while I won't give away the ending, let me simply say it was a bold and unexpected one that will leave some viewers shaken as the end credits begin to crawl.

Robert A. Nowotny

Last updated: 2010-04-05 02:04:28 by user07

The Mist: Polluted Haze

Frank Darabont reduces an exceptional Stephen King novella to a vacuous and polluted haze. The film’s basic structure is flawed in relying on quick objective characterizations in order to jump-start the action sequences. Darabont should have studied Hitchcock’s THE BIRDS before making this film and he would have learned that suspense is created slowly with wit, humor, and irony: witness the commonplace gone awry as these well-defined personalities change under pressure and trauma.

THE MIST is inhabited by caricatures that regurgitate inane dialogue seemingly from cue cards and without the narrative rhythm or beat of realistically spoken language. The acting is bad to the point of being funny and conflict is generated from emotional ether: accusations and slander fly, crude remarks made, biblical passages quoted all for the sake of friction…but instead of creating sparks it douses the drama in pointless prattle.

Darabont’s lazy filmmaking fails to manipulate time and space which is crucial to the fear of being trapped in this frightful alien environment. The Supermarket should have become a prison, the shoppers attacked by their own inner demons and anxieties, the isles closing in like a maze, stalked by an unknown faceless fear. Has it been only hours since the world turned upside down, or days? Through this silent turmoil then there be monsters. Instead, Darabont creates situations that will result in the next bloodletting without any real viewer attachment: he wants to show us the next neat CGI bug and the myriad ways of killing people.

But we’ve seen it all before from ALIENS, STARSHIP TROOPERS to a guilty pleasure, KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS. He also dilutes every scene with verbose excess. The abysmal Mark Isham soundtrack attempts to add some epic quality to this apocalypse but instead subtracts thematically from the film’s overall sense of dread. The ending is violently nihilistic and the one thing I liked: David Drayton promised his son he wouldn’t let the monsters get him. Unfortunately, Darabont weakened a powerful sequence by extending it with slow motion and close-ups. The rumbling epiphany of steel and flames should have cut to black. Final Grade: (C-)

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Recommendations: The Birds, Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960), Funny Games

All reviews copyright Korova, Ltd. Visit Alex at his Home Theatre Blog, http://korovatheatrepresents.blogspot.com/

The Mist

I was extremely happy with the adaptation of 1408 and The Mist was just as well done. I've been a Stephen King fan (or a "constant reader" as King himself calls us) since I was old enough to read a full novel. I read The Mist long ago as a novella in the Skeleton Crew short story collection. I remembered the basic story, but I didn't recall the details, so seeing the movie really brought back some great memories.

The movie opens with the main character drawing a movie poster of The Gunslinger from King's Dark Tower series. That's enough to get a movie dork like me excited, but this scene is followed by another two hours of great film. The interactions between the people trapped in the grocery story as the mist envelopes the town is just amazing. The dialogue is believable and it really makes some serious comments on society and religion. A horror movie with meaning, who would have thought?

This movie offers up both cheap scares and a thought provoking story. The ending is incredible and for those of you that have read the novella, the conclusion of the film expands on the written version's ending and it doesn't leave you hanging. Special effects could have been better for a big budget film, but I'm not really complaining. The scares are still there, and the story is classic King. This is a smart horror film that will bridge the generation gap, bring your parents, they'll like it too.


Favorite Quote:

Mrs. Carmody: I'll tell you what. The day I need a friend like you, I'll just have myself a little squat and shit one out.

The Mist

Allegory is a dubious friend to monster movies. Take The Mist, for example. When you’re telling the story of Mans’ struggle against giant man-eating insectoids, you don’t always need a political subtext. To be frank, I think most tales of claws, teeth and twitching antennae are better off sticking with gore. It’s the 50s fault. If it hadn’t been for McCarthyism and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, there would never have been a precedent for B-movies with socio-political aspirations. After Body Snatchers, it wasn’t enough to have the bug people gnaw our limbs off and tear young women’s blouses; they had to be (Shock! Horror!) based on something.

A spooky-looking mist comes tumbling out of the mountains near a picturesque mountain town. Decent, right-thinking movie poster artist (?) Thomas Jane dismisses it, but his son Billy (played by some-kid-or-other) knows the mist for what it is: spooky. Jane and his son head to the store to meet the rest of the cast of The Mist, and before you know it, there’s a man with blood on his face, ranting about how “something in the mist” got his friend – and everybody in the store knows “got” means “ate”. It’s a standoff; Jane and the other right-thinkers in one corner, Marcia Gay Harden and the religious zealots in the other. With giant man-eating insectoids seemingly having conquered the Earth, the age-old question arises: who then are the real monsters? (Hint: the f—ing monsters are, doofus!)

Director Frank Darabont is a man who believes in “classic” storytelling, i.e. you take an idea anyone else would make a ninety minute movie out of and you add half an hour (and subtract any humour). Darabont’s most famous movie, The Shawshank Redemption, got lucky with its cast, but all his other movies have floundered on an excess of solemnity.The Mist is no exception. Faced with rampant bug monsters and a general store chock-full of stereotypes, Darabont refuses any Tremors-style levity. Even a line like: “That’s not what the MP said in the pharmacy before the spiders came out of his skin” is delivered without exclamation mark.

In the lead role, Thomas Jane gives the kind of solid, dependable performance he’s given in every movie for the past ten years. Watching Jane these days is a bit like watching a guy at the super-market stack shelves perfectly; you wonder how he does it so well – then forget about him. Jane, like Darabont, is good in ways that just never really stand out. He’s not a journeyman, because he cares too much, but he doesn’t snag your eyeballs the way a movie-star should. Perhaps if he gave a really bad performance it might make all the difference for him.

Everyone else in The Mist is cast because they fit in a crowd. There needs to be a mass of people to whip up, because this is a movie about post-9/11 hysteria. Marcia Gay Harden plays the sort of religious person who does exist, but who is also the sole type of religious person in monster movies (make that movies, period). You sort of know she’s meant to be religious from the first judgemental look she gives, and pretty soon she’s cackling about God and building a personality cult. Harden gives her all to this part, praying with fury and letting her hair down when she really goes bonkers (as though her hairclips were there to keep her brain straight).

Even if you didn’t know The Mist was based on a Stephen King story, you’d know it was based on a Stephen King story: the small town, the sententious sermonizing, the bag boy eaten by a ravenous tentacle. King can’t let horror just be horrible, it has to be about Humanity. No fevered descriptions of sex and violence, for him, without an accompanying homily. And so Jane and Harden and co. rail back and forth about what people are like when pushed to extremes. And the ravenous bug beasts howl from outside, as if mourning the stories where everyone gets it on instead of philosophising; where people are eaten without allegory.

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The Mist

Frank Darabont takes on Stephen King's work yet again by tackling The Mist. Darabont previously directed The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, two films based on Stephen King works, and two films that were absolutely brilliant. Given these past projects, Darabont has a lot of weight on his shoulders to make another masterpiece. The Mist is by no means a masterpiece, but it is an accomplishment that Darabont should be proud of.

Thomas Jane plays David Drayton, a man who lives with his wife and son in a small town in Maine. After an intense storm strikes, an unexplainable mist begins to float through the town. In the beginning, nobody paid any mind to this strange phenomena. But while David and his son Billy (Nathan Gamble) are shopping at the local supermarket, a fellow townie bursts through the doors raving about creatures in the mist. The supermarket is locked from the inside as the mist engulfs it, cutting off the townspeople from the rest of the world. As the threat of monsters becomes more and more real, the desperate inhabitants of the store begin to look for any possible solution to save themselves. A local bible nut named Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden) rises from the crowd to offer salvation through God's will. As the townsfolk begin to choose sides, tension rises in the small store, raising the question, "Who are the real monsters: those outside the store, or those on the inside?"

The Mist is Frank Darabont's first horror film, and he handles the task very well. Acting as director and writer, he does an excellent job of balancing the threat of the monsters and the irrationality of man. With this movie, Darabont shows us what would happen if our life was suddenly cut off by taking away all of our lifelines. The way the characters are shown degenerating into thoughtless drones who flock to anybody that offers hope is an effective commentary on how dependent we are on others. The monsters created by Darabont are in fact scary if not terrifying. The wide variety of creatures that he unleashed to the world kept me eager to see what would appear next. The cinematography was pretty plain, but given the restricted environment he had to work with, Darabont made do with what he had. Fancy camera work was not necessary though, as the true feat was capturing the feeling of desperation and dread on camera. The dialogue at times became stale and sometimes hackneyed, but the rest of the script was well paced and did a good job at getting it's message across.

Thomas Jane does a good job in his role as David, the level headed family man who is just trying to keep his son safe. I say a good job because he neither dazzled me with an outstanding performance nor did he bore me with a terrible one. His compassion for his son felt real and overall Jane was entertaining to watch. But the person who really deserves attention for her performance is Marcia Gay Harden. As God-obsessed Mrs. Carmody, Harden personifies a character who is not particularly likable, but indeed a persuasive and even manipulative hierarch. Chances are you will greatly dislike Mrs. Carmody, but that just goes to show how great Harden's performance is. The rest of the supporting cast provide little as far as entertainment is concerned, with the exception of Toby Jones, who played a supermarket worker named Ollie. Actually, Ollie turned out to be my favorite character of the entire movie. If you watch, you will find out why.

It has been a good year for Stephen King films. First 1408 sent shivers down our spine as one man's life unravels before our eyes, and now The Mist has come to frighten us by showing what happens when you tear the fabric of human nature. Frank Darabont has proved himself to be a great director who has a knack for digging into the core of human emotion. But I cannot say The Mist is without fault. It does indulge in some horror cliches, and Darabont's new ending will definitely be way too much for some to handle. The bitterly ironic ending left me feeling absolutely terrible, and I actually felt like crying when I saw it. Thinking back on it, it wasn't a bad ending, but it was far too depressing to be considered great. Aside from that, The Mist was a very good film, and I recommend it. My Rating: (7.5/10)

The Mist

The Mist is another film by a short story by Stephen King. I remember reading the story which was not bad and hoped they won’t ruin it with a bad film. Well…they didn’t!

The Mist takes place in a store where people find themselves trapped after a mist covers the entire town. This is no ordinary mist and there is evil coming from it, all kinds of creatures, crawling, jumping, flying, and they are hungry. I know it sounds like a bad pc game, but it is a scary film. Not the creatures themselves but the feeling of hopelessness, knowing there’s nothing to do but wait and pray being rescued. This feeling is a terrifying one that grips your soul and once you relate to the characters in the film, you feel like you’re one of the people inside that store, trapped for life and you’re still not ready to die.

The Cast and play is not brilliant and no one deserves an Oscar, but this is not a good drama movie, it’s a horror movie…and it is made good. The best thing in this film is the ending. It’s not like in the story by King, it’s better, more terrifying and honestly, I thought they have gone too far with this after watching the ending. I won’t ruin you anything here. It’s a great ending and you’ll need to watch the entire film to see it. The film is good and there are good effects there as well as the fear sensation so you will enjoy it…up until the ending…then, it’s up to you…you’ll have to be strong. You’ll see what came out of the mist, you’ll feel the end of the world coming and it will be…because after all, how can you survive this? Like I said, see the film and its ending. There will be some like me who will praise it, there will be some who will reject it and with great anger…why? You’ll just have to see. All in all, a good film with a brilliant and scary ending!

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Jessie