"The Mist" is one of those allegorical horror movies about the real monster being the one inside us.
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.
It always feels like a bit of a cheat when you sit down for a good horror movie and you end up getting a lecture on paranoia, or whatever. You want climate, you get climate of fear.
"The Mist" is such a movie. Thomas Jane plays an artist with a lakeside home who sees a thick fog rolling in and drives with his son to a nearby town for supplies. Turns out there's nasty stuff in the mist, and the guy ends up trapped in a supermarket with a bunch of terrified townsfolk.
This is no mere gang, however. It's a Microcosm of Society. Blue collar, white collar, black, white, military, businessman, religious fundamentalist, etc. Individual reactions to the terror lurking outside are meant to signal some kind of portentous social/political commentary.
Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. The least convincing bit features Andre Braugher as a skeptic who insists there is no monster in the fog, despite eyewitness accounts and the giant octopus arm that Jane offers as proof that the threat level is, like, way beyond orange. Braugher clings strangely to his skepticism, and leads an expedition of "his people" into the fog.
A more interesting subplot features a religious kook (Marcia Gay Harden) whose stature among the terrified survivors evolves from irksome gadfly to mesmerizing shaman.
"The Mist," like most horror movies, is most effective when the creatures are merely glimpsed, and our imaginations contribute to the sense of dread. It loses steam when we start to see the monsters - giant mosquitoes, spiders, crabs. People get cleaved and stung, but it still feels a little like "Gremlins."
A-lister Frank Darabont adapts "The Mist" from a Stephen King story, which he's done successfully with "The Green Mile" and "The Shawshank Redemption."
This movie, though, feels thinner, more superficial and in the end not able to sustain its more-than-two-hour running time, and certainly not substantial enough to support the horrific, incredibly downbeat ending Darabont has added.
Produced by Frank Darabont, Liz Glotzer, written and directed by Frank Darabont, music by Mark Isham, distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
