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Synopsis: On the anniversary of the town's founding, a strange, supernatural fog returns to the town of Antonio Bay. Within the fog are the angry spirits of a shipwreck, whose links to the town's prosperity are a closely guarded secret by the town's oldest families. In the path of the fog are disc jocky Stevie Wayne and her son; charter ship owner Nick Castle, his first mate, Spooner, and his old flame, Elizabeth; and the drunk town priest, Father Malone. When the ghosts begin enacting ghastly revenge on the descendants of the town's founders, our heroes begin to discover dark and terrible things about the founding of their home...

Deja Vu All Over Again: When I set about writing this review, I went looking for my review of the 1980 version of this film. Much to my surprise, I discovered that I hadn't written one. I've owned the film in one form or another for many years. Though it isn't a particular favorite of mine, I have a great deal of affection for it. I'm sure that I've written about it at some point, but for now, that review is among the missing. If I unearth it, I'll post it so we have some points of comparison. John Carpenter was already showing signs of the decline that characterizes his late career, but even when he was off his game, he still had visible and undeniable talent.

Would that I could say the same for director Rupert Wainwright, the hand behind this remake. The remake is absolutely dreadful, a film that makes mis-step after mis-step before annihilating itself with an ending so silly that one watches it unfold like a slow-motion head-on collision. This film wasn't screened for critics (and since I'm not a card-carrying journalist, I don't get into critics' screenings anyway). I've always wondered about the practice of withholding films from critics, especially horror films. In general even bad publicity is still publicity. Better to take one's lumps, because it gets your film in front of an audience without spending any money for advertising. In the horror genre, in particular, fans expect bad reviews. Most horror fans don't care what critics think. Hell, some of them use critics as a sort of negative barometer. So withholding a film from critics is a losing game, to my mind. Take the lumps. But if I were a studio exectuive presented with The Fog, I might hesitate. It's THAT bad. It's bad enough that I might even consider shelving it and writing down the loss. As evidence that horror audiences really DON'T care, this film has grossed $28 million in the USA at this writing on a budget of $18 million, with DVD sales still to come. So what the hell do I know?

In the interests of full disclosure: I'm not constitutionally opposed to remakes, per se. There are a number of remakes I like a lot, not the least of which is Carpenter's own remake of The Thing. The horror genre as a whole has a pretty good track record with remakes, with remakes of classics like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Fly, Cat People, Night of the Living Dead, and Dawn of the Dead all having something to recommend them. The common thread in good remakes--especially good horror movie remakes--is that they have something new to say using a common pool of elements. Unfortunately, The Fog doesn't have anything new to sell, nor does it do what the original film did with anything approaching improvement, even in technical areas. Nor am I constitutionally opposed to horror movies that clock in at a PG-13 rating or less. A lot can be said for a less-is-more approach to things. The Fog's reticence along these lines may help the box-office, but it results in a film that leaves no impression on the viewer. It doesn't have the style, the elan, or the mood that should stand in for the genre's usual diet of red meat. And I'll lay you odds that an "unrated" director's cut shows up on DVD (one that will surely be an "R-rated" cut rather than the kind of transgressive film an "unrated" cut suggests). Not that it will help.

So what are we to make of this film? For myself, I think it's a matter of assigning blame. Assigning blame is a good way to enumerate the film's many, many flaws.

Much of the blame for this must be laid at the feet of the director--and that's as it should be. The film is completely pedestrian in blocking its actors, pacing its editing, choosing it's line readings, and the hundreds of other details for which a director is responsible. But not all of the blame can be laid on Rupert Wainright. This is NOT an auteurist's film, after all, it's a marketer's film that rises and falls on the jobs turned in by the mercenaries hired to execute it. A LOT of the blame for this fiasco can be laid at the feet of cinematographer Nathan Hope, who films this like it was an episode of CSI (on which he cut his teeth). I never appreciated Dean Cundey's work on the original film so much as when I was watching the scene in the remake where the kid finds the hairbrush. Compare it to the same shot composition in the original, with its merciless, Lovecraftian expanse of blue sky behind him to see what I mean. That shot has more creepiness in it than the entirety of the remake.

Others who need to shoulder the blame: Maggie Grace as Elizabeth. Her character corresponds to Jamie Lee Curtis's free-loving hitch-hiker in the original, a minor character. In the new film, Elizabeth is as close to a central character as the film has, and Grace isn't up to it. She's attractive enough, I suppose, but her beauty is of the completely featureless kind preferred by television casting directors looking for new "hotties." Her beauty is unencumbered by any flaw that may have been stamped upon it by the most fleeting of emotions. She's a non-actor. Her non-presence in the film only exacerbates the film's other major blunder: Selma Blair is the only reason to see the film--she's a real actor, capable of a real performance, and Maggie Grace is given the edge in screen time. Grace doesn't eclipse Blair; she only irritates the audience because when she's onscreen, the audience would rather be watching Selma Blair. Other cast members are either bland or irritating by turns: DeRay Davis's token black sidekick--isn't that particular racist archetype played out by this time?--being a notably irritating presence, while lead Tom Welling, late of Smallville, looks more like a model in an L. L. Bean catalogue than an actual character. What else...? Graeme Revell's score is AWFUL! It's loud when it should be soft and recycles Carpenter's original when it isn't being loud. Ghost stories should never shout and this one shouts quite a bit.

This remake also commits glaring blunders in the actual story construction, too.

The first is the elaboration of the backstory. In the original film, the backstory was delivered in properly sepulchral tones by John Houseman, who related the sad tale of the Elizabeth Dane and her crew of lepers as a campfire tale. This delivery turned the story into myth. It was a wonderful, Halloweeny touch that set the tone of the film. THIS film, however, literalizes and expands on the backstory--with the same quality of filmmaking as the main story, I might add. I have a name for this phenomenon. I call it the "Turns out what happened wuz..." factor, in which a horror movie provides an elaborate backstory for something best left mysterious. This is mainly a sop to people who like to have everything explained to them with big bullet points and 57 8 x 10 color glossy photos with circles and arrows on the back of each one, so they can tell their friends "Turns out what happend wuz..." In any event, it always, always robs the film of scary atmosphere, as it does with this film. There is no mystery involved.

The second story blunder comes at the end of the film, when the movie exchanges the apocalyptic ending of the original with a lame variant of the "reincarnated lost love." This doesn't work at all, in large part because it depends on the acting skill of Maggie Grace (and consequently fails on its merits), but also because it is enacted with particularly bad CGI effects at the end of the film. It. Just. Doesn't. Work.

This last part bears some elaboration. One of the justifications for Hollywood's latest rash of remakes is the opportunity to "update" creaky old technology with the latest advances in computer generated images. We'll ignore the essential fallacy involved with this impulse and focus on what the results mean for this movie. The original movie used a number of optical effects to create its fog. Because the original filmmakers were using REAL fog, though processed by special effects technicians, it still LOOKED like fog. The remake can't quite manage this trick. The fog always looks fake when CGI is employed, and looks fake even when it has been filmed for real because it doesn't match the CGI. Where the fallacy of CGI REALLY kicks in is in the depiction of the ghosts. The ghosts in this film look exactly like every other CGI ghost of the last ten years--they most resemble the army of the dead in The Return of the King, as it so happens. Familiarity drains them of some of their impact. The original's ghosts were designed by Rob Bottin and executed as physical presences. Bottin's work is usually distinctive, too, because he has the willingness to go deeper into grotesquerie, farther beyond the pale, than just about any of his competitors. His ghosts were SCARY. Further, his ghosts had a tangible reality. You could believe that his ghosts might be waiting around the wrong corner. The ghosts in the new film never come anywhere near Bottin's ghosts. They look fake, a combination of the failure of the design, the desaturated cinematography, and the CGI itself. And when, at the end, one of these fake ghosts winds up kissing Maggie Grace, a fake actor, the failure of the remake is complete.

This is a debacle in just about every category.

 
10/20/2005