When I normally hear that a film is being remade, my natural
instinct is to groan, and grumble the usual speech about why can’t
Hollywood make anything original, as I promptly write off the movie before I
even see it. But once I heard they were remaking John Carpenter’s The Fog, I
actually thought it was a good idea. I’m a huge fan of Carpenter’s films, but I
always thought The Fog was flawed (I felt it suffered from a weak ending). Here
was a chance, I thought, to fix the problem of the original and actually have
the remake be an improvement. And so I started watching the new Fog with high
hopes and an open mind--which promptly slammed shut with disgust once I got
about ten minutes into this turkey.
Flawed though the original may be, it had this great concentrated sense of
terror that slowly built to a crescendo over the course of the film. Yet the
remake is so disjointed in its narrative--which now has the fog attack the
citizens of Antonio Bay over the course of two nights, instead of only one night
in the original--that a true eerie mood is never given a chance to build up.
It’s the same basic plot: the ghosts from a 19th century sailing ship that was
betrayed by the inhabitants of a coastal town return over a hundred years later
for revenge from their descendants. But at least with the original, we actually
cared about what happened to the people in the film.
Which brings me to another annoying thing regarding the new film: the characters
act like the usual airheads you’d expect to see in a cheap slasher flick. Case
in point is when Elizabeth (played by Maggie Grace from Lost) discovers
something strange going on at her boyfriend’s house late at night. She hears
a loud, ominious pounding on the door by some unseen specture. So what does
she do? She goes OUTSIDE in her skimpy underwear to check it out all by herself!
And she’s not the only twit in the film who does this. It gets to the point
where the characters are just so stupid that I start wishing the ghosts would
hurry up and kill them all violently...really violently, with a lot of pain.
But I digress.
Only Selma Blair stands out as Stevie
Wayne, the radio jock originally played by Adrienne Barbeau. Blair manages to
infuse some life and vitality into her character, as opposed to the rest of the
cast, who appear to be just going through their paces before they have to report
back to the set of their various TV shows. It’s interesting that in one of the
making of documentaries director Rupert Wainwright mentions that while they
wrote the script, the filmmakers had to run everything by studio executives--which leads me to wonder if the problems of the new Fog might have
resulted from a dastardly villain more horrid than any ghost or zombie: studio
interference.
--SF
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