By LINDSI HEBERT, Staff Reporter.
Directed by Frank Darabont and released in 2007, “The Mist” starts with a storm. Like the beginnings of most scary movies, storms are never good and this is no exception to the rule. The bad weather knocked out power and David Drayton (Thomas Jane) decides to take his son Billy (Nathan Gamble) and his grouchy neighbor Brent Norton (Andre Braugher) to the grocery store to stock up on ice.
On the way to the store, this weird fog rolls in from the ocean, blanketing the town and basically stopping all transportation/town activity. This is when things start to get a little hairy, because with the fog comes some weird marine insect monsters that will have Lovecraft squealing with delight. These weird insect creatures start attacking the grocery store, and now David must try to keep the place together, form alliances, and ignore the crazy cults that want to start sacrificing people, all while trying to find out what caused this strange fog.
There are some definite good parts about “The Mist”. The setting itself is really interesting. It takes place in a small town in Maine, with a large military base on the outskirts of town. It’s right on the coast and gives a good, actually warm feel to it, and with it being right on the coast, weird fog isn’t really farfetched.
It’s also interesting to see the group of people stuck in the grocery store as all hell breaks loose outside. The dynamic that you get between the clashing of characters as they try to cope with what’s going on is probably one of my favorite things. Any time that you can mix religion into a horror movie, I’m hooked, and “The Mist” works it in nicely, with everybody thinking that the religious woman is insane, and then as all of the carnage (and there is carnage) unfolds, she starts making more and more sense.
One of my favorite scenes is when she’s babbling on about how they’re being punished for their sins and need to commit sacrifices to the evil monsters to live, and somebody just chucks a can of tomato soup at her face.. It sparks a large sort of uprising, and without spoilers, it’s worth seeing at least once.
“The Mist” also has one of the best possible endings I’ve seen in a horror movie to date. I won’t tell you what it is, but it’s good that it ends the way it does, because if it was different I’d probably be complaining.
Of course, there are some problems as well. Aside from the cool little bickering that happens with the folks locked in the grocery store, the story lags. For a monster movie, there aren’t a lot of monster attacks. Maybe three main ones and a few tiny little occurrences of monsters happening. It’s a little bit of a bummer, because the monster designs are actually really great. It would have been good to see some more.
Another problem is their reasoning for the monsters existence in the first place is kind of a cop out. “The Mist” was based off of a Stephen King story, so I’m betting that this came directly from the book, but it just seems like such a lame reason that really has been overdone.
On a scale of one to five gummy bears, with five being the highest, I’d say that “The Mist” gets a good three gummy bears. It’s kind of spooky, super weird and they get extra points for working in crazy religion and an ending that really hammers it all home.