Iron Man (2008)

This was written back in July, but I'm just getting around to posting it. Oh well:

Pretty much as good as a superhero movie can be nowadays. Spiderman 3 kind of fizzled out that franchise. Fantastic 4, X-Men 3, The Punisher and Ghost Rider were all kind of duds in an oversaturated dud market, so it's good we have a couple of Iron Man movies to look forward to. That and Batman. And Hellboy also. Anyway, this was directed by co-Swinger Jon Favreau, which seems weird since his few directing credits (Elf, Zathura) wouldn't naturally lead to mega-budget action films. Maybe Zathura was mega-budget action. Who knows, I don't think anyone saw it.

Half of this movie was the set up for how Tony Stark becomes Iron Man, but not knowing anything about Iron Man, or comic books in general, I could have sworn the movie was thinking about ending right there in the middle of Afghanistan or wherever they were. But it takes a couple breaths and ratchets back up for an awesome 2nd half.

What made this movie so great for me is the mixture of special effects (there were over 300 animators) and droll humor. Robert Downey Jr. seems like he's almost improvising at times, just riffing and having fun being there, and the scenes between he and Jeff Bridges (especially the pizza scene) are loose and natural. And I mean, is there no actor looser than Jeff Bridges? Iron Man was kind of like Ghostbusters in this way for me, really effects heavy action paired with off the cuff, dry comedy (the line "It's like Operation!"). I'd imagine the atmosphere on the set was really conducive to that kind of stuff, with Favreau and game actors like these guys who just seems like they're having a blast. And during the final showdown between Bridges' Ironmonger (at this point very un-"dude" like) and Iron Man, I was having so much fun, I had forgotten about the plot contrivances that had got them into this battle in the first place: like, why does Obadiah Stane want to kill Iron Man anyway? It wasn't quite clear how much of a threat Stark's newfound pacifism was to his company, and the reason Obadiah hires the Ten Rings in the first place got lost in the whole reveal. Really. It seems obvious, but after thinking about it later, I realize it didn't make sense.

Thankfully the Black Sabbath song was never used in the film. Instead there was a slightly reminiscent, nu-metal-ly theme every time homeboy puts on the iron suit, which seemed more appropriate. And then only the guitar solo from the Sabbath song was used during end credits, also cool. AND per my friend Bill's advice, we stayed past the end credits to see Nick Fury set us up for The Avengers movie.

Dracula (1931)

Finally saw this and was struck by how quiet it was. For whatever reason, I expected to hear a lot of dark, gloomy music during the Transylvania scenes and really creepy stuff for when Dracula bites necks. But no, just about every scene without dialogue just plays out silently, and sometimes all you hear is wind, and maybe the floorboards creaking as Dracula slowly walks across a room staring at someone, which seemed to be happening constantly in this movie. This lack of music was really chilling.

Even though it's a total cinematic cliche by now, Bela Lugosi's performance truly is great. There's no need to describe it. He's the Count from Sesame Street, only scarier, less purple, and has his OCD under control. There's not much dialogue in this movie, but Dracula talks less than anyone, he just sort of lurks behind people while they're chatting at a table or something. And then when he does talk, it's always something about being an undead vampire, like "there are far worse things awaiting man than death.", and everyone looks at each other awkwardly. A lot of this movie is about how hanging out with Dracula is a huge buzzkill.

Anyway, this was filmed simultaneously alongside a Spanish version: same sets and production crew, different actors and language. I'll have to look out for that sometime. I've heard more than once that it's actually better than the Lugosi version. For me, though, I don't think anything tops Nosferatu in terms of classic vampire films.

My Blueberry Nights (2008)

Caught this at the Charles a few weeks ago with a friend who's also a big Wong Kar Wai fan. So we were both pretty excited for the director's first english language outing. Some foreign directors score big time with english debuts (Wim Wenders' The American Friend) and some don't (John Woo's Hard Boiled?) This was somewhere in between for me. My bud liked it and I was just kind of okay with it.

Something seemed off, and a lot of it was the dialogue between Jeremy (Jude Law) and Elizabeth (Norah Jones), which felt too self-consciously metaphorical. Like when he tells her that at the end of every night the apple and peach pies are totally eaten, but there's always an entire blueberry pie left. "There's nothing wrong with the blueberry pie. Just... people make other choices. You can't blame the blueberry pie, just... no one wants it.", Jeremy says. A lot of conversations were like that, hammering us over the head with introspect and symbolism. I liked it better when these kind of ideas were treated more playfully, as in Chungking Express and Happy Together.

But it could also be that Wong Kar Wai's dialogue feels better, like more poetic, when subtitled as in his other films. It didn't seem to have the same effect on me hearing it in English. The lines sort of felt incongruous to the character's mannerisms and actions, especially the David Straitharn/Rachel Weisz section. They played the parts to a T, but the script kept those scenes from being completely believable for me.

I liked all the acting, except for Norah Jones, who was pretty flat. There's also just something really wrong with watching Norah Jones make out with a guy while a Norah Jones song is playing in the background. Throw one more Norah Jones in there and we're in, like, some tunnel that leads to Norah Jones' brain or something.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

I purposefully lowered my expectations before going into this. I actually spent some time during the day mentally preparing for it to suck, like I tried to think of the ways they could screw it up: too much reliance on CGI, George Lucas being allowed to write dialogue, etc... So into the theater my Dad and I went, fingers crossed, me expecting the worst, and lo and behold, my plan worked. I think I saw a pretty terrible movie that was lifted up by the grading curve in my mind.

The Movie Blog has a thread on the review of this movie about 200 posts long, and I'd say 85% of them are rightfully critical. I read something on there that summed up this whole Indiana Jones thing, which was basically like, "Don't compare anything to Raiders, because there's nothing like it. Raiders was a freak of a movie." I can get with that.

So instead of writing paragraphs on the bad things about "Crystal Skull" (i.e. CGI monkeys, Karen Allen's apparent vicodin haze, the entire 2nd half...), here are the things I liked:

* The first 30 minutes. The opening credits. The magnetic box that's pulling all the metal in the room as they lift it up. I have to admit that had my heart going. The action sequence that followed was tight, choreographed perfectly, and if they had only taken out one shot of those stupid prairie dogs, would have held it's own against any of the other film's openings. Also the entire A-bomb test scene was brilliant, the way he realizes what he's stepped into.

* The motorcycle chase that follows the diner scene. It reminded me of the lighter, more playful chase scenes in Last Crusade. And the way they crash into the school library, and as they speed off, Jones yells out, "if you want to be an archeologist, get out of the library!" Spielberg was on point there.

* Shia LaBeaouf. Never saw him in anything else. Thought I would hate him simply because I thought they wanted another Short Round. Turned out he was really good in this. Some of the things that come out of his mouth are pretty dumb, but he elevates it with perfect smart-aleck greaser attitude.

* Harrison Ford. Again, some of the dialogue was off (Indiana seemed too snippy too often, "Oh Marion, you had to go and get yourself kidnapped") but he's still the man for the job. Great to see him running, climbing, doing his own stunt work at 65.

Unforgiven (1992)

This movie kind of blew me away. I had always seen the cover of this on those lists like the AFI's GREATEST MOVIES or TOP 20 OSCAR WINNERS and put it mentally in the same category as Driving Miss Daisy or Forrest Gump: big budget Hollywood oscar winners that were beloved in the early 90's, but then lost flavor over time. Now I personally like Driving Miss Daisy, but dadgummit if Unforgiven ain't miles above it in every aspect. I read a review somewhere that stated Unforgiven is "a funeral for the western." Indeed it is. I suppose Dead Man gave the genre some more esoteric, smaller-level subverting a few years later, but Unforgiven really focuses its intentions and gives the western a proper burial.

Eastwood plays Bill Munny, essentially a washed up version of The Man With No Name, from the "Dollars trilogy", except this character is mean, amoral, or at least was...he's given up "the drink on account of his wife" and become a pig farmer with his two young children, leaving his bankrobbing, murdering years behind him. He's talked into doing one more job, though, by a kid who wants more than anything to be like those romanticized caricatures of gunslingers that Eastwood has embodied in countless movies.

So the movie's plot follows thusly, and is really straightforward, but it's the dialogue and depth of the characters that makes it so compelling. Stereotypes are inverted, and morality gets pretty murky. The bad guy in Unforgiven would be the good guy in any typical western, and vice versa. Little Bill Daggett, played ruthlessly by Gene Hackman (two years before he played a very similar character in The Quick and The Dead, in some ways the antithesis of Unforgiven), represents the death of the old ways of the west, in which thieves and killers roamed free and pillaged towns as they pleased. He used to be one of these outlaws himself, but now, as the town sherriff, he's determined to keep his town free of crime, albeit through intimidation and fear. And Eastwood's Bill Munny is the dying spirit of those old ways, a man whose time has come and gone, but who has to gather that gunslinging, lawless spirit in the face of injustice. Morgan Freeman plays Ned, Munny's former partner-in-crime, and the two of them have amazing onscreen chemistry as they struggle to get back on the saddle (literally) for this last stand.

The film chugs along confidently, exploring and debunking the cliches that the old Hollywood westerns thrived on, and finally we arrive at the final shootout, which I had to watch twice because it was so awesome. Seriously, one of the most badass endings of all time. I had to show my girlfriend the clip on YouTube a couple hours later. The ending of this movie is right up there with the endings of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest or Rocky for me, in terms of pure emotional impact. It's the moment I was hoping throughout the movie. It's so simple and predictable, yet so effective. And the dialogue makes it clear that everything that's been said in a scene like this has been repeated so much it's lost meaning:

"I'll see you in hell, William Munny."
"Yeah."

Bill Munny has responded to that cliche so many times, he no longer has anything to say besides "yeah."

Black Sheep (2007)

My good friend Al recommended this knowing I was a big fan of splatter-era Peter Jackson, and it did not disappoint. In fact, it did more than live up to expectations. I was really struck by simply how good the movie LOOKED. It was shot on 35mmm, had some really great photography of the New Zealand coastline, farmlands, etc, and overall was really slick. The director, Jonathan King, apparently wrote the script for The Tattooist, which I'm interested in checking out, even though it doesn't look very fun like Black Sheep was.

But on top of all that stuff, it kicked ass. There was quite a bit of gore, though nothing compared to Jackson's early stuff, and most of the gruesome moments came from people mutating into giant sheep, one limb at a time. There was one moment however that made me wince hard, and that was the offal pit, filled with rotting pig guts, and of course into which the characters fall and have to wade through to get back to safety. That reminded me of the scene in Phenomena when Jennifer Connelly falls into the pool of corpses, and I shuddered big time during that.

There was such a playful tone in the "sheep attack" scenes, which were essentially close-ups of handpuppets (kind of like Lamb Chop's demented cousins or something) chomping away at someone screaming, and then cut to a wide shot of common sheep standing in a field, casually gnawing at fake human limbs, heads, etc...and nothing beats menacing violins screeching underneath a bunch of sheep heading over a hill in our direction. Also, besides "Get the flock outta here!", another tagline was "Get ready for the Violence of the Lambs."

Collision Course (1989)

Collision Course!

Jay Leno. Mr. Miyagi.

END OF REVIEW.

The Fog (2005)

My instincts let me down on this one. There was not a single shred of "so bad its funny" anywhere to be found in this. Not one desirable chain of amino acids in the DNA of this lame teen horror clone, whose skeleton is identical to the original 1980 film, but whose body cavity is just filled with BAD MOVIE. So they just took all the characters and plot and filled in the rest with cheap CGI and silly (but alas, not silly enough to be funny) dialogue. I mean, there's a chick who spins bad hip-hop records in the top of a lighthouse, and she's the town DJ or something? Stuff that made sense in the original just doesn't in 2005. Oh man. Admittedly, I stopped watching after about 40 minutes and did some laundry instead, but I did glance at the TV occasionally and yup, it was still bad.

Teeth (2008)

This is the best flesh-eating-vagina movie ever made. But it's the only flesh-eating-vagina movie. At least as far as I know. I'll have to ask my friend Jim about it, and then he'll probably name like 10 Japanese movies about killer vaginas. But if flesh-eating-vaginas becomes a Hollywood genre, Teeth (2008) will be the Black Christmas of its kind: A movie that is important because it's the first one, but also a movie that just isn't all that great. Though we can't ignore the glaring truth: flesh eating vagina movies will never be important.

Some of this was really great. There were times during the beginning when it reminded me, of all things actually, of early Tim Burton stuff. Like the twisted suburban fantasy stuff. The main character, Dawn, lives in a quiet neighborhood with her ailing mom and stepdad, and as she bikes home from school one day, we see the looming towers of a nuclear power plant behind her house (hinting at the cause of Dawn's "gift"). The music is bright and plucky, reflecting Dawn's virtuousness and her good little go-getter attitude. Then there a bunch of up and down moments. Some don't quite work, like the scenes where Dawn is explaining abstinence to the Purity Ring kids at school, which I thought could have been funnier. And then other scenes are on point, like the dorky dude at the end who finally gets to sleep with Dawn, who he's lusted after throughout high school. At this point Dawn has learned to harness her power, and since he seems like a nice enough guy (rather than the wayward Purity Ring kid who gets a little overzealous), she uh, allows him to enter...but then he calls his buddy in the middle of the act to brag about his conquest, and oops, bad move dude. The facial expressions in this scene are so good.

There's enough campiness here for me to have enjoyed it quite a bit, though. Jess Weixler, who plays the main character, Dawn, is pretty amazing, and I'm sure she's getting calls to be in all sorts of indie horror stuff now, although IMDB lists what look like a few dramas on her plate. And as it should be, all the death (penectomy?) scenes are done with maximum gore and were effective enough to make my crotch sore with sympathy pains. Of course, once we've seen the first vagina attack, the rest get tired pretty quickly, since there all just variations of that one. But there's a hilarious scene where Dawn's gynecologist (Josh Pais), gets his fingers ripped off. He falls to the floor, blood gushing, screaming "It's true! Vagina Dentata! Vagina Dentata!" Man, that part had me cracking up. And there are 3 full-on realistic severed-weener shots before this whole movie's over, but not one single close-up of the titular chompers. That seemed to me like a logical step in keeping with all the over-the-top-ness, but maybe they thought it would compromise the naivete and cuteness of Dawn's character if they showed that. Or maybe they did and had to cut it for an R rating? Why am I so interested in this?

Most of those attack scenes got the appropriately ridiculous treatment, even if there was a bit of letdown after I realized they were just the same thing over and over. The whole subplot with Dawn's sexually jealous step-brother seemed kind of thrown-in and underdeveloped. It's just there waiting until it needs to fulfill its duty as the movie's "final showdown," which is expected and feels anti-climactic when it ends.

So Teeth is good if you want a slight little horror comedy. Now that we have the first one out of the way, I look forward to someone doing this a little better the next time.

Pug (2006)

It's about time someone gave the pug-nosed dog a cinematic re-evaluation. We had lovably stubborn Otis from that wonderful family film Milo and Otis, that bundle of attitude Frank the Pug from Men In Black, and who could forget Duke Leto Atreides' wrinkly-faced companion from Dune? Well, probably no one even knows about that one, and I had to actually do a google search for "movies featuring pugs" to find it. Also, there were like 3 sites devoted to this topic.

Well, now we have Bentley, who rips to shreds all our onscreen pug stereotypes as if they were so much chew toy stuffing.

We meet Bentley as he's being purchased and carted home to the unsuspecting Hilton household. David and Judy Hilton have decided their 2 children are old enough to start learning responsibility in the form of pet ownership. And what better pet to take under their roof than that symbol of cuteness and...um, ugliness: the pug. Little do they realize, Bentley is the 13th descendant in a long line of pugs bred by Earl Willoughby, a occultist and part time breeder who, as the legend goes, used black magic and satanic rituals to produce pug-nosed pups with murderous instincts. The breeder's "handbook" sternly foretells the coming of the 13th birth in the killer pug lineage, who will basically be the Damien of dogs or something, and will command the power of the Great Evil Cur, yadda yadda yadda... Anyway, this is all explained in flashback in the hilariously overacted opening scene, which features two (count 'em) instances of the phrase "by the mange of beelzebub!" and gives Warlock-era Julian Sands a run for his money.

The bulk of this Z-grade laughfest, which looks like it was shot with a handheld EasyShare camera, consists of the boilerplate "series of gruesome deaths that no one can explain". Awful lines like "There isn't a canine on the planet that's capable of this kind of carnage!" spoken by the nerdy zoologist, are tossed out repeatedly. The acting is high-school-theater level at best, and the plot is riddled with so many holes it makes Ernest Goes To Camp look like Chinatown. The attempts at romantic chemistry between the heroic (but dumb as a brick) dogcatcher and neighborhood ditz fall with resounding thuds.

But let's face it, all these things don't matter, because the movie succeeds in delivering the real goods: pugs killing people. The pug attacks are spectacular. Gory as hell (the dog-wrangler must have basically dipped the real life pug in red corn syrup) and in fact, surprisingly realistic. There's a great scene in which Bentley attacks the pretty unsuspecting babysitter, and a scene involving a guy's brains and a dogfood bowl which I won't ruin by explaining how amazing it is. Every possible way a tiny dog could attack a human is explored in this movie, and they're all extremely funny (and bloody). The low-angle point-of-view camera stuff is a nice touch too, accompanied by really fast panting sounds.

And can anyone really hate a movie that features the line, "Eat this you scrunchy-nosed fuck!", followed by a shotgun blast to that cute wittle facey-wace in the movie's head-scratchingly apocalyptic final scene. Pug-lovers and PETA members, unbunch those panties, because of course this isn't the end for Bentley. He is brought back one final time in the form of some giant 8-legged pug-spider-giraffe-thing, only to be commanded back to hell by the dying breeder Willoughby with his last breaths. It's all god-awful and gut bustingly funny, as it damn well better be. And as the big styrofoam creature is pulled back to the great green-screen netherworld, I could see the strings that pull it.

There's a little twist ending of course, where we're back to happy suburbia, and 2 little girls find a stray pug puppy under a tree in the park. The puppy has a pentagram-shaped birthmark on his neck, but screw it, those girls are taking him home anyway, because he's KEE-UTE. I was really hoping for a Turner and Hooch style ending, where the girls find the little rascal devouring the family cat or something and they go "This is not your room," but maybe that was asking too much.

Session 9 (2001)

I can't remember a movie in the past couple months I've been more pumped to see than Session 9. I thought Brad Anderson's follow-up to this, The Machinist (aka OMG Christian Bale is really skinny") was great, and from the hype I read on Netflix, IMDB and some "Greatest Horror Movie Lines" forum I can't remember the name of, I was convinced Session 9 was going to be even better. It wasn't. Pretty close, though.

While I was watching this movie, I started getting this feeling that the director in a way had a great horror movie before he even started shooting. I mean, he wrote a script about 5 men slowly going crazy while working in a creepy, old, and HUGE, abandoned mental institutition, without any special effects. His budget could be really low. He's working with a really small and manageable cast and crew. And he's been given access to shoot anywhere he wants in this old, scary ass building. That's about as ideal a scenario as I can think of. There's no possible way he could fuck this up. Is there? Maybe. But anyway, he doesn't.

At times, Session 9 was a nearly perfect psychological horror film, loaded with tingling atmosphere, dialogue, and visuals. Here are photos of Danvers State Asylum, where the movie was shot:



Chilling. Bleak. Damp. I could practically smell the mold as I watched. Gently paced and intelligently constructed nearly the whole way. But at times, it seemed to get a little confused as to what direction it wanted to lead the audience, especially toward the end, which was the only real disappointment. Although glacially paced at first, it was never boring. It builds as things get weirder and weirder until the slasher-movie finale, where everything's explained to be deceptively obvious.

The story is simple. 5 men arrive at the abandonded Danvers State Insane Asylum for a 5-day asbestos removal job. The leader of the team, Gordon (Peter Mullan), is under the emotional and financial stress of running a small company with a newborn daughter at home, so he agrees to do the job in a week because he desperately needs the money, even though his partner Phil (David Caruso) warns that it will take 3 weeks. As Gordon tours the asylum with the groundskeeper to get the scoop on the place (echoing The Shining here big time), he notices a lone wheelchair sitting in an infinitely long hallway, and a suddenly a voice that would make Hannibal Lector shit his pants, welcomes him, "Hello...Gordon." He shakes it off and the men get to work. The ridiculous deadline, coupled with a slowly growing malevolent presence in the building, strains the 5 men, bringing out their own fears and pitting them against each other. A series of taped interviews with a former patient, labeled Session 1-9, is discovered and played, and tells the story of a deeply disturbed woman whose split personality, Simon (the voice Gordon hears), told her to murder as a young girl.

The interviews are played throughout the film underneath the unnervingly quiet visuals, giving us clues, as the camera stalks down hallways, isolation chambers, and finally, the bloody corpses of the men as the building's truth is revealed.

Until the weak ending, the shocks are real and never feel cheap. The horror is never shown explicitly, only felt. One character, Hank, discovers a cache of gold coins hidden in a wall in the basement of the asylum, and as he starts to head back upstairs to join the others, he realizes he's not alone. Anderson does the suspense here perfectly. There's no music, only heavy breathing. And as Hank turns through the pitch black corridors, the steadicam shows us his point of view. He raises the flashlight towards the tunnel behind him and we see a dark figure at the other end, moving toward us. He freaks and starts running, tripping, and looking every which way. He turns a corner and Oh Shit! Of course something bad is there. It's all typical horror chase stuff, but it's just done SO WELL. There's also a bravura shot, I swear it blew me away, where the generator they're using to power the lights while they work, suddenly dies. Mullet-headed Jeff is afraid of the dark ("I got nyctophobia") and gets caught in the basement. As the lights that line the hallway go out one by one, he tries in vain to outrun the darkness that envelopes him, screaming. Hank disappears and is later found by Phil in the basement, in another great disturbing scene, severely shaken, hidden in the corner, and clad only in his undies.

The ending unfortunately is just a 15-minute Whodunnit? where the audience is trying to guess who the "bad guy" is. Throughout the film, it's unclear where exactly the danger is coming from. The men? The building? Which is fine and kept my interest. But as the ending draws nigh, Anderson seems to want us to think it's Mike (Stephen Gevedon, who also co-wrote the script), who stumbled upon the interview tapes and can't seem to stop listening to them. Did he go crazy listening to the tapes? And then all of a sudden the killer is supposed to be Phil, who keeps getting more aggressive towards Gordon, and then Jeff, and so on, etc. It's sort of lame because these implications are made through Gordon's hallucinations, not through the true character's action/dialogue, which would have earned genuine audience confusion. It's easy to throw in a conversation between two characters, then cut to a wide shot where only one of the characters is actually there, to show he's just imagining it all. That happened a little too much for my taste. Then finally we figure out who's gone nuts, and it's so obvious. Maybe Anderson thought it was too obvious, so he cluttered it with all that confusing stuff at the end. Sometimes you have to be PROUD of the obvious! There's a derivative psycho killer sequence and one too many pans of bloody pictures of Gordon's family, but then the very last line is classic, as the last patient interview (session #9) is heard underneath a sweeping exterior shot of the asylum. The doctor asks Simon where he lives, and the voice answers: "I live in the weak and the wounded...Doc." Brilliant. This suggests universality, and opens the film up to interpretation. Is Simon is the dark, murderous, urge inside anyone who feels attacked, emotionally or physically? Probably best not analyze that one too much, but it's just a great fucking line.

I couldn't really figure out exactly how the Simon presence related to Gordon, as his backstory didn't quite add up to someone who was "weak and wounded." The connection doesn't totally work for me. Other than that, and that flawed ending, it's a damn fine piece of psychohorror. Also my girlfriend and I jokingly referred to this movie as Brett Favre Loses It! because we really thought Peter Mullan looked like Brett Favre from certain angles.

The Fog (1980)

For a guy who looks like he may have just gotten done changing the oil on my truck, John Carpenter knows how to make a damn good horror movie. Maybe I'm saying that because my truck needs an oil change and I was looking for motivation to actually go get one as I watched this movie.

Anyway, I have to admit right off the bat that I've never seen Halloween (1978) all the way through, only caught bits and pieces during what seemed like its endless airing on AMC last fall. Although that sort of turned me off to watching it anytime soon in full, I'm planning on fulfilling my horror-fan duty and seeing it before the end of the year. There, I've made the vow online. The Thing (1982) is quite possibly my favorite horror movie ever, which deserves about 30 new paragraphs of praise which I'm sure I'll write later. Carpenter had an impressive 10-year streak of horror/action/trash films that started after Halloween, included such 80's gems as Escape From New York and its sequel, Big Trouble in Little China, and concluded, in the best conceivable way to end such a streak, with They Live, which I'm not sure counts as a true movie, but probably more as a movie-quote-generator ("either put on these glasses or start eatin' that trash can"). The Fog was made during the start of this streak, and while its got some slow scenes and a handful of what are by today's standards groan-inducing cliches, I would agree with Carpenter's own assessment of the film as a "minor horror classic." Yeah, it's kinda sorta classic.

The Fog is a good ol' fashioned ghost story. The town of Antonio Bay is celebrating its centennial, which just happens to coincide with the arrival of a mysterious green fog that carries with it the bloodthirsty remains of Captain Blake and his men, who were a group of lepers hoping to set up a colony very close to Antonio Bay exactly 100 years ago. The recently settled citizens of Antonio Bay weren't going to sit around while a bunch of weirdo lepers move in next door, so as Captain Blake and his ship, "the Elizabeth Dane" sailed toward land to begin building, 6 men from town started a massive fire on the beach to distract the ship, disorienting them and eventually causing them to crash and die horrible, watery deaths. This is all explained in a pre-credits scene, by old Mr. Machen (legendary Brit John Houseman) to a group of young Boy Scouts at a campfire, which sets up the rest of the movie. One of the boy scouts has a hot mom, Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau, still very much a sex symbol in 1980), who hosts the late-night radio show at the local station, and she has a weird thing going on with the town weatherman, who calls in to whisper some cheesy sex-talk, but also to warn her of the impending fog bank approaching the town. Jamie Lee Curtis, fresh off Halloween with vocal cords in-tact and recharged, shows up as hitchhiker Liz who just happens to get picked up at the wrong time at the wrong place by local fisherman Nick (Tom Atkins, another Halloween-er). Jamie Lee's real life mother, Janet Leigh, plays the town's...I don't really know what she was...mayor's assistant or something? And then there's Father Malone, played by Hal Holbrook, who finds out he's a descendant of one of the 6 men who started the fire that killed Captain Blake and his men, and not only that, the gold that was stolen from Blake's ship is hidden at Malone's church.

So the fog rolls in of course, and the zombies of Captain Blake and his men start going around killing people. There's no gore (I don't even recall one speck of blood), only a few close-ups on some unfortunate folks as they're pierced through with fishing hooks, cutlasses and there's one dude who gets his eyes sliced into with a long knife, but it's off camera, and all of these offings are effective mainly because of the juicy sound effects. Every single scene of Blake and his men arriving is scary as hell. Carpenter's sparse, tense direction is on point during these moments, and there are two especially nail-biting parts: a long, quiet take in which a doomed fisherman is crept up on from behind by a looming black shape, and then during the film's climax, as Father Malone is surrounded by walking corpses, half-shrouded by the fog, their eyes start to glow red as they pull out their swords, the effect is chilling and the words "THIS GUY IS SCREWED" are all but written on the screen in front of you. Actually, some of these scenes really reminded me of the illustrations for the kids horror collection, Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark, which scared the crap out of me when I was little:



There are a few other, though not quite as effective, scenes of scary stuff like a dry wooden plank suddenly starting to leak water, and a cheap "jump" moment where Father Malone sneaks up on Janet Leigh's character as she enters the church, which is followed by a very awkward exchange between the two actors, which I'm not sure was intentional. In fact, as much as I like Hal Holbrook, I thought there was a really strange rhythm to the way he would deliver his lines, like towards the end he's mumbling something about the "6 original conspirators!" and everyone else starts arguing overtop of him, and when they stop, he sort of finishes his lines in a confused daze. That's a minor quibble, though, because I think his character is intended to be a bit of a tippler, as evidenced by the scene between he and Bennett (John Carpenter himself) where's he's knocking back the wine chalice, and hey, he's just realized that zombies want to kill him, so he's got every right to be dazed. There's also a long, explanatory middle section which slows everything down quite a bit, and Carpenter crosscuts between the obligatory, "they're going to kill us!" realization scene where everyone's eyes slowly widen, with a stretch of dialogue-less scenes with Adrienne Barbeau, who, while hot, couldn't quite keep me from checking the running time. Curtis, Atkins, and Leigh are all solid as they react to the carnage and "figure out a way to explain all this!" like all good traditional horror movie heroes must. Everything's kept pretty natural and restrained, and that gives the handful of creepy Blake-arrival scenes much of their impact. There's also Carpenter's signature electronic score which pulses and rumbles under key scenes which adds to the creep-factor. Again, I liked his score to The Thing much better, but it works well here. Eventually Father Malone gives the dead sailors their rightful gold and sends them back from whence they came, everyone's happy, and towards the end, Barbeau's character has an awesome monologue as she broadcasts over the radio:

"To the ships at sea who can hear my voice, look across the water, into the darkness. Look for the fog."

What a great line. I thought the film should have ended there, but then there's a twist "they're not really gone!" ending which seemed a little silly and tacked on to me.

But all in all, a solid, traditional horror film, if a little slow and cliched for nowadays. I'd recommend it to those looking for something older, low-gore, and maybe even family-friendly, but who still want good scares.

I read that Carpenter shot this film in anamorphic widescreen Panavision to give it the "big budget" feel, even though it only cost $1 million, a relatively low budget even in 1980. The scenes of Adrienne Barbeau's son on the beach and much of the static wide shots of the town look amazing, although I'm not sure if the interiors and night stuff would have been hurt that much by using an ordinary lens. Also Carpenter was very dissatisfied after viewing an early cut of the film and decided to trash 30% of it (!). So 1/3 of the film is from reshoots, including the opening boy scout scene, and the more violent stuff, the close ups, inserts of people getting killed. And then after coming off of the high he felt with Halloween being such a hit, he was understandably disappointed when The Fog didn't go over nearly as well with audiences when released. By now it's collected a sizeable fanbase and then there was that remake in 2005 which apparently has a 5% (FIVE PERCENT) rotten rating on rottentomatoes.com. That means THREE people out of FIFTY FIVE rated it positive. I've got that lined up on Netflix because I need to watch a comedy. Please please please let that movie be funny and not just horrible.

Finally, what the hell is a "stomach pounder?" At one point, the Barbeau character's son asks "Mom, can I have a stomach pounder and a coke?" I was cracking up. Ah...never mind, it's a cheeseburger, I think. I just looked it up. Now I, too, would like a stomach pounder and a coke.