Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 14, 2005, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The Fog is not a scene-for-scene duplication of its inspiration the way Gus Van Sant’s Psycho was, but the experience of watching it is similar, at least for those who’ve seen John Carpenter’s 1980 movie. You get the odd feeling of watching scenes that are familiar, with the same things happening as in its predecessor, and yet they don’t work this time, don’t have the same impact that they did originally. The new Fog is slick but rote, the very definition of a soulless remake. To borrow an old saying, it knows the words but not the music.
Which isn’t to say that Cooper Layne’s script doesn’t pull some variations on the original—most of them misguided. Take, for example, the way it undercuts the effectiveness of the lighthouse location where DJ Stevie Wayne (Selma Blair, in Adrienne Barbeau’s old role) works. In the Carpenter/Debra Hill scenario, the seafaring lepers whose ghosts plague the town of Antonio Bay died in a shipwreck caused by a false beacon, which gives their assault on Stevie in the lighthouse a touch of poetic justice. It’s also a great, claustrophobic place for Stevie to become trapped, with nowhere to go but up and out into the fog that heralds the phantoms’ arrival. In the new movie, Stevie is pointlessly allowed to escape the lighthouse as the horrific events begin to mount, yet plays very little of a role in the climactic action. The only apparent reason to get her out is so she can take part in an action setpiece which asks us to believe that her car can get slammed by a truck, tumble down a hillside, crash into the water and sink to the bottom—all without any of its windows being shattered.
Stevie is also given a touch of backstory involving an affair with Nick Castle (Tom Welling), a charter boat owner on Antonio Island, but nothing comes of this either. It goes forgotten and unaddressed when Nick’s girlfriend Elizabeth (Maggie Grace) comes home, Nick picks her up hitchhiking (on a prosperous island? Are there no cabs or car services at the dock?) and the couple fall back into the sheets again. Elizabeth has returned from college due to bad dreams she’s been having, and to fulfill the part of the horror heroine who goes out on an eerie night in a sweater and panties or down into a creepy boat’s hold to check out strange noises, to drop a crucial piece of evidence regarding a grisly multiple murder and, in the same scene, to oh-so-coincidentally discover a hidden journal that explains the island’s dark history and the reasons for the ghostly attack.
For in this retelling, the betrayal of the lepers is treated as a mystery to be uncovered by the characters and revealed to the audience. It played more potently in the original, where the tale was related in the beginning (by the great John Houseman), thus lending a sense of scary inevitability to the murderous attacks that followed. The ghosts were more hands-on in that version, too, as creatures avenging their deaths might want to be. Taking advantage of updated CGI, the new spooks dispatch their victims in gimmicky ways like igniting and blasting a guy across a room or reaching up through a sink drain to give a woman a case of instant leprosy.
So how will this movie play to young audiences or others unfamiliar with the Carpenter film? Probably not well, I would imagine, since it doesn’t build sustained tension and, in the opening stretch, contains sops to the youth audience that may be too blatant for even that target crowd to stomach. DeRay Davis has the thankless role of the Wisecracking Black Guy who says things like “Women have testicle telepathy” before he gets (almost) killed; though he does recover, he has even less to do than Blair in the final reels. Director Rupert Wainwright avoids the MTV overkill that marred his last genre feature, Stigmata, but nor is there much excitement as the movie kind of moseys from scene to scene, on the way to an ending in which the final coup de grace is delivered to a character we’ve barely gotten to know, and a concluding story twist comes out of nowhere. When Blair (echoing the original’s Barbeau), says in a final voiceover monologue that they may never know exactly what happened that night, she’s not alone.
There’s a certain amount of atmosphere to Nathan Hope’s widescreen cinematography, although inevitably, all the money shots of the CGI mist enveloping the island don’t have the punch of a simple dry-ice effect as real fog flows down a hallway toward the room where Stevie’s son is hiding. Similarly, Graeme Revell’s score thunders and roars to diminishing returns in the big setpieces yet is more effective in its lower-key moments, when it subtly references Carpenter’s music from the ’80 movie. Speaking of tributes, the end credits contain an apt dedication to Hill, who produced the original and was performing that same function on this film when she died earlier this year. It’s too bad that, if this redux had to be made, she and Carpenter couldn’t have written and the latter come back to direct it as well—the result would likely have displayed more palpable passion for the material than is on view here.
