The Fog remake

Oh, man, is The Fog remake even worse than I remembered. This was the case where everything Carpenter and company did right in the original film was performed poorly, ill-advised and dumbly overplayed, in the remake.

Casting, dull and lifeless (the joker playing the priest is woefully rotten, a pathetic substitute for the haunting Hal Holbrook, whose face wore shame, regret, and horror extremely well; this guy is just a asshole with an attitude problem), an abundance of CGI effects that do little to salvage a lack of real atmosphere (this is a special effects movie, not an atmosphere movie...), the need by the screenplay to explain explicitly all of what happened to the crew of the Elizabeth Dane (I really don't need, or felt the original needed to explain, a ton of exposition; when you have John Houseman, that sinister, gentlemanly voice and his ghoulish story, it can go a long way, certainly more affective than a modicum of special effects drawn up in a hi-tech studio with computers highly depended on to tell the story for you).

 What Carpenter did for me was give the fog seen in his film a living, breathing life of its own while the digital effects presented in the remake look and feel phony and heartless. Maggie Grace couldn't be a more spiritless female heroine and how the film binds her to the old crew of the Elizabeth Dane drew eye-rolling from me; yet another unnecessary need to collide the past with the present when the fog itself in the original, just flashes of the lepers of the Dane within, spoke volumes. I like that Jamie Lee Curtis was just a girl passing through, not a reincarnated member of the crew "rejoining" her husband in a moment right out of The Shining.

Wow, does Smallville's Clark Kent/Superman Welling do little to say in his performance that he deserved a chance to jump from the small screen to the big screen...quite a bland hero if there ever was one...Tom Atkins kicks Welling's ass all over the place in that regard. Criminally underused in this film is the Adrienne Barbeau replacement Selma Blair who the filmmakers did not believe in. She is not highly featured in the radio station (yes, there is a special effect sequence where something found by her son in the water has a conniption fit, causing screams, noises, and spiritual *unrest*; as noisy and boisterous as everything else), the film isn't involved in her overall role as voice to an unsuspecting town that the menace is closing in (Barbeau used her post as an emergency broadcast, while Blair exits stage left, later, while in her car suffers a crash, is sent off a cliff into the ocean, somehow escaping a hand grabbing her ankle, not turning into a steaming skeleton like her babysitter, and eventually finding her son safe and sound) and screen time devoted to her welfare or as a mom devoted to seeing that her son is rescued from the creatures in the fog is limited. I actually did like Blair in this film--not something I can honestly say in past roles she has portrayed--and so it is rather disappointing that the director didn't capitalize on her potential when the rest of the cast couldn't be worse in the appeal dept. This is just all wrong; no wonder I haven't watched this monstrosity since 2005.How many times have I watched Carpenter's film over the years? Too many to count; it has such rewatchability to me; yet this abomination is so insufferably soulless and boring, I couldn't imagine sitting through it again not just anytime soon but maybe never again.

To mention an example of how wrong-headed this movie is: the babysitter, Mrs. Kobritz, in the original, is carried away, a hand over her mouth, pulled into the engulfing fog never to be seen again, as glimpses of hooks and blades appear and disappear, telling us her fate, while in the remake, a hand reaches in from the kitchen sink, grabs her arm, as her body deteriorates into a skeleton through the means of CGI; just like everything else in this fucking misfire, the special effects, in over the top fashion, try to overcompensate when subtle works just as well...

Don't even get me started on the leader of the Dane, appearing with the remnants of a face, reduced through CGI to a skull peeking from a glowing visage, appearing in a library, *compelling* glass from windows to stab through the priest, in slow motion, as he twirls in terror (the glass doesn't even look real for chrissakes), collapsing to the floor....Holbrook took a scythe to the throat as the screen faded to black, simple and effective, again subtle not overelaborate and bloated to the extreme. Just a pathetic waste of money and time that could have been better spent elsewhere...

I may watch the Carpenter film this afternoon just to get the bad taste out of my mouth, even though I was wanting to give it a special place in Halloweenmonth.