Director: Frank Darabont
My Rating: 6 out of 10
First off, file this one under sci-fi creature feature, not really horror, save for some gore and blood splattering. The premise is pretty damn creepy: after a storm of, apparently, biblical magnitude passes through a small town, a thick mist sweeps over the land. Before long, people are getting wiped out by tenticles, weird monster mosquitos, some crazy pterodactyl looking things, and acid spitting spider creatures. The story focuses on a bunch of people banded together in a supermarket, with Thomas Jane playing the de facto leader of the bunch, or at least the only one with a brain. The film is smattered with several other small supporting parts, most annoyingly of all is a bible thumping "prophet" woman who absolutely kills the movie for me. In all honesty, if they simply cut her part, trimmed about 20 minutes and just played up the terror outside the store I would have probably given it an 8 instead of a 6.
I think the film tries to be something like Night of the Living Dead, the similarities are hard to miss. They've got the resourceful leader, they're trapped in a building with an unknown terror outside, and, moreso than the issues with the creatures, they've got problems with their own humanity. Several of the people begin to turn on the others as the movie goes on, splitting into two factions: one lead by the religous idiot and the other by Thomas Jane. I have the biggest problem with the extremity of the religous clique. They just seem to play up the stupidity of humans more than anything. At the apex of insanity the religous fanatics go so far as to savagely kill one of the others in an attempt to "sacrafice" him to God. That's where the movie lost me. Do they really expect that, given the situation, people are so dumb that they would believe some lunatic preacher and murder someone because she told them to? Sorry, I do have more faith in people than that. And if that's where they're trying to derive their horror from, I'm not biting.
That being said, the creatures are pretty great and the ending is fairly solid. If it wasn't this could have been a disaster. There's also a stand-out sequence in a pharmacy where the CGI people get to show off some pretty cool stuff amidst an all-out creature attack, which I dug, except my Netflix disk decided to stop as the attack was about to begin. Luckily, I bought the blu-ray on sale at Best Buy the day before, so I had to throw that in. Serendipitous if you ask me.
Next: A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot
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