Film Review: The Fog (1980)

(source:tmdb.org)

Great concepts are wasted on mediocre and subpar films more than anyone would like to think. And this could happen even to the great film masters who are supposed to know better. One of the examples is John Carpenter and his disappointing 1980 horror film The Fog.

The plot is set in Antonio Bay, small town on the coast of Northern California, which is about to celebrate 100th anniversary of its founding. Unbeknownst to most of its inhabitants, the town owes its existence to a shameful crime committed by six men who have deliberately sunk a ship carrying lepers on the way to a colony in order to plunder their gold use it to build a town. Father Malone (played by Hal Holbrook), local priest and grandson of one of the town’s founders, discovers this terrible secret after a piece of masonry falls from the wall, which is one of the many strange and increasingly disturbing events preceding the celebration. This also include brutal killings of three fishermen on the trawler which was caught in a strange fog. Those events spark the interest of Stevie Wayne (played by Adrienne Barbeau), DJ and owner of a radio station operating from the local lighthouse. A night before the anniversary strange fog begins to approach the town and something within is determined to avenge a hundred year old crime at the expense of its perpetrators’ descendants.

Fog is a natural phenomenon which seems tailor-made for horror genre. It is fascinating and frightening at same time, especially to audience that likes to project its fear of the unknown into something shapeless, omnipresent and seemingly unstoppable. To have fog as the actual adversary protagonists would have to fight is a good idea, especially for horror genre master like John Carpenter. In this film however, it is reduced to a simple gimmick in rather classic ghost/revenge story when the actual villains happen to be zombie-like lepers. A lot of mystery is actually revealed before the finale, which looks like an uninspired rehash of Night of the Living Dead. Even worse is script which, among other things, adds an unnecessary character of hitch-hiker only to have Jamie Lee Curtis - star of Carpenter previous ground-breaking film Halloween - as part of the cast. Action in the finale is divided on two locations, with fate of the characters rather predictable to all those viewers who can count.

Not all things about The Fog are bad. Carpenter is a superb director, and he skilfully uses 2:35 anamorphic format to make his rather low budget film much grander than it actually is. His wife Adrienne Barbeau is also good in rather unusual role of Final Girl who uses radio broadcast as a way to explain what is going on to the audience. However, The Fog, with its predictable and underwhelming finale still gives impression of a wasted opportunity. Such view, partially accepted by Carpenter himself, is in recent years been abandoned by most hardcore cinephiles and horror fans who “rediscovered” it as great film. This reappraisal was mostly caused by comparisons with truly awful 2005 remake which made this 1980 disappointment look unjustifiably better.

RATING: 4/10 (++)