John Carpenter's made a few big deal horror flicks in his time. Though I can't stand Halloween (a fault that shares equal blame with the movie's fans as with the actual movie itself), I was unimpressed with Ghosts of Mars and deep down I know that They Live was terrible despite the residual childhood love I have for Roddy Piper, even I have to admit that Carpenter's a guy who knows what he's doing and deserves at least 60% of the ego hand job he gets from the relentless praise of his sheep. The Thing? Loved it. Escape From New York? Great. Prince of Darkness? Awesome. Big Trouble In Little China? A lot of fun. Vampires? No, wait, that sucked like Dracula on a bender. Anyway, one of the movies people kinda gloss over when it comes to running through Carpenter's filmo is The Fog, likely because it didn't spawn any sequels and it didn't star Kurt Russell. It's not a "lost" movie by any stretch of the imagination; it's just usually overshadowed by the rest of John-Boy's creations. After finally sitting through it, I understand why so many people choose to ignore it…
In the small coastal town of Antonio Bay California, all Hell breaks loose one night as payphones ring off the hook in droves, TV's turn themselves on to distortion, and cars come to life with their headlights beaming and their horns blaring. No, we didn't take a wrong turn into a Maximum Overdrive sequel, but there is something fishy going on... errr, no pun intended. On her way to Vancouver via Antonio Bay is "may or may not have been born a hermaphrodite" hitchhiker-slash-artist Liz (Jamie Lee Curtis), who's picked up in, ironically enough, a pick-up truck, as driven by Nick (Tom Atkins!... sans mustache?!). Not far into their ride, all the windows in Nick's truck shatter mysteriously, amazingly leaving the duo unscathed as they continue on so they can bump uglies at Nick's place... are all California hitchhikers just begging to jump into bed with the next middle-aged dude in a pick-up truck that gives them a ride!? Meanwhile, single mom radio deejay Stevie Wayne (Adrienne "Boob-eau" Barbeau) gets a report from her pal at the weather station that there's a heavy fog heading for their sleepy burg... but not before it engulfs a fishing trawler off-shore... with its ghost ship and hook-wielding zombie pirate crew!
It turns out Nick owns the boat that was attacked, so the next morning he makes a stink out of finding out where the Hell his vessel is when it doesn't come in. They find the boat itself later, along with its corpsified crewmen, both showing signs that they'd been submerged in sea water for weeks. Meanwhile, with the town's centennial looming on the horizon, the local pastor (Hal Holbrook) uncovers a journal masoned up behind a crumbling wall in the church. The journal details how, a century ago, the town's founders (including the Father's own grandpa) promised to sell a section of land to a colony of lepers so they would have a place to live instead of rotting away on an island. Not wanting to share their land with diseased weirdos, the townsfolk took the lepers' money and manipulated them into crashing their ship amidst the bay's jagged rocks. This event actually brought together the people to form the charter for Antonio Bay. So, on the 100th anniversary of their deaths, the zombie ghost remains of the pissed-off lepers have come back to take their revenge on the town's current citizenship. It always amazes me at how the spirits of the vengeful dead always like to wait a nice round number of years before fulfilling their vendettas. Is the processing time for revenge cases in the Underworld really that bad these days?! Kryst, we're turning into the fucking DMV.
Naturally the centennial celebration is doomed to go down in a flurry of hook ravaged bodies as the fog once again rolls in, just in time to take in the festivities. The only hope of surviving the attack? Well, just stay inside and don't answer your door when the ghost leper zombie pirates come knocking. That's right, despite having 100 years to prepare, the ghouls can apparently take down power lines and get stabby with people, but haven't yet mastered the fine art of turning doorknobs. Fortunately for their little revenge mission it looks like the people of Antonio Bay have overlooked the benefits of putting peepholes on their doors, nor have they had to deal with poor credit ratings. Believe me; after your first or second run-in with a big ex-con bill collector named Rosie with flaming skull tattoos on his head knocking on your door, you learn to screen your visitors like you screen your phone calls.
Despite the potential for carnage and mayhem, the movie tries to opt out of buckets of blood and fountains of viscera in favor of trying to achieve that "people trapped together by an evil force trying to kill them" suspense motif that Carpenter worked so well later on in The Thing and Prince of Darkness. Instead I get a kick to the head as my mind screams "WHAT THE FUCK?!" while watching the undead fog monsters pass up on a buffet of civilians in favor of wrangling our main cast (everyone who's had five lines or more and has yet to be killed) into the church and attacking them there. The ending is where that head kick comes in though, when it turns out the vengeful lepers were just there to get their money back, because materialism apparently extends beyond the land of the living... What good is 100lbs of gold going to do you guys in leper Hell?! To further complicate matters, the killers pop up to take care of one last piece of unfinished business before the end credits roll, probably because the producers wanted to take one last stab at spooking the audience and not for any reason detrimental to the story or anything. Argh.
I understand where Carpenter was coming from when making this movie. Fog gives people a general discomfort because of the element of the unknown that comes with it. You can't see what's in the fog, so you don't know exactly what could come out of it. That's fine. Monsters and maniacs have been stalking through the dark of night in stories since the dawn of time. Fog just doesn't instill that fear into me though. Fog has little to distinguish it from clouds, so when Carpenter's vessel of terror rolls in, all I can think of is a fluffy, low flying cloud coming in say hi and give everybody a big, moist hug. And as far as making the fog for the movie, it always gave me one of two impressions: it either reminded me of The Stuff spilling super-imposed style over footage of the landscape, or it had me making bad jokes about '80s metal music videos and their overloaded fog machines. It just wasn't scary and it always looks too corny to be suspenseful. Bah. I always didn't like the pacing of the movie, it felt like we were plodding through 3 feet of hypothetical honey just to build up to a lackluster end reel. It didn't help that we were seeing the events from three groups of characters either (including Janet Leigh and her assistant), because it spreads our attention too thin and it seems like there are almost too many stories being told, only to have them smooshed together near the ending to try and make it all work. Overall, it just wasn't a very good movie for me. The gore whores have little to look forward to and the people looking for a little more substance to their movies will end up weighed down.
