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It starts the way many good scary movies do – with a dark and stormy night.
The next morning, there are downed power lines and trees everywhere, which
means David Drayton (Thomas Jane), his son Billy (Nathan Gamble), and their
arrogant neighbor Mr. Norton (Andre Braugher) need to go to town and get
supplies and tools to fix up their places. They notice a mist coming down
from the mountain and a whole convoy of military personnel heading somewhere
in a serious hurry, but once they arrive at the local supermarket they
forget it and go about their shopping. It doesn’t take long to realize
things are really going wrong – first the civil defense siren goes off,
then an earthquake, and then Dan (Jeffrey DeMunn) comes running into store,
bloody and screaming, "There’s something in the mist."
Their first encounter with a mist creature (something
with mutant octopus tentacles and a nasty personality) doesn’t go well.
David and Ollie (Toby Jones), one of the store employees, try to convince
people that it’s not safe to go outside so they should fortify the place
(with dog food, bags of fertilizer, and duct tape - you can tell it's a guy's plan) and wait for help. The
folks quickly fall into 4 categories – the ones who want to make the store
safe, the ones who want to escape while they can, the soldiers who know
something they’re not sharing with the group, and Mrs. Carmody (Marcia
Gay Harden) who won’t stop preaching about the "end of days"
and how God has sent his wrath down on all these sinners. David has Amanda
(Laurie Holden) and Irene (Frances Sternhagen) on his side because you
have to have at least one woman on the good team and if Irene weren’t around,
you’d miss the funniest scene in the film (gotta love a little old lady
with bug spray).
The second encounter is with prehistoric birds and giant bugs (they may
just be bugs, but they’re seriously deadly) - this round goes even worse.
As the dead bodies mount up, Mrs. Carmody is starting to convert people
to her side with fervor and the deck is getting stacked in her favor. When
she stirs the crowd up into mob-frenzy level with her demands of expiation,
it’s hard to tell which is a more dangerous place – inside the store or
out in the mist. When the "sane ones" become the vocal minority,
it’s time to hightail it out and take their chances which leads to an ending
that is not going to please everyone, but you can totally see it coming.
What works best about this movie is that it doesn’t take long before you’re on edge – and you pretty much stay there with the exception of a couple of lulls (for character development and reflection). There are plenty of popcorn-throwing moments and it’s serious skin-crawling time when the spiders show up. There’s a bit of a letdown when most of what comes out of the mist isn’t more terrifying, because the bugs give the film a B-movie quality that’s a little cheesy.
The biggest problem is that these characters are agonizingly slow to figure
out the obvious – even really big bugs are attracted to light, if something
is creeping under the loading dock door then shut the damn door, if you
manage to make it to a car then don’t wait for something else to come around
before you start the engine. It’s so frustrating to watch people be so
stupid (and these guys are bad even for horror-movie stupid). For once,
it would be refreshing if people did smart things and got it anyway, but
I guess scary movies are safe because we can sit in the audience and think
to ourselves, "I would never do something that dumb", so we don’t
feel as threatened.
Marcia Gay Harden delivers a performance that’s going to be hard to forget.
She goes from really annoying to crazy and annoying, then downright scary
– you wish somebody would shut her up (stoning with canned veggies is genius,
but only works for a minute). When the Revolutions inspired bible-thumper
is scarier than the "monster", that either says something about
man’s (or woman’s) ability to make a bad situation worse or they need to
work on the monster.
A note to actors - people who don’t know how to show fear in their eyes, just look silly in horror movies with their mouths agape.
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