—One stick of doom

The Deer Hunter was the feelgood movie of 1978.

Yes, and if you buy that one, you might just believe the advertising hype concerning The Fog, and how it's a breathtaking thriller that you simply must see. Such a claim is comical, because really, this is the sort of film you shouldn't watch unless you have been strapped to a theater chair—your eyelids pried open like Alex de Large—and the poison gas mechanism stored in your false tooth will not deploy.

In other words, it's pretty bad.

The first thing you should know is that this is a remake of a 1980 John Carpenter film. Mistake numero uno. What I'd like to know is, who thought it was a good idea to remake a John Carpenter film? I adore John Carpenter. I think he's got a great, morbid sense of humor and a skill for transforming even the campiest premise into something downright creepy. I mean sure, The Fog wasn't one of his best. It was no Halloween. It was no Escape from New York. It was not even as good as that movie he made where James Woods was a vampire slayer. But John Carpenter at his worst is still better than this new version of The Fog, which features nothing more scary than a levitating knife, some adhesive seaweed, and the possible end of Selma Blair's career.

Here's the thing. Every horror film has its own rules, its own system of logic. This is even more critical when it comes to the supernatural. If there is a reason for the ghosties to be mad, then their wrath must be visited upon their victims in a way that is consistent with that reason. Likewise, if the perpetrator is a sociopath, or the undead manifestation of a sociopath, you can get away with a wide swath of indiscriminate destruction. This isn't that difficult. The criminal just has to fit the crime. But nothing in The Fog makes any sense, even in terms of the rules it has itself constructed. It's like it was written by committee. Maybe it was the result of playing the "exquisite corpse" game, in which each person writes a sentence on a piece of paper, then folds that portion down so that it cannot be read by the next contributor. Or maybe it's the fact that the director, Rupert Wainwright, used to direct MC Hammer videos. It's hard to say.

Okay, here are some snapshots of the story. And yes, I'm including spoilers (although, if you do go see this film, I think you'll agree that it was a bit spoiled to begin with). The setting is a small island off the coast of Oregon. We learn from the start that the place was founded by four men in the 1870s, and that they have a lot of descendants running around. The primary characters are as follows. There's Nick Castle, a young, dark-haired young fisherman, played with confused intensity by Tom Welling (Superman from Smallville). There's Elizabeth, his mysterious blonde girlfriend who wears a Sergeant Pepper jacket and likes seaweed wraps. There's sultry-voiced Stevie (Selma Blair), Nick's other girlfriend, who plays records from a studio in the lighthouse and has a kid who makes cute, prescient statements like "it wants us." At the beginning, Nick and his token black friend, Spooner, are out in their fishing boat when their anchor disturbs ... well, I don't know exactly what it disturbs. Some kind of wreckage on the ocean floor. I really don't have any idea what it is. All I know is that it reminded me of that burlap bag Perseus used for carrying Medusa's head around. This is the first of many things that shouldn't have been funny, but were. Anyway, shortly after this event, weird things start to happen. A sudden fog rolls into town, and Tom Welling starts to brood. Girls in bikinis die. Elizabeth has flashback dreams of a 19th century boat burning, and corpses talk to her. All standard stuff. Basically, we learn that the four founding fathers did some very nasty things to a bunch of lepers a century ago, and the lepers are back for a little old-fashioned revenge.

Question #1: Why did the ghosts wait 130 years to exact their revenge? This whole business about "the sins of the fathers" could have been avoided if they had just taken out their anger on the guys who actually were responsible for their deaths. Why did they wait? Did it take them that long to get organized? Did they have to keep stopping so one guy could go to the bathroom? Did they maybe forget what had happened for awhile, until Superman's anchor reminded them and they got all pissed off again? I just don't get it. With all the resources the afterlife has to offer, it's hard for me to imagine that these guys couldn't have gotten their revenge in a more timely fashion.

Question #2: If their primary goal was to avenge themselves on the descendants of their betrayers, why all the other indiscriminate killing? In other words, why did the bikini girls have to die? I know, I know. Horror movies are all about puritanical morality, so I understand that it's their exposed flesh that dooms them. It's one of the classic horror imperatives (dating back to Hammurabi's Code, I believe). But it was never established that these girls bore any relation to the founding fathers, so their deaths are inconsistent with the stated goals of the ghosts.

Question #3: There's an alcoholic Irish Catholic priest, spouting revelatory scriptures and warning everyone to get the hell out of town. I want to know how they ever came up with a character so mind-bogglingly original. I mean, it's not like we've seen this same character type in countless horror films through the years. Oh wait....

Question #4: Can you really get away with cheating if one of your girlfriends turns out to be (possibly) a ghost? From the first, we learn that Nick Castle is a player. Early on, he and Spooner (who gets unfairly jostled around while on a boat with the bikini girls) have a conversation about whether Elizabeth knows about Stevie. This sets us up for a bit of interpersonal drama. But once all three are on screen together, not a one of them behaves as if anything is at all awkward or odd. There's no "what is she doing here?!" There's no "I can't believe you were doing this behind my back!" Nope. The women don't comment at all. When Nick shouts, "Get in the car—we have to go get Stevie!" Elizabeth obediently climbs into the car without a word, an expression, or, apparently, a solitary thought in her head. At this point, Nick gets to run around with both women hanging off his arm, helping them out of one desperately silly situation after another. Really, all three of them exude the kind of vacuousness usually reserved for brainwashed cultists. At least in Elizabeth's case, she has the alibi of being (possibly) a somewhat corporeal ghost to begin with. (You may think this sounds confusing, but until you've seen The Fog, you have no idea.)

I love bad movies. You all know this about me. But this film wasn't bad in a good way. It tried to be all serious and scary, and it only succeeded in being boring. Just stop for a moment to think about what I'm saying. This is from the woman who is terrified of malfunctioning music boxes. This is from the woman who quite literally lay awake all night after watching Ringu, paralyzed with fear that some straggly-haired moppet was crawling out of the television at that very moment. Put simply, I'm excitable. But even given my predisposition to be scared—my desire to be scared even—I felt not even the faintest frisson of concern for these stupid characters on their stupid island getting killed by stupid ghosts. Next time, ghosties, don't camouflage yourselves in low-hanging clouds of condensed water vapor. Just come right out in all your ghoulish glory and let us see you for what you are. We promise not to laugh at your outmoded clothing and Johnny Depp hair.

In short, I would advise you not to see this movie. You can get a better fog from a hangover, and the hangover would be more pleasant.