Smog

Noel Vera

It's not as if John Carpenter's "The Fog" was a classic, or the best
work Carpenter ever did. The movie turned on the premise that a fog
represented the hundred-year-old supernatural vengeance of a colony
of lepers on the treacherous founding fathers of a small coastal
town. The fog was a tricky sort of threat to present onscreen: while
ominous, it was hardly the sort of thing to make an audience want to
jump out of their seats in terror, and Carpenter had to resort to
more concrete means--walking corpses sporting hooks and cutlasses
and marlinspikes and the like--turning the picture into a more
diffuse, less sensible remake of his "Assault on Precinct 13" (which
in turn is a remake of Howard Hawks' "Rio Bravo"). The script was
barely logical--it suggests that the phantoms can only appear inside
the fog, yet things go bump or rise up from the dead without a sign
of vapor around; it reveals that the descendants of the founding
fathers are the targets, yet innocent bystanders are harmed along
the way (besides, lineage is such a tricky concept; you wonder why
the phantoms don't just take out a tactical missile and nuke the
place). Carpenter was at the beginning of his career; he as yet
didn't have the skills to evoke more metaphysical horrors, to push
illogic so far it becomes a sensibility (he would be more successful
at both by the time he made his 1994 version of Lovecraft's "In the
Mouth of Madness").

Carpenter's film had all kinds of problems, and the acting was
barely adequate--everyone just has to look threatened and harassed--
yet there's something to the film, the claustrophobic sense of
danger closing in (a Carpenter specialty); you can't help but feel
your ankles tingling in anticipation of the rotting, seaweed-
festooned hand that will soon clamp down on it. The picture is a
guilty pleasure that makes you feel all the worse because you've
been taken in by such ostensibly slipshod storytelling.

The remake's best virtue is that it makes you realize just how well
the original--despite all its considerable flaws--works. Instead of
Carpenter's minimalist melody (which takes its cue from his visual
style (or is it vice-versa?), simple and unstoppable), you've got an
elaborate score by Graeme Revelle, which does little more than
mickey-mouse the action (sexy music for the sex, scary music for the
(alleged) scares); instead of Carpenter's clean, unfussy visual
style (Hawks meets Alfred Hitchcock), perfectly paced to stretch
nerves to the breaking point, you have director Rupert Wainwright's
uninspired look, dressed up with elaborate costumes, lights, and
sets, then paced to time in at a relatively bloated 100 minutes.

The script--what script? Carpenter and producer Debra Hill whipped
something up, then when they realized they didn't have quite enough
running time to qualify as a feature (it was only 80 minutes long),
tacked on a prologue where John Houseman as a grizzled old sailor
tells a hundred-year-old tale of betrayal and murder by flickering
campfire. The opening perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the
picture and is by far its best scene; if it weren't a last-minute
addition, it possibly wouldn't have been so inconsistent plotwise
(Why, if the legend is the stuff of bedtime stories, do the
townspeople have to learn of it from some ancient buried journal?)
and it could have helped explain how readily some of them accept the
notion of a killer fog (the only time I get apprehensive about
dangerous vapors is after a Mexican buffet). Wainwright's version
drops the campfire and blows up the opening story into a large-scale
flashback, complete with a fleet of sailing ships sinking in flames.
It's a waste of budget that could have been better spent on other
things--the script, for one.

The cast in the original didn't have to do much, but they had the no-
nonsense look of seasoned professionals (Adrienne Barbeau; 'scream-
queen' Jamie Lee Curtis; Tom Atkins), who could at least perform
competently under pressure. The most seasoned actors fare best:
Houseman as the sailor, instilling childhood traumas in kids; Hal
Holbrook as a priest practically paralyzed by the enormity of his
ancestral guilt.

The cast in the new one--well, what can I say, except I really
couldn't tell them apart (the females had breasts, I think).
Otherwise they were mostly younger, and when they weren't they were
grotesques, covered with plenty of prosthetic makeup. If Carpenter's
cast at least looks like they had a fighting chance against the
living dead; this litter of puppies looks adorably helpless, perfect
for putting in a wire cage and collectively drowning. They do scream
nicely when expiring, though, even the men.

The special effects are ruinous. Carpenter didn't have much in the
way of effects, mostly fog machines, some makeup prosthetics, and
clever lighting, but he managed to get plenty of mileage out of
shadowy figures looming in the mist. Wainwright seems to have more
faith in computer-generated effects, and his climax at a nondescript
town hall (the old church in the original was a far more atmospheric
location) involves a collection of digitally created glass shards
that look as if they wouldn't harm a balloon, much less a human, and
a horde of specters that look as if they had mistakenly wandered in
from Disney's "Haunted Mansion" movie. Then Wainwright has the
temerity to try evoke the single most famous shot in Hitchcock's
own "Vertigo" (a shot Brian De Palma has been attempting (and
failing) to reproduce, in terms of emotional and dramatic impact,
for practically his whole career), and throws in an ending lifted
from "The Haunting" in the bargain--not very satisfying, but
consistent with all the other misfires that occur throughout this
puerile and essentially pointless picture. Up volume music; roll end
credits. Exit laughing.

(First published in Businessworld, 12/9/05)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)