"I’m not sure I believe it, and I was here. What we saw was impossible. You know that, don’t you? What do we say? How do we… convince them? Ollie, what the hell were those tentacles even attached to?"

- David Drayton in The Mist (2007)

I guess I pick weird date movies. Then again, I pick weird dates, too. Yeah, we went to see The Mist together because I adored the novella and insisted that she see this movie with me. While we went with her mother that didn’t stop us from making out - so there! Afterwards, though, they both had to whine about the ending. Not a fun night because all she wanted to do was sit around and play mopeycakes ™.

The Mist is, of course, based on a Stephen King novella of the same name which you can find in his book Skeleton Crew. I read Skeleton Crew while spending the nights in a car outside the food processing plant where glittersoul worked during some particularly difficult times. Not only did I read The Mist during the autumn months, I read it after dark in an essentially abandoned gravel parking lot surrounded by - you guessed it! - thick fog. How crazy, right?

Since the written version affected me so much I knew I absolutely had to see the film version at my first opportunity. Basically, we’ve got a sort of ‘end of the world’ scenario where the characters are holed up in a grocery store as a terrible and mysterious mist enshrouds the world around them (as far as they know). There’s some other stuff at the beginning, but the meat of the story takes place in that small town grocery store.

Speaking of the begininng, make sure you catch what the main character, David Drayton’s working on as the film opens. See that painting? Yeah, that’s for The Dark Tower, another work by Stephen King. See, Drayton’s a commercial artist. Kind of like the main character of Kingdom Hospital. Basically another of Mr. King’s many alter egos if you ask me. Drayton’s played by Thomas Jane who was also in Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher, Boogie Nights, The Crow: City of Angels and he played Frank Castle in The Punisher - all fantastic movies! He’s set to direct The Dark Country this year, so he hung around watching The Mist get edited in order to learn more about the filmmaking process. The Dark Country’s supposed to be based on a novel, but confusingly enough NOT inspired by the Dennis Etchison book of the same name. Etchison wrote the novelizations of Halloween II & III, Videodrome (which he wrote under the pen name Jack Martin) and John Carpenter’s The Fog. See the tie-in there? Fog? Mist? Get it!?

Fine. So besides me serenading Thomas Jane, we’ve also got lil Billy Drayton. Billy’s played by young Nathan Gamble who played Mike in Babel , "boy" in Diggers and Tommy in 10 episodes of Runaway. With character names like those he must be Hollywood’s real ideal All-American kid, eh? The whole cast for this movie really does a terrific job. Playing Brent Norton, the uneasy and slightly hostile neighbor of the Drayton’s, we’ve got Andre Braugher who you may recognize from Salem’s Lot (another King TV series), Frequency, Get on the Bus and especially as Detective Frank Pembleton in Homicide: Life on the Street. I think Braugher rocks in about every role I’ve seen him in. He’s never a typical character and in this movie he really adds a good deal of realistic tension to the story.

Of course, if you talk to anyone who’s already scene the movie, chances are good that they’ll give you an earful about dear ole Mrs. Carmody. She’s played by Marcia Gay Harden (The Invisible, Into the Wild, Meet Joe Black) who’s nearly worse than whatever the hell’s roaming around in the mist outside the store. Marcia Gay Harden’s got some truly awe-inspiring ability to piss people off with her Mrs. Carmody character. I mean people were yelling at her in the theater - even throwing stuff at the screen! Then again, she’s an evil Leo so that’s not too surprising. She plays a religious nutcase who spews all sorts of fire and brimstone gobbledy-gook while everyone around her melts down. A real winner, fer sure. She delivered the magical line:

"I’ll tell you what. The day I need a friend like you, I’ll just have myself a little squat and shit one out."

Yeah. I know. But it’s true, some characters are supposed to do exactly that: get us emotionally embroiled in the story taking place in front of us! Harden knocks one out of the park as Mrs. Carmody, without a doubt.

Now there’s some real terrible stuff wanderin’ round out in that thar mist. All sorts of theories (still) abound as to what exactly triggered it. A portal to another dimension? Aliens? Some sort of Lovecraftian nightmare come to life? A chemical or biological weapon gone crazy? No one knows. The secret will likely go to the grave with Stephen King - assuming he actually dies one day. I wouldn’t bet on it, personally.

Oh, wanna see a monster? Course ya do!

 

Now for a bit more of the details I look yammering about during these reviews. As they say in the porn industry it’s all about: location, location, location! While you’re fooled into believing the whole movie’s shot in King’s blessed state of Maine (which I think we ought to trade to Canada in exchange for Vancouver), it’s actually ALL shot in the far more inviting Shreveport, Louisiana. And guess what? Mr. King himself couldn’t even tell the difference until it was pointed out to him, according to what I’ve read.

Let’s show another picture now. Here’s a "wtf!?" moment from The Mist. You’ll see lots of these. Oh! and if you listen closesly you’ll get to hear a Wilhelm scream when one of the characters dies. Total gravy!

 

 

And now, my merry readers, we come to the end. I feel it my duty to rhapsodize upon the controversial ending of the fine film we call The Mist. You see, the movie doesn’t end quite the way you’d expect a typical Hollywood blockbuster to climax. Instead, the final scenes caused not only my weak-hearted date to whine, but quite a large segment of the viewing public to get a teensy bit angsty.

I don’t believe you’ll blame me for not blowing the ending. You’ll get to see some really epic creatures that will slingshot you back to your E.T. days if you’re my age or maybe Harry Potter for you younger readers. See, Frank Darabont wrote this screenplay and agreed to direct this film under a certain stipulation: come hell or high water they would not request a change to the scripted ending. They did not. So what you see is precisely what he wrote and according to Stephen King himself, masterfully played. It’s the kind of ending that’ll leave you and your friends talking for quite a while! And hey, atleast they didn’t let him release the sucker in black and white the way he originally wanted to. Ugh!

It’s easy for me to give this flick a solid 5 out of 5 because that’s what we do here at Happy Horror - we look at the positive aspects. The Mist is dang near loaded with positive aspects - even the ending I admire.

Without further dally, this is GlowStormLion storming off into The Mist in search of some sort of collectible monster to Ebay at the nearest opportunity.

-- by GlowStormLion of http://www.happyhorror.com

Tags: apocalypse, end of the world, horror, movie, stephen king

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 1:17 am and is filed under Horror Films. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.