THE FOG (2005)

John Carpenter's 1980 The Fog, is a good horror film with excellent atmosphere. It may be a little slow in places and doesn't have too many scares or surprises, but it gets by on its eerie feeling and superb direction by the now legendary genre master. It feels like one of those films that's missing a little something but still manages to spin a decent enough ghost yarn. So you would hope that a remake of The Fog would not only build upon the elements worked into the original, but also succeed in the areas where the first was a little weak. But pathetically, director Rupert Wainwright's remake fails in just about every single aspect and is a complete disappointment.
Lead actor Tom Welling has about as much charisma and talent as a piece of cardboard, only the cardboard would be a little more fun to watch. Except for Selma Blair, the acting in the film is horrid. I hoped and prayed that the creeping fog would kill every single character in the movie and then come through my TV screen and kill me so I didn't have to watch the rest of this wretched film. Then it should go after the people responsible for making this remake possible. The dialogue is so bad at points that I felt embarrassed for the actors who spoke the lines. It would have been a better idea to stick more closely to Carpenter and Debra Hill's original script, and an even more fantastic idea would have been to just not make this new movie in the first place. The original Fog holds up pretty well as the years have passed, but somehow this remake feels more dated than its predecessor, which is actually a testament to how great of a director Carpenter is and at the same time it's an insult to how bad the filmmakers are who created this awful remake.

Cooper Layne's script, if you would like to call it that, tries to expand upon Carpenter and Hill's original ghost story in slight ways but with contrived dialogue. It still basically sticks to the same premise, albeit in a dumb down fashion, but it does try to give more insight into the back story of the lepers turned ghosts. Other than that, this is still the same story of the quiet seaside town of Antonio Bay that gets overtaken by a mysterious glowing fog filled with vengefully spirits. Some of the flashback segments involving the lepers are adequate enough, but the movie just gets dumber and dumber as it goes along. The ending is so astoundingly awful that I nearly vomited up my popcorn which, on balance would have been a pleasant distraction from this stilted affair.
Director Rupert Wainwright seems to know how to shoot a movie. There is some beautiful scenery and the camera work is pretty smooth. Sadly, he just doesn't know how to make a good one. There is no tension and no horror in the film at all. The kills lack originality and more importantly they lack any sort of dramatic impact. Besides Selma Blair's Stevie Wayne, all the characters are a joke, but the movie could have been somewhat saved by some good kill scenes. Instead we get horribly fake looking computer effects. The ghosts look awful and the fog looks like....fog, but less ominous than Carpenter original menace.

The Fog remake is a horror movie with no scares, no atmosphere, no brains, and no nothing. It looks nice shot wise and Selma Blair is good as usual, but this is one of those movies that you see and then try to forget that it ever existed. This leads me to the same question I ask myself at the end of almost all the remakes I see, which is, when is this bullshit going to stop?