The Mist
Director: Frank Darabont
Starring: Thomas Jane
Release date: November 21st, 2007
"We have a joke now - because the first two films I directed were period prison movies - that my directing career will stall unless he [Stephen King] writes another period prison story" -- Frank Darabont
It’s a good joke.
Substitute:
- the prison with a convenience store whose metal bars are dense humidity (not fog)
- sadistic prison guards with CGI monsters
- talented actors with Thomas Jane.
A very good joke.
Darabont, after the highly successful Majestic (did you see it? No? Huh.) is returning to his roots. He’s written horror; horror that goes into the history books. Horror like The Fly II (a sequel to a remake) and the terrifying 1988 version of The Blob (a remake). In case you mix up your movies within the blob franchise, this is the one where the teenager is pulled into and through a sink drain by the title character.
Oh, the horror.
So, the fellow who spent a year writing a to-be-rejected screenplay for Indiana Jones 4 is adapting and directing another Stephen King novella, this one from 1980. With the number of King adaptations that have been brought the screen (into three figures and climbing), why has this one taken damn near 3 decades to get made? Probably because we’ve been waiting for the cinematic technology to do such a work of terror the justice it deserves. Definitely not because the screenwriter/director has no good ideas of his own, and this is one in the quickly diminishing pool of King’s pop-schlock-passing-for-literature that up until now has actually been deemed ‘too shitty, even for him’.
Possible spoiler:
A mist that serves as a portal to another dimension through which monsters can enter.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Can’t wait for the remake.
1 comment:
The Fly II was incredibly terrible. I watched it one day when I was home from school sick 7 years ago or so and it was on Sci-Fi. It is perhaps the reason I waited until last week to finally see Cronenberg's remake of The Fly, which was quite good (better than the original, I'd say).
I have a soft spot in my heart for Shawshank, a soft spot which would probably collapse on itself if I were ever to watch the film again. The Green Mile was pretty dumb and The Majestic was embarrassingly bad, even for a Jim Carrey movie.
The Mist looks truly God-awful. I didn't even like that story when I was into Stephen King in middle school. I'm pretty sure it's one of the novellas in Four Past Midnight, two others of which they've already turned into films: The Langoliers and Secret Window, Secret Garden (the movie was just Secret Window). If that fact and the participation of Darabont doesn't clue people in to just how bad this movie is going to be, I don't know what would.
But how dare you insult the star of The Punisher (2003) and that one episode of Arrested Development. Tom Jane is brilliant.
Just kidding.
Finally, when is Stephen King actually going to retire? I have a certain amount of respect for how incredibly productive he is, but he hasn't written a book that's even marginally enjoyable for twenty years or so. He says every five years that he's going to retire, but then I always find a book about cell phones coming to life and killing people two months later. He's a regular Jay-Z.
Sorry about the super-long comment. I'll stop now.
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