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The Dog - jimbow8 - 11-06-2005
No, that is not a typo. That is what the remake of John Carpenter's The Fog should have been title.
Right from the beginning I knew this movie was going to be bad. It replaces Hohn Houseman's creepy campfire story with a nonsensical montage of fire and screaming on board a clipper ship accompanied by a bunch of loud noise.
From that point on it continues to go horribly wrong. Hal Hobrook's Father Malone is replaced by a bearded, brooding, drunken Alan Rickman impersonation (not Alan Rickman, just some idiot who wants to look like him). Jamie Lee Curtis's character is replaced by a Lost cast member who has dreams about the events of the past for some reason. Adrienne Barbeau's wise presence is replace by Selma Blair.
At MANY points during this movie I found myself laughing at the absurdity... but not in a good way. For those of you who don't know me and my movie tastes very well, I am what a friend of mine refers to as a "movie whore." I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to most movies. I don't LIKE all movies but I very rarely dslike them. And when it comes to horror movies, I tend to give even more leeway; I'm kind of a "horror whore." That being said, I came out of this movie feeling like I had just had 2 hours of my life sucked painfully from me through my eyeballs.
Perhaps the most disappointing things about this movie to me were these:
- The lack of any real suspense or scares or, lacking that, quality kills. There was one quality kill, but it was of the otherwise completely worthless Father Malone character (Alan Rickman-lookalike). Any others were completely idiotic and needlessly violent for the sake of visceral impact.
- The total lack (or maybe I just didn't notice) of a score. I've always liked John Carpenter's scores, especially his earlier ones. The only thing resembling a score in this movie was the annoying loud noise that screamed at me whenever something "scary" was happening.
- I have always LOVED the ending to the original The Fog. The main reason I even stayed for the entirety of this movie was to see if the ending held even a flicker to the original. It didn't. There were some decent special effects in the graveyard, but I didn't care one bit.
Finally, I must say that I did make two incorrect predictions. First, I mistakenly guessed that the fishhook-like sharp objects that were hanging from the eaves of the house as wind-chimes would be used to kill someone. Second, I guessed that the hairbrush that Stevie's son found on the beach (instead of the wooden sign) would at some point begin to glow green; instead it glowed red and then started on fire. My bad!